Cross of Vengeance (12 page)

Except so far as it showed the depths of Father Miguel’s feelings towards the dead man and his abhorrence of the crime committed when the relic was burned.

‘The question now,’ she said aloud, ‘is where are the clothes belonging to the dead man? They don’t seem to be here so they must be at the church, I think. Will you follow me? Domhnall, translate, please.’

Domhnall, at ease with English, Latin and Irish, and having a working knowledge of Spanish from a very early age when he had accompanied his merchant father, Oisín, to the busy docks of Galway city, translated with ease as she led the way towards the church. There was no sign of the clothes anywhere in the church itself, but behind the altar were the German pilgrim’s two leather satchels. Mara opened them and looked through the contents. Hans Kaufmann, she remembered, had been wearing a blue doublet, but only a green one was to be found and the linen was starched and the folds of ironing still sharply creased into the undergarments. Mara took out the small pile of shirts, shook them open and then handed them to Domhnall to refold. They had not been worn. The same with braies – they could never have been worn and still smelled of the laundry maid’s soap. The mystery of the missing clothes had still to be solved. The second satchel held no clothes, but a leather bag filled to the brim with coins – at a quick glance, Mara could see a mixture of German, Italian and English coins. But still no sign of the clothes that Hans Kaufmann had been wearing yesterday.

Who had violated the sanctuary of the church? Who had killed the German pilgrim? And how had his clothes been stripped from him? And when his body had been taken to that screened-off spot, not far from the church, but also not far from the tower house where Nechtan and his wife lived, and from the small house which was the residence of the priest – well, what had happened next? One by one, Mara methodically tabulated the questions to be answered in a corner of her mind and then turned her attention to the people who had been present in the vicinity of the church during the night when the German pilgrim was killed.

No one, she noticed as she came out from behind the altar and eyed them keenly, had asked any of the normal questions. How did the body come to be in the open, out just beyond the churchyard? Why was it placed on the capstone of the ancient tomb? What is the significance of the missing clothes? She would have expected these questions to have come tumbling out, but there was a strange and uneasy silence.

‘Can anyone suggest where the clothes of the dead man may be hidden?’ she asked. ‘My boys have already searched the ground around the tomb and the pathway that leads back to the church.’

A perfunctory effort was made by all to search the bare church, but no one seemed to be particularly interested and soon they were all back and gathered around her. The boys continued to root around the little loft where the choir would gather during a service, but they did so quietly and she allowed them to continue.

‘Did anyone else see Hans Kaufmann alive yesterday evening?’ she asked. ‘You left the church unlocked, didn’t you, Mór, once you had served him with his evening meal.’ She waited for Mór’s nod before continuing, ‘Therefore anyone could have gone into the church after she left, perhaps,’ she ended blandly, ‘in order to convince him of his wrong-doing by the aid of argument.’

They all started and moved their eyes from the ground towards her face and then looked at one another. Even the prioress was now silent and defiant.

‘I think that I was probably the last person to see him when I brought his supper,’ said Mór bravely. ‘He said that he was sleepy after he had eaten – he put his hands together like this and rested his head on them. He was teaching me some words in German.’ The memory brought a flush to her cheek and a tear to her eye. Domhnall translated the Gaelic rapidly into Latin and then English for the sake of the foreign pilgrims. Time I started that clever boy on learning Greek, thought Mara, admiring his fluency in languages, and then dismissed the irrelevance.

‘And what about breakfast?’ she enquired innocently.

A cloud came across Mór’s face. She put away her handkerchief and faced Mara defiantly. ‘He told me not to bring breakfast, Brehon,’ she said defiantly.

‘In what language?’ queried Mara with interest.

Mór’s eyes fell before hers, but then she lifted them. ‘In Latin, Brehon,’ she said. ‘I know something of the language – I have learned it so that I can talk with the pilgrims who come here.’

Easy to find out if that is true, thought Mara. I won’t press her now. She looked at the other pilgrims.

‘Have any of you, since the moment when he claimed sanctuary at this very spot, seen this man?’ Dramatically she pointed across at the altar steps and noted how the twelve people who had crowded into the small space between the altar and the front row of seats seemed to shrink back on themselves and avoid looking at her.

‘No one? No priest went to pray with him, to offer him spiritual guidance, to debate the precepts of Martin Luther with him? No one, except Mór, went to offer him hospitality – food, a drink, a blanket?’ Her eyes wandered across the faces, but all heads were being firmly shaken.

‘In that case,’ she continued, ‘I’d like you all to go back to where you are staying and to wait until I have time to question you all individually. I assure you that I will put everything into solving this murder as soon as possible and then only the guilty person will be detained.’ She spoke slowly, leaving a pause after every sentence to allow Domhnall to translate.

‘Guilty person!’ exclaimed the prioress, suddenly deciding to take part. ‘What can you mean, Madame?’

‘“Brehon” is what I am called,’ said Mara coldly. ‘I am the king’s representative in the kingdom of the Burren, just as a sergeant-at-law is in the kingdom of England. The guilty person will be the one that killed Hans Kaufmann.’

‘But what if he was struck down by God?’ The prioress asked the question shrilly.

Mara did not answer. She turned to Ardal and Nechtan. ‘I shall rely on you both to keep a guard around the perimeter of Kilnaboy, its houses, church and inn. No one is to go in or out without my permission. Now all may go back to the inn.’

They went off, looking, to her eyes, more meditative than guilty. If she had to plump for someone at this moment, she thought, glad that her thoughts remained secret within her own head, she would plump for the Spaniard, Father Miguel. He was a fanatic and she distrusted fanatics. Someone killed Hans Kaufmann and she had little doubt that his death was due in some way to the burning of the relic of the true cross. Otherwise, why lay the corpse out like that in a ghastly simulacrum of the crucified Christ?

The four boys stayed still until the door shut behind them.

‘Brehon,’ said Finbar in her ear, and then more incessantly, ‘Brehon! I wanted to tell you something.’

‘Sorry, Finbar,’ she said, immediately conscious of feelings of compunction. ‘Weren’t you saying something to me just before the others came?’

‘I was just saying that I saw something funny when I was running back. I was going to tell you about it, but then you were all hiding and Domhnall—’

‘Brehon,’ said Cormac, ‘I can see where he was killed.’

‘What!’ she exclaimed.

He did not answer but went and picked up a candelabrum from the side of the altar steps, holding it high and stepping down on to the tiled floor. There was a look of triumph on his face and in a moment she saw why.

The church was full of shadows and the carpet on the steps leading up to the altar had looked almost black until Cormac held the tall, thick candles of beeswax above his head. Now the carpet glowed in its pristine crimson shade, all except one step – the bottom step. And that was dark – almost black in colour.

Cormac handed the candelabrum to Finbar and bent down, touching the carpet with his finger.

‘It’s wet!’ he said.

‘With blood,’ breathed Finbar, but he held the candles aloft and did not move. Domhnall pushed past him and he also bent down and touched the carpet.

‘It’s just wet,’ he said in disappointed tones.

‘Definitely not blood,’ confirmed Slevin. ‘It’s not sticky.’

‘Definitely wet,’ said Cormac, feeling it again with a disappointed look on his face. And then he cheered up. ‘Clever,’ he said admiringly. ‘That murderer washed the carpet.’

‘Let me feel,’ said Finbar, and Mara took the candelabrum from him.

‘Just wet,’ he repeated.

‘But what would the murderer wash the carpet with?’ Domhnall sounded puzzled.

‘No water in a church,’ said Slevin. ‘When we kill the pigs,’ he said with a swagger, ‘we have to throw buckets and buckets of water over the yard. The smell – whew!’

‘Yes, there is water in the church,’ contradicted Cormac. ‘There’s holy water!’

‘Holy water!’ Finbar looked shocked, but the other three boys hurtled across the space towards the carved-out limestone basin near to the south door.

‘Empty!’ exclaimed Cormac. ‘I’m right!’

‘Carried it over in that silver ewer,’ Domhnall nodded to himself.

‘Should still be able to smell the blood,’ asserted Slevin and knelt down, sniffing loudly.

‘Can you smell anything?’ asked Mara, still patiently holding the candles, but he shook his head.

‘Nothing,’ said Cormac.

Domhnall took a long time, smelling the carpet with concentrated care, but then shook his head. Finbar, copying him, took even longer, but in the end just volunteered that it smelled ‘holy’. Mara handed the candle to Domhnall and knelt down, leaning over and almost touching the carpet with her nose, but she could not smell blood either. The whole church, she thought, was full of the highly perfumed smell of incense, beeswax and communion wine; it was no wonder that Finbar thought it smelled holy.

As for the holy water – that just came from the well and was blessed by Father MacMahon. She didn’t suppose that it was any different to the water that they drank themselves. All of the water on the Burren was the same: bracingly astringent and tasting strongly of lime.

‘Well done for spotting that wet patch, though, Cormac,’ she said, noticing a look of disappointment on her son’s face. He shrugged and said nothing and she wondered whether he thought that she was condescending to him as the youngest at the law school. He was very touchy about things like that. And then she forgot about him as she pictured the murderer scrubbing at the bloodstain with a stoup of holy water and one of those cloths that were in plentiful supply for the celebration of Mass.

‘Brehon,’ said Finbar insistently, and she realized that he had already spoken to her at least twice and had been telling her about ‘something funny’.

‘Sorry, Finbar, yes, what is it?’

‘I saw something funny when I was running along the path to here from the churchyard, Brehon,’ he repeated.

‘Yes, Finbar, what was it?’ she asked, bringing her whole attention to bear on him. She remembered his shout when he arrived, before he realized that there was no one to be seen.

‘I saw something,’ he repeated. ‘Do you want to see it?’ he invited.

‘Yes.’ Mara decided against inviting the other boys, who were amiably wrangling over the stain on the steps and poking around the church for bloodstained cloths. Finbar’s ‘something funny’ might turn out to be nothing, in which case Domhnall and Slevin would be politely non-committal and privately contemptuous and Cormac would probably laugh. ‘Come and show me,’ she requested. ‘Domhnall, when you are finished here, please lock the church and bring me the key.’

The object was not far down the path. It was surprising that it had been missed, but it lay slightly to the side of the path, almost hidden beneath a lichen-encrusted boulder, amongst a clump of the very pale flowers of the tall, pure-white, five-petalled marsh maidens. It was a triangular piece of cloth, about the size of a normal handkerchief, but thickly padded. She looked down at it in a puzzled way. What on earth was it? Certainly something that she had never seen before and she could not imagine what was its use. It had no blood on it, but it might be significant.

‘Ask the others to come,’ she said, ‘perhaps they’ll have some ideas.’

Domhnall and Slevin came instantly, tired of searching for bloodstained cloths, but it was Cormac, trailing behind them, who immediately identified the triangular piece of linen.

‘That’s a codpiece,’ he said scornfully. ‘Murrough has a pile of them. The King laughs at him about it. You wear it here under those tight hose.’ He pointed between his legs with a grin. ‘Makes you look b-i-g,’ he said with a sidelong glance at Finbar, who giggled nervously.

‘So that’s it. Of course,’ said Mara in matter-of-fact tones.

Turlough’s second son Murrough, Cormac’s stepbrother, was a young man who frequented the court in London. It was true that he always wore something that looked padded inside his hose, and Turlough had many a ribald laugh about his son’s pretensions to manhood. The thing that Finbar had spotted, lying concealed among the oddly inappropriate white marsh maiden flowers,
was
called a codpiece, she remembered. It was something that would presumably be buttoned on to the hose around a man’s groin. She had noticed the swelling between the legs of the young German and had wondered why young men like Hans Kaufmann and her stepson, Murrough, bothered to wear this obviously fake piece of padding.

But all that was of little interest now. What was of interest was that a piece of Hans Kaufmann’s clothing had been dropped at the side of the path between the churchyard and the ancient tomb.

But it was not a handkerchief or a belt buckle that had been dropped. A living man could perhaps have mislaid something like that on a walk through the bushes. No, this article of clothing, this codpiece, could not have been dropped accidentally – it would have been buttoned securely inside a man’s hose.

That meant that Hans Kaufmann had been naked when his body travelled along the path either this morning or last night.

And his clothing had probably been carried by his murderer.

(Laws of Noble Professions)