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Authors: Cora Harrison

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BOOK: A Secret and Unlawful Killing
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DI CHETHARSLICHT ATHGABÁLA (ON THE FOUR DIVISIONS OF DISTRAINT)
T
here are eight signs of a good mill:
1.
A
fast-running stream of water
2.
A
sluice gate to control the water in case of floods or drought
3.
A
chute of elm wood
4.
A
floor of stone
5.
A
wheel of eight paddles of alder wood
6.
T
wo millstones of heavy stone
7.
shaft of elm wood
8.
A
An honest miller
 
 
O
LIGHTMAMA WAS A SMALL settlement in a deep valley on the side of the mountain to the east of Clerics’
Pass. A steep lane led up to it from the road and Mara could hear Garrett, Malachy, the two MacNamara clansmen, Eoin and Maol, and also Father O’Mahon, dismount from their horses when they reached the steepest part. Her mare showed no signs of distress, so she rode on and caught up with Nuala.
‘Your father is worried about you witnessing Aengus,’ she said bluntly. ‘He has been dead for a while and animals have attacked the body.’
‘I’m not a child,’ said Nuala rebelliously. ‘This is a good opportunity for me to learn. There’s so much that I don’t understand about bodies. You can’t learn everything from scrolls and Father doesn’t write down much. My great-grandfather wrote the most, but his handwriting is hard to read and some of the words are in old Gaelic.’
‘Well, if you feel sick, just move away quickly,’ advised Mara in a matter-of-fact manner. The girl was right. She had to learn. Her father had wanted to marry her off this month; if he had had his way she would be bearing a child next summer and that would be more injurious to her. Mara sympathized with Nuala’s ambition to be a physician. She herself was the only woman Brehon in the whole of Ireland. It would be great to have a woman physician as well, in the kingdom of the Burren.
Oughtmama had originally been a monastic settlement. It had probably dwindled away gradually with the competition from the Cistercian monks just across the valley in the abbey of Our Lady of the Fertile Rock, and now no monks inhabited its ancient stone buildings. It was a favoured spot: a small valley, filled with rich soil, in the fold of the mountain, open to the south, and well sheltered from the east, west
and north. There were still the ruins there of the ancient churches — two of them within the old enclosure wall and one outside. At one stage Aengus had inhabited the abbot’s house, a handsome two-storey building of well-cut limestone, roofed with Liscannor stone slates, but in recent years he had used one of the small houses kept for passing visitors in the days when it was still an abbey.
‘That was the ladies’ chapel.’ Mara indicated the small ruined building outside the walls. ‘The monks didn’t like women within the enclosure so they built a chapel out there for those sinful creatures.’
Nuala giggled. ‘If I had been around at that time I would have gone straight to one of the ones on the inside.’
‘You probably would,’ said Mara, but already her eyes were going towards the mill, which was the only working remnant of the monastery where once the long-dead monks had tilled the land and ground the corn. It was a small mill, powered by the stream that ran swiftly down from the mountainside and turned the paddles on the great wooden shaft, causing them to ceaselessly spin.
The wheel was turning merrily when they came and they could hear from inside the small building how the millstone was turning round and round. There was even a slight smell of over-heated stone.
Garrett was the first of the men to arrive. He went swiftly into the building and the sound ceased.
‘Where’s the body?’ asked Nuala.
‘We should have waited for Maol MacNamara,’ said Garrett coming out, his face flushed with the heat from the stone. He looked downhill. Eoin and Maol were a long way back, walking slowly up the slope beside the heavy cart.
Ahead of them Malachy plodded on his heavily built horse and Father Mahon kept pace with him. Mara dismounted from her mare and looked around. The grass was still lush and very green; obviously the frost had not reached this sheltered valley.
‘There’s no sign of Aengus,’ said Garrett in an irritated tone. ‘Perhaps Maol was mistaken. He’s-’
‘He’s here,’ called Nuala, her clear voice showing no sign of emotion. She had hitched her pony to the post, had gone upstream and was standing just where the stream burst through from the mountain land which was held in common between the O‘Brien and the O’Lochlainn clans.
Mara tied the bridle of her mare to a nearby tree and went up rapidly. Aengus MacNamara was there all right. The body had been mutilated by foxes, but that was not what made her draw in a long breath.
Where the stream ran down from the mountain and into the mill land at Oughtmama someone had placed a gate, a sluice gate. In its usual position it allowed the stream to flow unhindered but it stopped any sheep from trespassing. A flock of sheep had gathered there, perhaps waiting to be fed, Mara had surmised when she had noticed them first, but now as she approached there seemed to be something about them that reminded her of the mourners at the graveside in Carron. There in front of them Aengus the miller lay, full length, stretched out in the water, his neck trapped under the gate, with his body in MacNamara land and his head in O’Lochlainn land and his sightless eyes fixed on the sky above.
‘God almighty,’ breathed Father O’Mahon, whether as a
prayer or an exclamation, Mara did not know. She turned to look at him and met Malachy’s troubled eyes.
‘We’ll have to get him out of here,’ said Malachy. ‘I left him so that the Brehon could see exactly where he was. Here are Maol and Eoin. Stand back, Nuala.’
‘His neck is trapped under the gate,’ said Father Mahon huskily.
Ignoring her father’s instruction, Nuala hitched her
léine
well up above her knees, knelt down on the soft grass and examined the dead face intently. Reluctantly Malachy put his satchel on the ground, came over beside her and bent down.
‘Did he drown?’ asked Nuala. ‘Can you tell by his face?’
‘No,’ said Malachy grimly. ‘But we’ll be able to check for that in a minute.’
But who put him there? thought Mara. She said nothing, just watched Malachy’s face as he studied the corpse.
‘Help me to get him out,’ said Malachy to Eoin.
Together they dragged the swollen, sodden body from under the gate and laid him on the grass. The smell was atrocious, but no one moved. Father O’Mahon approached, laid the holy oil on the forehead and then on the eyes, nostrils, ears, mouth, feet and hands, anointing each of the five senses in turn. Then he stood back, looking stricken and suddenly very old, and murmured the prayer for the dead.
‘Wash your hands, Father,’ said Nuala. ‘Wash them above where the body lay. The water is still pure there.’
‘What do we do now?’ asked Garrett in a low voice. He looked from Malachy to Mara. His confidence seemed to have deserted him. Mara almost felt sorry for him. Two
violent deaths of members of his clan within the one week would set tongues wagging. There was still a very primitive belief in ‘luck’ among the people of the Burren. The aura of ‘bad luck’ could attach itself to a man and he would never be fully trusted or liked after that. Garrett’s father had been a benevolent, respected and well-loved
taoiseach;
his son would be judged all the more critically because of that.
‘Was it suicide?’ asked the priest, looking at Malachy.
Malachy shrugged. ‘Impossible to tell at this stage; the man has been dead for days.’
‘Could you examine him for any signs of blows or bruising?’ asked Mara crisply. Malachy, as well as she, had a duty towards the dead man now. They had to discover the truth about his last lonely agony.
With an expression of distaste Malachy approached the body. He turned it on its back and instantly Nuala knelt on the grass beside him, her lips tightly closed, but her large brown eyes alert and intent on the task. Mara bent over also. The back of the head seemed to be uninjured to her eyes, but the front of the neck was badly marked and the head was almost severed from the body.
‘Was he strangled, do you think, Malachy?’ she asked after waiting for a few minutes.
‘Could be,’ said Malachy. ‘If he were, it would be impossible to tell after this length of time, but I would think that this damage to the neck came from the pressure of the gate. He may have been unconscious when it was placed on him, but I don’t know if he was dead. What would be the point, anyway, of putting him there in the stream if he were dead beforehand?’
‘The gate can be lifted easily, Brehon,’ said Maol in a low voice. ‘The O’Lochlainns take their sheep out that way when they are sending them to the market. This is the quickest and easiest route for them. They have had the right-of-way here from time immemorial.’
A great phrase:
‘from time immemorial’,
thought Mara as she stood up to examine the gate. Brehon laws, also, had been in existence from
time immemorial.
They were the means that the community used in order to live at peace with their neighbours and their clans. Though not a religious woman, she breathed a quick prayer that she, the present-day representative of these laws, might be given the insight to solve these crimes and to restore peace to the people of the Burren.
The fittings for the gate had probably been made by Fintan, or perhaps by his father, or even his grandfather before him. They were a fine example of the blacksmith’s art, strongly made and fitting the wooden gate like a glove. She stood in the stream and lifted the gate with her hands. It moved readily up, and then crashed down when she let it go. She climbed back out again. Her boots and the bottom of her
léine
were soaking wet, but it had been worth it. She knew now how Aengus could have met his death. And yes, suicide was a possibility. It would have been easy for a strong man like Aengus to have held the gate in his muscular arms, above his shoulders, and then lain down. Hopefully the weight had broken his neck so that he died instantly rather than through the long suffocation of drowning. She turned and went back to Malachy.
‘Is there water in the lungs?’ she asked.
He tightened his lips, but made no objection, just seized the body, rolling it over on its side with the head facing down. A small amount of liquid trickled out.
‘He didn’t drown,’ he said curtly. ‘The weight of the gate probably broke his neck and killed him.’
‘It must have been suicide,’ said the priest bleakly. ‘Why should anyone do a thing like that to a man when it would be just as easy to strike him over the head — quicker and easier — or else strangle him with a rope?’
‘He was a strange, melancholic man,’ said Eoin, shaking his head sadly. ‘He’d hardly give you the time of day when you brought the flour to be milled.’
‘But why put the gate over his neck?’ asked Garrett, looking anxiously from face to face. ‘Wouldn’t that be a strange thing for a man to do to himself?’
‘You’d be surprised.’ Father O‘Mahon nodded his head knowledgeably. ‘I’ve seen suicides where a man put the noose around his neck, then tied his hands together before jumping off the stool. They are afraid in case, by the mercy of God, they will have second thoughts.’
But the ‘mercy of God’, according to his earthly interpreters, will condemn a man to eternal damnation for this deed, thought Mara, trying to keep her rising irritation at bay.
‘Do you think that he committed suicide then, Father?’ asked Garrett respectfully. ‘Would you refuse him burial in the churchyard?’
‘It could have been murder,’ said Mara coldly. ‘It was obviously not an accident, but it could have been a cold-blooded murder, arranged to look like suicide.’
‘He had nothing much to live for,’ sighed Eoin. ‘He just
worked from morning to night. He said to me once that he wished he had married and had a proper son of his own to follow him and to help him at the mill. You see, he was never really sure that Niall was his son. He didn’t look a bit like Aengus and, what was more, he didn’t look a bit like the mother either. There was quite a lot of talk about that. It put Aengus off the boy, and then, of course, the other poor fellow, Balor, him being a
druth,
well, Aengus could have no pleasure in him.’
‘He was a sad, poor man.’ Maol wagged his bald head solemnly. ‘His only pleasure in life seemed to be going to church. He went to Mass at the abbey every single morning of his life. Even went to vespers most evenings.’
‘I suppose when you haven’t much to live for, then death seems the only way out,’ agreed Eoin.
Father O’Mahon nodded sadly. His face was set in stubborn lines and Mara knew that he had made up his mind. Poor Aengus would be buried at the crossroads at the bottom of the hill — just as if he were a dead sheep or cow. Garrett would go along with this; it would be quicker and easier than another elaborate funeral. And then there was the state of the body to be considered. It would be an urgent matter to get it quickly underground.

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