Condemned to Death Read Online Free PDF Page B

of the child as quickly as possible. It wasn’t fair to embarrass Cormac to that degree in front of his friends.
    ‘Just tell me again, Síle, how you found the boat,’ she said. Looking across the sands she realized that the boat, on its narrow spit of sand, even from this position in the middle of the beach, was completely hidden by surrounding rocks. She stood up, but still could not see it, so sat down again.
    ‘I didn’t know it was there,’ said Síle, seeming to be slightly alarmed. She repeated the words and her voice rose to a shrill pitch. Mara noticed that Síle’s brother and sister, Etain and Brendan, had not gone back to their hunt for samphire, nor had they joined the groups tending to the fires and gutting fish but stood together halfway up the sands.
    ‘You didn’t see it until you had climbed over the big rock; that’s right, isn’t it, Síle?’ Cormac’s voice was unusually indulgent and had a soothing note in it. Mara gave him a grateful nod.
    ‘That’s right,’ repeated Síle. She smiled adoringly at Cormac and snuggled a little nearer to him. Etain and Brendan turned back from the sea and went slowly up towards the fires.
    Mara briefly considered cross-questioning Síle about the boat, but then abandoned the idea as unworthy. The girl was obviously very young for her age and not too bright. She should really have kept Etain if she had wanted to do any interrogation. The parents, she remembered, were dead so Etain was probably mother as well as sister to Síle. She thanked the child effusively and sent her up to join the sister and brother, noticing with amusement the sigh of relief from Cormac when he got his rock back to himself.
    ‘Did any of you see her go across the rocks to discover the body?’ she asked in a low tone.
    ‘I did,’ said Cormac instantly. ‘And she was alone; no one went with her; they were all up at the top of the beach by the fires with the fish, Brehon,’ he added and his quick-witted understanding of what Mara would need to know made her sorry that he would not study a little harder and show more interest in the law. ‘She climbed over the rocks and then she screamed at the top of her voice – we didn’t take any notice of her, but then she kept on screaming until everyone came running.’
    ‘She’s just so stupid,’ said Cian with scorn. He turned to Mara with a businesslike air. ‘Where do you think the body came from, Brehon?’
    ‘And could you tell us about the procedure Brehons follow when a body floats in from another kingdom?’ enquired Cael with a thoughtful air. The girl was a natural scholar, always thirsting for new knowledge and with a memory that retained facts and figures in the same way as those sponges that floated in on the Atlantic tides retained water.
    ‘Do you know, Cian and Cael, I’m not certain of the answer to either of those questions,’ confessed Mara. ‘Of course, I will be able to send a message to the Brehons of north and south Corcomroe if it does turn out to be a case of “
fingal
”;
though further south as far as Kerry might be a bit more difficult with the countryside down there in a state of unrest,
but we’ll see what the physician says first.’
    She wished that Nuala’s husband, her law-school assistant, Fachtnan, was here, but it was the end of term and he had gone on a journey to the north of Ireland to see his father and mother. It might be, she told herself, that there was no case here for her to deal with, that it would be just a matter of burying the body, but somehow she didn’t think so. Reason and instinct told her that this was unlikely to be a case of
fingal
. She was quite certain that no such case had been judged recently in Corcomroe. Only two days ago she had met Brehon Fergus MacClancy, her near neighbour from north Corcomroe, who lived near the giant cliffs of Moher, visible from where they stood, and he had said nothing about such an unusual case – and moreover, she suddenly