There was a silence.
“I think we will find that this murder was planned for a week or two at least. Once I began to realize what the mechanism was that killed Gray, all I had to do was look for the person capable of devising that mechanism as well as having motive and opportunity. Hold out your hands, Mr. Tilley.”
Reluctantly the secretary did so.
“You can’t seriously see those hands constructing a delicate mechanism, can you?” Fane said. “No, Elgee, the model maker and handyman, doctored one of Grays inhalers so that when it was depressed it would explode with an impact into the mouth, shooting a needle into the brain. Simple but effective. He knew that Gray did not like to be seen using the inhaler in public. The rest was left to chance, and it was a good chance. It almost turned out to be the ultimate impossible crime. It might have worked, had not our victim and his murderer been too fond of their Latin in-jokes.”
THE SPITEFUL SHADOW
“It is so obvious who killed poor Brother Sioda that it worries me.” Sister Fidelma stared in bewilderment at the woebegone expression of the usually smiling, cherubic Abbot Laisran. “I do not understand you, Laisran,” she told her old mentor, pausing in the act of sipping her mulled “wine. She was sitting in front of a blazing fire in the hearth of the abbot’s chamber in the great Abbey of’Durrow.
On the adjacent side of the fireplace, Abbot Laisran slumped in his chair, his wine left abandoned on the carved oak table by his side. He was staring moodily into the leaping flames. “Something worries me about the simplicity of this matter. There are things in life that appear so simple that you get a strange feeling about them. You question whether things can be so simple, and sure enough, you often find that they are so simple because they have been made to appear simple. In this case, everything fits together so flawlessly that I question it.”
Fidelma drew a heavy sigh. She had only just arrived at Durrow to bring a psalter, a book of Latin psalms written by her brother, Colgu, King of Cashel, as a gift for the abbot. But she had found her old friend Abbot Laisran in a preoccupied frame of mine. A member of his community had been murdered, and the culprit had been easily identified as another member. Yet it was unusual to see Laisran so worried. Fidelma had known him since she was a little girl, and it was he who had persuaded her to take up the study of law. Further, when she had reached the qualification of
Usually, Abbot Laisran was full of jollity and good humor. Anxiety did not sit well on his features, for he was a short, rotund, red-faced man. He had been born with that rare gift of humor and a sense that the world was there to provide enjoyment to those who inhabited it. Now he appeared like a man on whose shoulders the entire troubles of the world rested.
“Perhaps you had better tell me all about it,” Fidelma invited. “I might be able to give some advice.”
Laisran raised his head, and there was a new expression of hope in his eyes. “Any help you can give, Fidelma… Truly, the facts are, as I say, lucid enough. But there is just something about them-” He paused and then shrugged. “I’d be more than grateful to have your opinion.”
Fidelma smiled reassuringly. “Then let us begin to hear some of these lucid facts.”
“Two days ago, Brother Sioda was founded stabbed to death in his cell. He had been stabbed several times in the heart.”
“Who found him and when?”
“He had not appeared at morning prayers. So my steward, Brother Cruinn, went along to his cell to find out whether he was ill. Brother Sioda lay murdered on his bloodstained bed.”
Fidelma waited while the abbot paused, as if to gather his thoughts.
“We have, in the abbey, a young woman called Sister Scathach. She is very young. She joined us as a child because, so her parents told us, she heard things. Sounds in her head. Whispers. About a month ago, our physician became anxious about her state of health. She had become-” He paused as if trying to think of the right word. “-she believed she was hearing voices instructing her.”
Fidelma raised her eyes slightly in surprise.
Abbot Laisran saw the movement and grimaced. “She has always been what one might call eccentric, but the eccentricity has grown so that her behavior became bizarre. A month ago I placed her in a cell and asked one of the apothecary’s assistants, Sister Slaine, to watch over her. Soon after Brother Sioda was found, the steward and I went to Sister Scathachs cell. The door was always locked. It was a precaution that we had recently adopted. Usually the key is hanging on a hook outside the door. But the key was on the inside, and the door was locked. A bloodstained robe was found in her cell and a knife. The knife, too, was bloodstained. It was obvious that Sister Scathach was guilty of this crime.”
Abbot Laisran stood up and went to a chest. He removed a knife whose blade was discolored with dried blood. Then he drew forth a robe. It was clear that it had been stained in blood.
“Poor Brother Sioda,” murmured Laisran. “His penetrated heart must have poured blood over the girl’s clothing.”
Fidelma barely glanced at the robes. “The first question I have to ask is why would you and the steward go straight from the murdered man’s cell to that of Sister Scathach?” she demanded.
Abbot Laisran compressed his lips for a moment. “Because only the day before the murder, Sister Scathach had prophesied his death and the manner of it. She made the pronouncement only twelve hours before his body was discovered, saying that he would die by having his heart ripped out.”
Fidelma folded her hands before her, gazing thoughtfully into the fire. “She was violent then? You say that you had her placed in a locked cell with a Sister to look after her?”
“But she was never violent before the murder,” affirmed the abbot.
“Yet she was confined to her cell?”
“A precaution, as I say. During these last four weeks she began to make violent prophecies. Saying voices instructed her to do so.”
“Violent prophecies but you say that she was not violent?” Fidelma’s tone was skeptical.
“It is difficult to explain,” confessed Abbot Laisran. “The words were violent, but she was not. She was a gentle girl, but she claimed that the shadows from the Otherworld gave her instructions; they told her to foretell the doom of the world, its destruction by fire and flood when mountains would be hurled into the sea and the seas rise up and engulf the land.”
Fidelma pursed her lips cynically. “Such prophecies have been common since the dawn of time,” she observed.
“Such prophesies have alarmed the community here, Fidelma,” admonished Abbot Laisran. “It was as much for her sake that I suggested Sister Slaine make sure that Sister Scathach was secured in her cell each night and kept an eye upon each day.”
“Do you mean that you feared members of the community would harm Sister Scathach rather than she harm members of the community?” queried Fidelma.
The abbot inclined his head. “Some of these predictions were violent in the extreme, aimed at one or two particular members of the community, foretelling their doom, casting them into the everlasting hellfire.”
“You say that during the month she has been so confined, the pronouncements grew more violent.”
“The more she was constrained, the more extreme the pronouncements became,” confessed the abbot.
“And she made just such a pronouncement against Brother Sioda? That is why you and your steward made the immediate link to Sister Scathach?”
“It was.”
“Why did she attack Brother Sioda?” she asked. “How well did she know him?”
