An Ensuing Evil and Others

early twentieth century. Mundy had an adventurous life himself; son of a well-known British military family, expelled from the famous Rugby School, he went to the colonies, adventuring in India and Africa, where he misbehaved and served jail sentences before arriving in New York in 1909 under his assumed name of Mundy. In 1911 he began to write for magazines. He became a U.S. citizen in 1917. Several of his books were made into films, notably his King of the Khyber Rifles (1916), filmed once by John Ford with Victor McLaglen as the hero in 1929, and then by Henry King in 1954 with Tyrone Power as the star.

Back in the 1970s, a good friend, the American publisher Donald M. Grant, asked me if I knew anything about Mundys early life. At that time it remained a mystery, because Mundy was not his original name. Don asked me whether, if I could crack the Mundy mystery, I would write a biography for him. I was optimistic. However, from 1976, when Don first suggested the book, it took several years of painstaking research, and it was not until 1984 that Don was able to publish my biography The Last Adventurer: The Life of Talbot Mundy.

“The Eye of Shiva” is just the sort of setting in British India that Mundy worked in as a young man and which he later portrayed so vividly in his many novels and stories. I decided to publish this under an old pseudonym of mine, Peter MacAlan. I wrote eight novels under that name, but Mr. Tremayne outgrew Mr. MacAlan.

Finally, I come to the late twentieth or even early twenty-first century.

When anthology editor Mike Ashley asked me if I could write a “locked room” mystery but one with a difference, I thought I would try to come up with the ultimate locked-room tale. How could a man be murdered in a toilet on an aircraft at thirty-two thousand feet, being shot while the door remained locked from the inside and without anyone noticing anything untoward? As Mike observed when he first published the story, “How much more impossible can you get!”

To conclude this volume, it would be impossible to avoid an encounter with the lady my readers see as their favorite sleuth-Sister Fidelma, the seventh-century Irish religieuse who is a ddlaigh or “advocate” of the ancient Irish law courts. In this new tale, “The Spiteful Shadow,” which has not appeared in either of the Sister Fidelma short story collections (Hemlock at Vespers or Whispers of the Dead), Fidelma is at the ancient abbey of Durrow in another encounter with her old friend and mentor Abbot Laisran. Laisran has a mystery on his hands: Is one of his religious possessed by a malevolent and vengeful spirit?

So these are my mystery short story offerings. Most are slightly different from my usual fare of Sister Fidelma but, hopefully, for the reader, they will all prove equally as enjoyable.

— Peter Tremayne

NIGHT’S BLACK ANGELS

Good things of day begin to droop and drowse;

While night’s black angels to their preys do rouse.

— Macbeth, Act III, Scene ii

“It is plainly murder, my lord,” the elderly steward announced unnecessarily.

What else could a stab wound in the back mean but murder? It would hardly be self-inflicted. The fact that Malcolm, the son of Bodhe, prince of the House of Moray, lay stretched on the floor of his bedchamber with the blood still seeping across his white linen nightshirt did not need a fertile imagination to conjure an explanation of what had befallen the young man.

The corpse lay facedown on the wooden floorboards, clad in nothing else but the shirt, which meant that he had just left his bed to greet his killer. A bloodstained knife had fallen nearby, apparently dropped by the assassin in his haste to be gone.

MacBeth, son of Findlay, the Mdr-mhaor or petty king of Moray, which was one of the seven great provincial kingdoms of Alba, answering to no man except the High King, whose capital was south in Sgain, stared down with a grim face. Indeed, this was his castle, and the dead man was his wife’s brother. He stood with a cloak wrapped around his shoulders to protect him from the night chill. It had been but only a few minutes ago when he had been roused from his sleep by his anxious steward and requested to come quickly to the bedchamber of Malcolm.

It certainly needed no servant or seer or prophet to tell MacBeth that someone had entered this chamber and brutally struck down the young prince and then discarded the weapon.

“Is the castle gate still secured?” he demanded, his voice raised as if in irritation and glancing into the corridor, where a warrior of his personal bodyguard stood impassively.

“Aye, noble lord,” replied his steward, an elderly man named Garban. “As custom decrees, the gate was secured at nightfall and will not be opened before dawn. Your warriors still stand sentinel at the gate and walk the ramparts.”

“So the culprit may yet be within these walls?”

“Unless he has wings to fly or be a mole that can burrow under the walls,” agreed the old servant.

MacBeth nodded in grim satisfaction. “Let it continue to be so, for we many yet snare this evildoer. Now where is Prince Malcolm’s servant? Why is he not here?”

“He was injured, noble lord. He now is being attended to, for in truth, he received a blow to the head, which caused it to bleed. He it was who discovered the body of his master.”

“Then send for him straightaway, Garban. And send for my brehon to oversee these matters, according to the law. There is little time to delay in our pursuit of this assassin.”

While a king or even a chief could be a judge and arbitrator in the law courts, it was, by law, known that a professional and qualified lawyer, a brehon, had to sit with the king to ensure the letter of the law was obeyed and a fair judgment delivered.

The old steward was turning toward the door when there was a cry at the portal, and MacBeth turned to see his newly wed wife, the Lady Gruoch, standing there, a hand to her mouth. Garban, the steward, jerked his head to her in nervous obeisance before he hurried forward to carry out MacBeth’s instructions.

MacBeth turned to his wife. He had thought her still sleeping when he had left the bedchamber to follow Garban. “Madam, I am afraid your brother is dead,” he greeted her quietly, not knowing what else to say but the blunt truth.

Lady Gruoch had seen much violence in her five and twenty years. It had been only one year ago that her first husband, Gillecomgain, the previous petty king of Moray, had been slaughtered in his castle near Inverness with fifty of his warriors. The castle, with its occupants, had been razed to the ground with fire. No one was caught, but whisper had it that the man who ordered the deed was none other than the man whose bed she now shared and who had been acclaimed with the mantle of Mdr-mhaor to replace her dead husband. Yet the Lady Gruoch had long been persuaded to discount such a notion, and she had come to love the young red-haired monarch who offered her and her baby, the young Prince Lulach, his protection.

Gruoch had not been in the castle of Gillecomgain at the time of the attack but away visiting with her newly born son. The people of Moray, bereft of their ruler, turned to MacBeth, whose father Findlay had been king before Gillecomgain. For kingship, like chieftainship, descended by the rule of the ancient laws of the brehons and not by the inheritance of the firstborn male. A king, or chief, had to be of the blood, but they were elected to their office by their derbhjine, four male generations from a common great grandfather. The law of succession had always been thus so that the most worthy and able should succeed.

No one questioned that MacBeth was worthy or that he was able. Indeed, he was also of the blood royal, for he was grandson of the High King, Malcolm, the second of his name to sit on the throne at Sgain. Thus the red- haired young noble had been duly installed as the petty king of the province.

Within the year, MacBeth had convinced the Lady Gruoch that he had not been responsible for her husbands death and had won her love. Scarcely a month had passed since their marriage, at which he had even adopted her son, the baby Lulach, as his own. Yet the evil whispers still remained, and some said that he was ambitious and