Condemned to Death by Cora Harrison Page A

from Galway. I was used to seeing him all dressed up – he was a fancy dresser, and seeing him there, all bedraggled – just dressed in a
léine
or a shirt and covered with seaweed, he looked so different, but the more I looked at him, the more I thought that he was, indeed, the goldsmith from Galway City.’
    ‘Do you know his name?’
    ‘Niall Martin,’ said Domhnall without hesitation. ‘Niall Martin. I’m sure that was his name. Mind you, my father would know more about him than I would.’
    ‘And was he married?’
    ‘Not that I remember.’ Domhnall sounded a little unsure, thought for a moment and then resolutely nodded his head. ‘No, he wasn’t,’ he said. ‘I remember my father talking to him, well, Brehon, you know my father – he was giving him advice, telling him that he could expand his business, get a bigger shop, take on some workmen, or an apprentice, make his business more profitable. My father had all sorts of good ideas to give to him, and Niall Martin listened to them all, but in the end he just shook his head. And he said that he had neither wife nor child and no near relations and that he preferred to manage everything himself. I’d say myself that he was content with what he had – that he didn’t want anyone else to have a nose in his affairs. He had a little shop at the bottom of Red Earl’s Lane; you know the place, Brehon, don’t you, and, well it didn’t look anything great, but he did his business there.’
    ‘I see,’ said Mara. She was thinking hard. Domhnall was only sixteen years old, but he was astute and reliable, and above all, because of his father’s connections with the merchants of Galway, he knew all there, spoke perfect English as well as fluent Gaelic, and would be able to make his enquiries acceptable to all. And Slevin, as usual, would make an excellent second-in-command to his admired friend. Should she go herself to Galway to make enquiries, or send these two as her deputies? The key to the mystery of this death, she felt quite strongly, would lie in the Burren rather than in the English city of Galway.
    But in the meantime …
    ‘But in the meantime,’ she said aloud, ‘I have to decide what to do about the body. If it turns out, as I suspect, that this is not a case of
fingal
but is a murder of a man from the city of Galway, then should he be sent back to Galway, or buried here?’
    ‘It depends on how long he has been dead,’ said Slevin in a practical fashion of the son of a farmer who would have had many dead bodies to dispose of in his time. ‘If he has been dead for only a day, then it wouldn’t be too bad to take the body to Galway City, but if he has already been dead for longer, and myself I would guess that he has been – well, given the heat of the sun, and the length of the journey and then finding a priest and a graveyard …’
    ‘Better to bury him here,’ put in Domhnall. ‘There are plenty of men to dig the grave and if any relatives turn up, they can always come and pray there. After all, if he died at sea, he would be buried at sea.’
    ‘You’re right,’ said Mara, cheered by the matter-of-fact philosophy. ‘We’ll bury him here at Fanore, that’s settled. So what do you think that this man, Niall Martin, if it were he, was doing here on Fanore Beach? It is, after all, a long way from Galway City.’
    ‘Not that long,’ said Domhnall with a cool deliberation in his voice. ‘After all, Brendan, the samphire-gatherer, goes to Galway every day and comes back every evening.’
    Mara met his eyes. ‘That’s an interesting point,’ she said slowly. ‘It does, does it not, provide a link between Galway and this place.’
    ‘Though there appears to be no link between samphire and gold,’ said Slevin.
    ‘I wonder,’ said Mara pensively. She looked at the long line of rocks at the far side of the river. The sun had moved a little into the south-west and she could see the prominent vein of silver-white quartz which