Averted eyes and reluctant answers on a sex question

Bridie Gordon sat with her hands in her lap and a smart handbag at her feet during her 35 minutes in the witness-box yesterday. As she walked past her brother-in-law, Pat Gillane, neither looked at the other. "That doesn't come into it. I'm not saying," she told prosecution counsel, Mr Edward Comyn, when he asked her if she had had a sexual relationship with Pat Gillane before and after he married her sister.

Mr Comyn told her she would have to answer the question. "Yeah," she said reluctantly.

Mr Gillane, charged with soliciting two men to murder his wife, sat calmly, as he has since the trial began. His arms were folded tightly across his chest while Ms Gordon gave her evidence.

The court heard that Mr Gillane met Philomena Gordon, his wife-to-be, in Lisdoonvarna in 1991. Two years later when they were married, Mr Gillane took her sister, Bridie, to Lisdoonvarna for a weekend. Philomena had given birth to their first child the previous month.

Bridie said she had spent another weekend in Kerry at the Rose of Tralee festival with Mr Gillane when he was engaged to Philomena. "I didn't want to do it to my sister," she said. "He kept pestering me to go out with him." The affair ended in October 1993, she said, "and I started going out with another boy."

In December 1993 Mr Gillane told Philomena about his affair with her sister when he was drunk, she said. There was a "big row". At the end of her evidence Ms Gordon said, "Lord have mercy on" each time she used the name of her younger sister, Phil, and her mother. Her sister had been "brutally murdered", she repeated, and her mother had died "heartbroken".

Mr Christopher Bolger, one of the men who alleges Mr Gillane asked him to "do a job" and "kill a woman who worked in a hospital", said he remembered him as a man who didn't smoke and had "powerful hazel in his eyes".

Mr Gillane kept his eyes down as people in the back of the courtroom stared over to assess their colour.

"Is that him in the picture?" counsel asked Mr Bolger. "Yeah. And he's just behind me as well." Pressed on his recollection of the day more than three years ago, Mr Bolger said he had a microchip in his head. "I know people can read my mind. I'm tied into my microchip and it's tapped."

As the courtroom emptied Mr Gillane talked to his legal team before walking towards the quays, followed by a camera team.