“Donie’s only an arsewipe,” Trey says, with complete scorn.

“OK. Stay away from him anyway.”

Trey kicks his rock, hard, into the heather. He gets in front of Cal and stops, blocking the path. His feet are set apart and his chin is out.

“I’m not a fucking baby.”

“I know that.”

“‘Stay away from this, stay away from him, do nothing, you don’t need to know—’”

“You wanted me to do this ’cause I know how to do it right. If you can’t stay outa my way while I—”

“I wanta talk to Donie. He’ll say nothing to a blow-in.”

“And you think he’ll talk to some kid?”

“He will, yeah. Why not? He thinks the same as you: I’m a baby. He can say anything to me; there’s nothing I can do about it.”

Cal says, “What I’m telling you is, I find out you’ve been anywhere near Donie, I’m done here. No second chances. Clear?”

Trey stares at him. For a second Cal thinks the kid is going to flip his shit, the way he did when he smashed up the desk. He gets ready to dodge.

Instead, the kid’s face shuts like a door. “Yeah,” he says. “Clear.”

“Better be,” Cal says. “I’ll talk to him tomorrow. Come round the day after, I’ll update you.” He wants to tell the kid not to get seen on the way, but the sleazy ring of it stops him.

Trey doesn’t argue any more, or ask any more questions. He just nods and lopes off, into the heather and gone behind the shoulder of the mountain.

Cal understands that the kid knows. He knows something happened inside that house; something solidified and came into sharp focus, and the stakes shot up. He knows that was the moment when this situation went bad.

Cal wants to call the kid back and take him hunting again, or feed him dinner, or teach him how to build something. None of those will fix this. He turns and starts to walk home, by the same meandering route he took to get here. Below him the fields are yellowing with autumn. The shadow of the mountainside is spilling onto the path, with a chill inside when he crosses it. He wonders if, a week or two from now, the kid will hate his guts.

At least now he knows what farm equipment got stolen back in March. Brendan went out with a hose and a propane tank one night, or a couple of nights, and siphoned off a little bit of P.J.’s anhydrous ammonia. Only he got busted: maybe he got sloppy and left a piece of duct tape stuck to the tank where he’d attached his hosepipe, maybe P.J. spotted the brass fitting turning green. Either way, P.J. called the cops. Cal would love to know what Brendan said to him to make him call them off.

He could probably have those CSIs and that K-9, if he went to the police—not cheery Garda Dennis, but the big boys, the detectives up in Dublin. They would take him seriously, specially once they saw those photos. Brendan wasn’t setting up some pissant shake-n-bake op in that cottage. He was going for the real thing, the pure high-yield technique, and he had the chemistry knowledge to make it work. It seems like a fair assumption that he also had the connections in place to sell the meth once he made it. The detectives wouldn’t fuck around.

Cal would be lighting the fuse on something whose blast would reverberate through Ardnakelty in ways he can’t predict.

No matter what he does or doesn’t do, he can’t see a way that this might turn out well. That’s what that shift in the air meant, the one he and Trey both felt as they squatted by the sideboard, the cold implacable shift that’s familiar to him from a hundred cases: this isn’t going to have a happy ending.

FIFTEEN

The loss of one of their number hasn’t scared the rabbits off. In the morning an easy dozen of them are bounding around Cal’s back field like they own it, breakfasting off his dew-wet clover. He watches them from his bedroom window, feeling the cold creep in at him through the glass. Whatever people do, right up to killing, nature absorbs it, closes over the fissure and goes on about its own doings. He can’t tell whether this is a comforting thing or a melancholy one. The rooks’ oak tree is every shade of gold, leaves twisting down to add to a pool lying like a reflection beneath it.

It’s a Wednesday, but Cal feels safe in assuming Donie McGrath won’t be spending his day in gainful employment. He also assumes Donie isn’t an early riser, so he takes his time over his morning. He fixes himself a big breakfast, bacon, sausages, eggs and black pudding—he hasn’t worked out whether he likes black pudding, exactly, but he feels he should occasionally eat it out of respect for local custom. This could take a while, so he might as well be prepared for a long wait and no lunch.

A little after eleven he heads down to the village. Donie’s house is on the fringe of the main street, maybe a hundred yards from the shop and the pub. It’s a narrow, ungainly two-story house, its windows crowded, at the end of a mismatched row facing right onto the sidewalk. The gray pebbledash is flaking off in patches and there’s a sturdy crop of weeds growing out of the chimney.

Opposite Donie’s place is a pink house with boarded-up windows and a low stone wall outside. Cal settles his ass on the wall, turns up the collar of his fleece against the lush wet wind, and waits.

For a while nothing happens. The sagging lace curtains in Donie’s front window don’t move. There are little china ornaments on the windowsill.

A skinny old guy Cal has seen in the pub a few times shuffles past, giving him a nod and a sharp look. Cal nods back, and the guy heads on to the shop. Two minutes after he leaves, Noreen pops out with a watering can and tiptoes to aim it at her hanging basket of petunias. When she cranes her head over her shoulder to peer at Cal, he gives her a wave and a great big grin.

By evening, all of Ardnakelty will know he was looking for Donie. Cal has had enough of being discreet. He figures it’s time to kick a few bushes and see what scuttles out.

He waits some more. Various old people go past, and a couple of mothers with babies and little kids, and a fat ginger cat that gives Cal an insolent stare before sitting down on the sidewalk and washing its nether parts to show him what it thinks of him. Something moves behind Donie’s mama’s lace curtains, and the folds waver, but they don’t move aside and the door doesn’t open.

A beat-up yellow Fiat 600 bumps down the street and pulls up in front of Noreen’s, and a woman who has to be Belinda gets out. She has a lot of dyed-red hair going in a lot of directions, and a purple cape which she swirls around herself before she goes into the shop. When she comes back out, she slows down as she drives past Cal, flutters her fingers and gives him a huge glowing smile. He nods briefly and pulls out his phone like it’s ringing, before she can decide to stop and introduce herself. It looks like Noreen has changed her mind about setting him up with Lena.