That feeling is one of the things that drove Cal out of his job. He associates it, even though he knows the reality is nowhere near that simple, with a scrawny black kid called Jeremiah Payton, who, a few months before Cal retired, robbed a convenience store with a knife and jumped bail. Cal and O’Leary tracked him down at his girlfriend’s house, at which point Jeremiah leaped out of a window and took off.

Cal was older than O’Leary, and heavier. He was three paces behind him rounding the corner. He heard O’Leary yell, “Let me see your hands!” and then he saw Jeremiah turning towards them with one hand rising and one dropping, and then O’Leary’s gun went off and Jeremiah landed facedown on the sidewalk.

Cal was already on the radio calling for the ambulance as they ran towards him, but when they got there, Jeremiah shouted into the sidewalk in a voice that was pure terror, “Don’t shoot me.”

Cal got his hands behind his back and cuffed them there. Someone had started screaming. “You hit?” Cal asked Jeremiah.

He shook his head. Cal turned him over and checked him anyway: no blood.

“I miss him?” O’Leary said. He was cabbage-green and pouring sweat like he was melting. He still had his Glock in his hands.

“Yeah,” Cal said. To Jeremiah he said, “You got anything on you?”

Jeremiah just stared up at him. It took Cal a minute to understand that he couldn’t talk because he thought he was going to die.

O’Leary said, “He was going for his pocket. You saw him go for his pocket.”

“I saw his hand drop,” Cal said.

“For his fucking pocket. Pants pocket. I swear to God—” O’Leary bent over, panting, and burrowed in Jeremiah’s pocket. He came out with a switchblade.

“I thought it was a gun,” O’Leary said. “Well, shitfuck,” and he sat down on the curb like his legs had given way.

Cal wanted to sit down next to him, but the woman was screaming louder and people had started to gather. “It’s gonna be OK,” he said, pointlessly, and he left O’Leary there and headed off to cancel the ambulance and secure the scene.

Cal was feeling a little tender right then, what with Donna having just walked out on him. He had spent most of the past year fumbling in the dark trying to disentangle complications, and complications behind complications; he didn’t seem to know how to stop. He was sure, absolutely, that O’Leary had believed Jeremiah was going for a gun in his pocket, which for a lot of guys would have been enough. But for Cal, that fact seemed to be overlaid and underlaid by so many layers that he couldn’t tell whether or not it was important. What was important was that he and O’Leary were supposed to be out there keeping people safe. They had always considered themselves to be good cops, cops who tried to do right by everyone they came across. They had worked hard to be that, even when plenty of people hated their guts on sight, even when some of the other guys were getting meaner by the day and some had been rattlesnake-mean from the start. They had done their damn sensitivity training. And yet, somehow, they had ended up almost killing an eighteen-year-old kid. Cal knew it was unspeakably wrong that Jeremiah had come within a few inches of dying on that sidewalk, and that he had looked at the two of them and expected to die; but no matter how much time he spent fumbling at it, he couldn’t put his finger on a point where he could have made things go right. He could have stayed outside Jeremiah’s window to stop him taking off, but that doesn’t seem like it would have fixed very much of anything.

He told Internal Affairs that Jeremiah was going for his pocket. Cal had a good record and fewer complaints against his name than most cops; IA believed him. It might be true—Cal thinks it is, he thinks that probably is what he saw. That doesn’t alter the fact that he didn’t say that to IA because he thought it was the right thing to do. He did it because he knew everyone around him believed it was, and he himself had no idea. He was so deafened by the locust buzz of all the anger and the wrongness and the complications surrounding him, he couldn’t hear the steady pulse of his code any more, so that he found himself having to turn to other people’s—a thing that in itself was a fundamental and unpardonable breach of his own.

When he put in his papers, and the sarge asked him why, he didn’t mention Jeremiah. The sarge would have thought he had gone out of his ever-loving mind, losing his nerve over an incident where no one got hurt worse than a couple of scraped knees. Cal wouldn’t have known how to explain that it wasn’t that he couldn’t handle the job any more. It was that one or the other of them, him or the job, couldn’t be trusted.

The river, out of its endless supply of contrariness, has decided to be charming today. The perch are little, but inside half an hour Cal has enough of them to make up a good dinner. He keeps fishing anyway, even when the cold sets up an ache in his joints, making him feel old. He only packs up his gear when the light coming through the branches starts to tarnish and contract, turning the water green-black and sullen. He doesn’t feel like walking home in the dark today.

As he comes up his lane he sees Mart leaning back against his gate, looking out across the road and the wild-grown hedge and the fields scattered with hay bales, to the gold in the sky. A thin curl of smoke trickles from his mouth and meanders off up the road. Beside him, Kojak nips through his fur after a flea.

As Cal gets closer, Mart turns his head and drops his cigarette under his boot. “Here comes the big bold hunter,” he says, grinning. “Any joy?”

“Got a mess of perch,” Cal says, holding up his kill bag. “You want some?”

Mart waves the perch away. “I don’t eat fish. They depress me. I had fish every Friday of my life, till the mammy died. I’ve et enough fish for one lifetime.”

“I oughta be that way about grits,” Cal says. “But I’m not. I’d eat grits any day and twice on Sundays, if I could get them.”

“What the feck is grits, anyhow?” Mart demands. “All the cowboys in the fillums do eat it, but they never have the courtesy to tell you what it is. Is it semolina, or what is it at all?”

“They’re made of cornmeal,” Cal says. “You boil ’em up and serve ’em with whatever you like best. I favor shrimp and grits, myself. If I could get my hands on some, I’d invite you over to try them.”

“Noreen’d order that in for you. If you bat the big aul’ baby blues at her.”

“Maybe,” Cal says. He remembers Belinda waving to him out her car window. He doesn’t think Noreen is in the mood to special-order anything for him right now.

“Are you getting homesick on me, bucko?” Mart inquires, eyeing him sharply. “I’ve twenty quid on you, down at Seán Óg’s, to stick it out here at least a year. Don’t let me down.”