The morning has turned lavishly beautiful. The autumn sun gives the greens of the fields an impossible, mythic radiance and transforms the back roads into light-muddled paths where a goblin with a riddle, or a pretty maiden with a basket, could be waiting around every gorse-and-bramble bend. Cal is in no mood to appreciate any of it. He feels like this specific beauty is central to the illusion that lulled him into stupidity, turned him into the peasant gazing slack-jawed at his handful of gold coins till they melt into dead leaves in front of his eyes. If all this had happened in some depressing suburban clot of tract homes and ruler-measured lawns, he would have kept his wits about him.

He needs to talk to Austin. Austin sounds like a fun guy. If he’s the boss man, though, even just regionally, there’s better than a fifty-fifty shot that he’s the calculating subspecies of psycho, rather than the rabid kind. In this situation, unlike many, Cal considers that a plus. If he can convince Austin that Trey is no threat, then Austin is likely to abandon his silencing campaign as an unnecessary risk, rather than keeping it up just for entertainment. There’s even an outside chance Cal can persuade him to give Trey some level of answer in exchange for guaranteed peace and quiet. In order to gauge Austin well enough to wrangle him, though, Cal needs to do this face-to-face. He’s going to have to phone Austin and set up a meeting, pick his strategy on the fly depending on what he finds, and hope his meeting goes better than Brendan’s did.

The house and the garden look the same as they did when he left, and the rooks are happily doing their thing, making conversation and combing the grass for bugs, undisturbed. Cal unlocks the front door as quietly as he can, figuring the kid will likely be asleep again, and peeks into the bedroom. The bed is empty.

Cal spins round, his head blooming with fully fledged abduction scenarios. When he sees the bathroom door shut, he switches to picturing the kid collapsed on the floor, bleeding into her guts. He can’t believe he didn’t haul her to a hospital last night.

“Kid,” he says, outside the bathroom, as calmly as he can. “You OK?”

After a bad second, Trey pulls the door open. “You were fuckin’ ages,” she snaps.

She’s electric with nerves. So is Cal. “I was talking to Donie. Did you want me to do that or not?”

“What’d he say?”

The flare of terror in her eyes disintegrates Cal’s irritation. “OK,” he says. “Donie says your brother did get mixed up with the drug boys from Dublin. Not selling, you were right about that, but he was gonna be making meth for them. Only he fucked up, lost a bunch of their supplies. He was planning to meet up with them and make it right, and that’s the last Donie heard of him.”

He’s not sure if some or all of this is going to be more than Trey can take, but he’s done hiding stuff to protect her: look how well that worked out last time. The kid has a right, paid for and branded onto her, to true answers.

She absorbs it with an intentness that stills her jittering. “That what Donie actually said? No bullshit this time?”

“No bullshit. And I’m pretty sure he wasn’t bullshitting me, either. Not sure he told me every single thing, but I reckon what he did tell me was true.”

“Didja hurt him?”

“Yeah. Not too badly.”

“You shoulda battered the fucker,” Trey says. “Shoulda danced on his fucking head.”

“I know,” Cal says gently. “I would’ve loved to. But I’m after answers, not trouble.”

“You haveta talk to them, the lads from Dublin. Didja talk to them?”

“Kid,” Cal says. “Slow down. I’m gonna. But I need to work out the best way to go about it, so neither of us winds up with a bullet in our heads.”

Trey thinks that over, biting off skin from around her thumbnail, wincing when she catches her lip. In the end she says, “Didja see Mart Lavin?”

“No. Why?”

“He came looking for you.”

“Huh,” Cal says, mentally kicking himself. Of course Mart would have clocked Lena’s car and headed straight down here, truffle-hunting for gossip, the second he got a chance. “He see you?”

“Nah. I saw him coming, hid in the jacks. He went all round the house, when you didn’t answer the door. I heard him. Checking in the windows. Saw his shadow.”

The kid is starting to twitch with adrenaline again at the memory. “Well,” Cal says peacefully, “good thing my bathroom’s got that sheet over the window.” He takes off his coat and hangs it on its hook behind the door, moving nice and slowly. “You know why I put that up to begin with? ’Cause of you. Before we ever met. I knew someone was watching me, so I nailed that sheet up there to give me a little bit of privacy where it counts. And now it’s coming in useful to you. Funny how things turn out, huh?”

Trey gives a one-shouldered shrug, but her jittering has slowed down. “I know what Mart wanted, anyway,” Cal says, “and it’s got nothing to do with you. He saw Miss Lena’s car here, and he wants to know if me and her are hooking up.”

The look on Trey’s face makes him grin. “Are you?”

“Nope. There’s more’n enough going on without adding that in on top. You want anything? A snack, maybe?”

“I wanta see this.” The kid points at her face. “You got a mirror?”

Cal says, “It looks a lot worse’n it is, right now. The swelling’ll go down in a day or two.”

“I know. I wanta see it.”

Cal finds his beard-trimming mirror in a cupboard and hands it to her. Trey sits at the table with it and spends a long time there, turning her head this way and that.

“We can still see if a doctor can fix up that lip,” Cal says. “So it won’t leave a scar. We’ll tell them you fell off your bike.”

“Nah. I don’t give a shite about scars.”

“I know. You might someday, though.”

The kid makes Cal happy by giving him a full-bore moron stare. “I’d rather look like ‘don’t fuck with me’ than look pretty.”

“I think you got that covered,” Cal says. “You need to get out in the village. Before those bruises go down.”

Trey’s head comes up sharply from the mirror. “I’m not going down there.”

“Yeah you are. Whoever told your mama to do this, we need them to know that she did it, and did it right. That’s why she went for your face: so they’d know. You need to get seen by someone who’ll pass it on.”

“Like who?”

“Well, if I knew that,” Cal says. “Just go into Noreen’s. Buy bread or something. Give her a good look at your face, walk like you hurt all over. She’ll make sure word gets around.”