He was ushered out. He read the new code of conduct for police on duty at demonstrations as he sat in his living room and knew it was all a façade. Public relations was replacing justice. The war had taken a fresh turn. In the new propaganda the Catholic was the victim. He read it and placed it under a pot of jam. Then from his window he saw Matti Bonner. With an enormous sense of relief he saw him moving through the Adams’ orchard collecting apples in a basket while the geese followed behind, yelling. He had returned of his own volition. It was one of the happiest sights Jonathan had ever seen. It meant he was forgiven.

That night in the labourer’s cottage he watched Coronation Street, followed by a film about mountaineers climbing the sheer rock face of some precipice in Scotland. Matti Bonner, he knew, would have heard or seen the item about Duke Street on the news in a bar, as everyone in Ireland had. But Matti Bonner said nothing. A few times that night Jonathan Adams tried to refer to it in an oblique way, but the Catholic labourer would not be drawn.

As he sat in the labourer’s kitchen the Sergeant tried to imagine what Matti Bonner felt as he saw his neighbour baton so-called peaceful Catholics. The Sergeant wanted to scream out his innocence, to have Matti Bonner see it all from his perspective. What did Matti Bonner do when he saw it on the TV? Did he shout out in rage? Did he scream out obscenities like the others did in the bar in Belmullet? But to imagine the labyrinths of the Catholic mind was beyond Sergeant Adams. Matti Bonner’s silence he took for blame. As he sat there in his neighbour’s kitchen the feeling he got was of being afloat on the high seas far from land. While he sat making small talk what occupied him was that image of himself on the screen – old, bitter, crazy-eyed. In certain cultures he knew that peasants refused to be photographed for fear the camera would steal their soul away. Now Sergeant Adams understood that superstition perfectly. The RTE man who had filmed him in Duke Street had stolen his soul.

And the one man – Matti Bonner – who knew of the Sergeant’s distress refused ever to discuss it. Now Jonathan Adams was forever fixed in the mind of the world as a bigot dressed in the uniform of the Queen. He would have done anything to have that image removed from the viewer’s mind. “I saw you on the TV,” old knowing Protestants would say, and he’d wince, and feel an inordinate wish to cease to exist. And yet in Matti Bonner’s kitchen it was as if it had never happened. The labourer made tea, looked into the fire, stirred the burning coals and shook his head at the mystery of the mundane.