“You have some distance ahead of you then.” He slipped the books into a paper bag. “We have some people from home, from Bonniconlon, down there. Are you in the city?”

“That’s right.”

“A man by the name of Gillan, Paddy Gillan?”

“Well, we’ve moved recently. Further out. Kinsale, in fact.”

“I see.” The shop assistant rose his eyebrows. “You wouldn’t have come across him by any chance before that?”

“No, I’m sorry.”

“I suppose it’s not likely.” The shop assistant broke out into a horrendous laugh. “Of course you wouldn’t be from there originally,” he said counting out his change coin by coin onto the counter, “not with your accent.” He smiled wickedly. “I can understand you. But it’s hard to understand the Cork man.” He stepped out from behind the small counter and accompanied the Sergeant to the door. “When I land down there and step off the train, and hear them talking. Oh Lord. To tell you the truth, I often think they are trying to fool me.”

“Oh, aye,” said Jonathan Adams.

“You’ll get that,” agreed the man as he opened the door.

Jonathan Adams escaped onto the street. What now? Where to? For a moment he could not get his bearings, so he headed off confidently in the wrong direction. It was typical of the Republic, he realized, that he should get lost in a small town, that he should be driven out of despair into telling a useless lie, and then be forced by embarrassment into buying the first work of fiction he had bought in years. He walked around Ballina and found a place to sit by the river Moy. He watched fishermen standing thigh-high in foaming waders casting flies downstream. What’s the name of the river? He opened the map of Erris. He looked at it a long time, and yet he could discover no place that would tell him he would be safe if he lived there.

“The only Protestant church on Mullet,” he said to Maisie as they drove back, “is closed.”

“You’re not thinking of opening one, are you?” she asked.

The peninsula, joined to the mainland only by the old bridge at Belmullet, was so isolated that it made him feel secure. It was a small, safe enclave, surrounded by huge seas. And one other extra feature made him optimistic: he heard tell there were as yet few televisions on the peninsula.

But he would not make up his mind.