Fights had broken out in the buses that brought students into Enniskillen. He waited with his daughters at their stop, and got on. For weeks he travelled to and fro, a rifle in his hand, keeping the law between Catholic students on one side, and Protestants on the other, till eventually separate buses for each religious tribe were provided. Returning, he began to dread the moment he had to enter the barracks. What had been his Fenian ledger was now a classified document, as large as a dictionary, filled with photos, intimate descriptions of persons in frazzled print, and bizarre psychological data.

He’d turn aside. Into the hot barracks in Fermanagh came a cool breeze from the Atlantic. He dreamed of retirement, that his face might disappear from public consciousness. He saw himself digging potato drills. Setting daffodil bulbs. Going out with the fishermen. Naming birds. Naming wild flowers. Re-reading the lives of obscure martyrs in the wars of the Reformation in Scotland. He would renew his knowledge of Geneva and Berne and Bohemia.

He asked the few Catholics in the force whether they knew Belmullet.

“Belmullet? That’s the end of the earth,” Constable Morris told him. He wore an even more haunted look than did Adams himself. That year an ultimatum had gone out from the IRA that all Catholic members of the RUC should leave the force, or else should consider themselves legitimate targets. “You’re not thinking of going down there?”

“I was considering it – temporarily.”

Morris shook his head. He knew the stories of Adams’ otherworldliness but could not believe that the Sergeant had convinced himself of the possibility of some romantic nook in the South.

“I don’t know the area, Sergeant. Perhaps you should speak to some of the local Protestants down there.”

“I doubt there are any.”

“Oh,” said Morris, “In that case, you might be safer down there than you are here. In fact, you might be safer there than I would be.”

And there was some truth in that. Within the year Morris had resigned though he had four years to go till he received a full pension. But not only Catholics left the force. Protestants went, too, on half-pensions, for they saw no way they could be protected from the assassins. And Jonathan Adams began to see how lucky he was. His retirement was coming just in time. Like the rest of the old-timers he sat out his remaining term without inviting attention to himself, knowing he must not put a foot wrong. At IRA funerals he kept a discreet distance, and yet once, as the cortege of a man killed in a shoot-out passed the place where he stood behind a group of soldiers, it was said that Sergeant Adams came sharply to attention and raised a formal salute to the dead IRA man.