The mourners saw this and were astounded. They looked again to find that his hand had dropped to his side. The heels of his boots now stood apart. The face remained distant, disinterested. It was as if it had never happened. When the story was told later, it was not believed. He was only raising his hand to his head, some said. He was righting his cap. And yet the chief mourners swore they’d seen it – the last salute an RUC officer of the old guard would give to the passing coffin of an IRA man.

This image of Jonathan Adams, along with the moving pictures of him batoning defenceless Catholics, went on into the traditions. The one image was fixed forever in visual history by television. The other was hardly ever mentioned. It could never be verified. It existed only in folk memory. It could only be recalled by a few of those who were there on the day.

He did it surely, the brave fucker. He did. I saw it, wi’ me own two eyes.

Like fuck he did.

That particular day was Jonathan Adams’ last in the RUC. Next morning he would be saying goodbye to nigh on forty years as a policeman. It appeared that his last act as a policeman was to salute the traditional enemy as he was borne past from this life to the other. A few days later, towing a trailer filled with yelling geese, he headed South.

The Mullet peninsula gave Jonathan Adams and his family a foothold in a new reality.

During the whole of that spring and summer, the family journeyed down to The Dwellings every third weekend. A neighbour fed the birds when they were away. It was in Corrloch that the Sergeant at last relented and allowed his daughters to wear miniskirts, something he would not have permitted in Fermanagh. They were now free to inhabit a world he and Maisie had renounced. He got the names of some families in Newport and Westport, where he called to probe the psyche of the Southern Protestant so that he might find an entrance into the sandy Gaelic-speaking catacombs of Mullet. But the members of the Erris Church of Ireland proved to be even more ambiguous and elusive than the Southern Catholics were.