“I wouldn’t say that.” Bernie felt the back of his neck and bared his teeth. He looked uneasily at Joe Love.

“I am his brother, you see,” continued Willy.

“Ahhh! I’ve got you.”

“You look like him, too,” nodded Joe.

“The eyes,” said Bernie.

“And the chin.”

“He has him round the eyes.”

“I was not aware that I looked like Jonathan.”

“Oh, but you do,” agreed Eitne.

“He was a good soul.” Bernie reached up and gratefully took a glass from the tray Catherine held. He downed half the drink in one go. “And he’ll be sorely missed.”

“And what line of work would you be in?” asked Joe Love.

“I’m in the church.”

“Good man, Father.”

“Can I get you something?” Catherine asked her uncle.

“No, thank you.” Willy gave an abstemious grimace and wandered off. Justin Ruttle accepted a glass and sat in an armchair by the Mullet folk. They talked of the weather and compared the winds in the west with those in the south. A conversation ensued about exactly where the Gulf Stream reached Ireland. They talked land, pigs, cattle and storms. Across the room the policemen talked of the complications of the new witness forms that had to be completed in triplicate; the younger ones listened to their elders fondly reminiscing about conditions in the old stations; they talked of computers, lawnmowers, the Canaries, judges and cars. They remembered Jonathan Adams, a figure from another age.

Maisie, her mind still raddled by the stories she had been reading out loud till first light over the preceding days, moved among the RUC men dispensing cakes and tea, overcome with the feeling that somehow she had betrayed her husband, that he had died not as a sergeant in the police but as something else, something she could not as yet define.

After an appropriate interval, all the policemen left together. She shook each man’s hand on the doorstep. “If there’s ever anything we can do . . .” “Look after yourselves,” she said. They ran down the footpath and into the waiting cars. A bristle of rifles covered their retreat. Then the Mullet folk got up to go.

“We’ll see you in the summer,” Joe Love said.

“I hope so.”

Maisie stood on the road waving till the two cars were out of sight.

“Nothing would stop them but they come,” she explained to her father. “I’m sure they found it unsettling being here. You see, we never told them he was in the police. Now everyone will know who we are.”

“You should come down with me to Rathkeale for a while.”

“And what about the girls?”

“We can look after ourselves,” said Catherine.

“Oh yes,” she said. “I’m sure you could. I was not much older than you when I married your father.”