Sergeant Adams would often conjure up moments in the past. An image of Matti would materialize, an unprincipled and menial man in one sense, in another, dangerously subversive. When he touched the corpse he remembered the long drive they’d made together to Rathkeale. Two men in a car hurtling South without a word. The warmth of Matti Bonner’s voice behind him in the church the morning of his wedding – “Good luck. Boss. They’re good auld stock.” Now the dead man was a complete stranger.

Jonathan Adams was stunned by grief. And so, despite being a policeman, he had braved the Catholic graveside to say his goodbyes to his best man. The men and women who stood in the graveyard were all enemies of Jonathan Adams. There was a cursory nod from the priest, a handshake from the nephew, a fatalistic silence, then they stood aside to give him a view of the naked coffin. Look what you’ve done, their movement said. I knew him better than any of you, he wanted to shout. But he acted his part. Submissive. Holier than thou. Yet somehow the sense of being at a funeral by-passed Jonathan Adams. For, throughout it, he was disputing with the living man.

Why did you not speak to me? Why did you hold back? Where are you now? Well, one thing, there was no Roman Catholic priest to guide you into the hereafter when you died. Thinking this, Jonathan Adams felt blasphemous. “That’s what they do to us,” he recalled Matti saying, “slip an arm around you just when you’re gone senile. It’s the priest talking, not you at all. You’re not there. It’s the infant you once were is being blessed. Aye. I don’t want it. Never.”

Thinking on these words, the Sergeant remembered how delighted he had been to hear a Catholic deriding the priests. But now the words, enriched by Matti’s death, returned to him from a different, dangerous perspective. For, though Matti had seen no priest and had died by his own hand, yet he had died a Catholic. It didn’t matter that there was no priest present. Now Jonathan Adams wished that the priest had been there to attend to Matti as he climbed the tree.

For there was something offensive in such a staunch death.

Something that drove him to ask Matti, Are there balconies up there? Are there trees? Are there stars?

Matti Bonner had harvested for both sides, and was known by none. Yet he died a Catholic. His religion could accommodate his despair.