Now, about a hundred people stood round his grave, bound to him by mended fences, by the milking of cows, the shovelling of gravel, the spreading of manure. Thinking this, Jonathan Adams was struck by a sudden insight into the decency of Matti Bonner’s life. Many of the graves each side of the one he was being put into, Matti himself had dug. He would have cleaned his shovel with the heel of his boot onto the plot in which he now was laid.

This togetherness of things, this stubborn harmony, this realization of how for years Matti Bonner had been separating himself from others so that he might have the strength to carry out his quest, struck the old Presbyterian with a fine high feeling of prophecy mixed with anger.

He looked out onto the road at his car. He looked back at the chapel. What am I doing here? Then he stepped through the creaking turn-gate. He felt under the passenger seat for his rifle. He drove back towards the village. Some of those in the graveyard who had moved on to visit the plots of their relations watched him go.

Jonathan Adams had white hair with black roots, salmon cheeks, walnut eyes and, in his latter years, a nervous shaking of the head and chin which he always feared might lead to the same Parkinson’s disease that killed his father.

He had been a member of the Royal Ulster Constabulary for thirty years, yet he had never managed to develop a policeman’s bearing. The uniform sat ill on him. The figure itself was apparently straight and manly, but was somehow not correct. Slouches hung around the buttocks and the armpits. And he never shook off the hump that learning had given him. Despite cultivating the rough accent of his youth and refining his knowledge, he had a habit of speaking above the other policemen. The other learned phrasing still haunted his words. Once upon a time his belief lay in the simple statement: Conscience demands knowledge. As a policeman he had to relinquish the higher ground, yet his scholar’s demeanour persisted in the hesitant tone of voice.

For three years prior to joining the police he had studied at small Presbyterian seminaries. The first in Belfast, which dealt with theology alone, then for a while in Edinburgh. Those few years had given him a scholar’s mien, and a dislike for what he called in a letter home to his father the mocking hypocrisy, defined scepticism, reeking impiety and shameless revelry of life beyond the new, emergent Northern Ireland State.

It’s people that matter, the doctors told him. Be popular with the congregation. Keep up the home visits. You need peace of mind to find God’s will.