Jonathan Adams loved his village. It was neat like the interior of his house. It was ordered, civic, with houses of cut stone, with fine mill walls, a clear stream, fields of potatoes, window boxes with wild flowers in bloom, with the same wild flowers in bloom under the mill walls. Sheep grazed in an orderly fashion and were daubed neatly at the same precise spot, great Charolais cattle grazed, antiques sat on shelves, in gardens, on floors where they had stood for over a hundred years. Eagles from a stonemason’s yard in Enniskillen sat on all the piers.

Everywhere was the same healthy tradition and yet now Jonathan Adams found himself removed from it all.

He did not walk the village any more, only took the few steps from his car that led to the new barrier at the station. In time he drove out of the garage adjoining his house and entered the station through a gate that closed automatically behind him. So, in fact, he never had to encounter the public at all. And the first thing he heard, the first thing the new shift heard as they approached the station, was Matti Bonner whistling. He was whistling “Mary from Dunloe”. In time, as the policemen sat into their cars to drive to some new crisis area, they stole his tune. They were whistling a tune about love in the Republic they despised. And when Matti Bonner went home he had taken away something from them. The dryness came with him. The smell of fear.

It was Sergeant Adams had arranged for the Catholic labourer to find work there. He was his neighbour. It did not strike him as ironic that a Catholic should put up defences that other Catholics would tear down, defences against which other Catholics would hurl stones, petrol bombs, and then, as the war progressed, mortar bombs. He was not to know that the American and Russian rifles he had read about, and which appeared so far away and exotic, would one day be homing in on men who wore his uniform. Or that in a few years workmen like Matti Bonner would have been murdered for collaborating with the enemy. He did not foresee the day when the IRA would get that well organized. For him, Matti Bonner was a man who provoked care and curiosity, who had a knack with machines, who caused no trouble, who spoke contemptuously of priests, who had witnessed his nuptials, who would listen sheepishly to Sergeant Adams’ speculations about the hereafter. We can talk about things, Sergeant Adams would say, we are ordinary men.

Nevertheless, when Matti Bonner died, he would have wished a priest was with him.