‘Fishing, you say? I’ll remember that next time I’m casting on the lough. It’s bad enough the Americans taking all the best salmon without the ones that are left shooting at us.’ He twisted the steel in my shoulder. I gasped with the shock of it.

‘And I’ll remember to bring my own anaesthetic next time.’ The fentanyl had worn off. For the pain Doc had nothing more than a glass of Paddy – one for him, and one for me. I swallowed what was left in my tumbler. Doc motioned for me to keep still.

‘I’ll be honest with you now, Mac Ghill’ean, anaesthetic would have been grand.’ He looked at me and smiled a quick, tight-lipped smile. ‘Because this is going to be some dose all right.’ He turned his wrist as if springing a lock with the forceps, and then drew them slowly towards him, working the bullet clear. I tried to breathe through it. One final tug and he produced the mangled round before my eyes with a flourish. He smiled again, triumphant. I grinned back weakly.

‘Five-seven,’ he concluded, correctly. ‘Nasty. Ricochet?’

‘No,’ I said. ‘It went through a chair.’

He wiped the spent round on a swab and then dropped it on to the bedside table. It clattered to a halt beside his own, half-empty glass.

‘The wound isn’t pretty but it’s not that deep,’ he said. ‘Damned thing got wedged by the bone. If it had hit you properly it could have taken your shoulder out.’

He cleaned fragments of wood and clothing from the wound and made especially sure there were no shards of bone that could threaten my lung. Then he packed it with disinfectant-soaked wadding and wrapped it with a bandage. I was propped up on a captain’s bed in an attic room – lit only by an oil lamp – which within minutes of my arrival had been transformed into a makeshift dressing station. Like the rest of the house, it was an echo chamber of a life lived on the road: Indian cloth paintings lined the walls, depicting improbable intercourse in impossible profile, their blue silk and gold leaf shimmering in the half-light; a battle-worn Martini–Henry hung above the mantel; an assegai leaned against a Victorian tallboy. And beneath a glossy canvas of a black stallion standing alone in a field, a silver menorah competed for space on top of a dusty antique dresser overflowing with brand-new, newly empty bottles of whiskey.

He drained the last of the peat-coloured liquor from his own glass and ran through the inventory of my other injuries.

‘Your thigh’s a bit ragged, too, but it’s not serious, either. The butterfly stitch should hold it. Another ricochet, or what-have-you, by the look of it. Surprisingly clean. The bicep’s just a graze. And you,’ he concluded, putting his empty tumbler down, ‘are one lucky bastard.’