Driving through Athenry, he stopped for lunch and then for a drink in the hotel. The guards told her that. It was all recorded apparently. Sherlock fucken Holmes.

So he saw a truck from Quinn’s quarry across the road filling up with petrol at the filling station. He saw drivers in the hotel restaurant sitting at the bar and eating their dinners in ravenous silence. They saw him and he saw them. He saw men in tracksuits standing in the corridor near the door of the leisure centre, waiting to go swimming. Or waiting for their wives. Or lovers.

He saw salesmen in the foyer flicking through glossy brochures of new cars, and fact sheets about life insurance spread on the coffee tables, as they waited for clients or regional managers or other people who made them nervous.

He may have seen the women in Tober going to Mass. But no, they weren’t going to Mass. The guard said they were going to clean the church. And they saw him.

Well, that was good. That was almost like seeing him herself. Because Birdie knew some of those women. Women with sons. Women gathering all the secrets of their lives into thirty minutes of prayer at Mass every morning. Women remembering. Leafing through little-worn pages in their prayer books. Weddings and births and the moments of widowhood all measured out in holy pictures and anniversary cards. A sorrowful chorus in cheap headscarves. Old women dominated by young men who preached blather and poppycock with the confused hubris of medieval popes. Old women humbling themselves before some lizard in a clerical collar who blundered through the motions of Christ’s death and Resurrection with the enthusiasm of a mechanic changing the plugs on a car engine. Don’t talk! Birdie knew how women felt.

According to Hughie, Gussie was in good spirits when they parted company. Full of urgency to make amends. Get things back on track. Louise. He even mentioned Louise. Hughie said that.

And how many hours did Hughie and Birdie spend together, in the drawing room, when it was all over. Speculating on what was and what was not, as the evening closed in, the dark November evening, creeping up on them, unbeknownst.

They went as far as they could. That’s where they went. They went as far as the facts would allow. But neither of them could really say with what excitement Gussie was contemplating his future, or how far out of the woods he had come. The thought of seeing him at her front door with a bunch of flowers was something that gave Birdie a pain in the chest. The prospect of him finding Louise again was another thing Birdie wasn’t quite sure about. In short, neither Birdie nor Hughie nor the entire force of gardaí in every police station from Galway to Ballinasloe could really imagine what the hell he was thinking as he drove home to his mother. All anyone could do was accept that appointments with destiny are, by their nature, unexpected.