Hector and Paudi kept the farm locked down, a holdout against the world. They had an in-house armoury stocked with several hand guns, a pair of shotguns, and a semi-automatic hunting rifle with a mounted telescopic sight. They had flak jackets and camo gear, and both men were adept at improvising small explosive devices from basic domestic and farming ingredients, or so they claimed. They had shown Dympna and Arm something called a siege cupboard, where they kept an eighteen-month supply of tinned soup and dry goods. They owned two hulking Alsatians trained to lock jaws around the jugulars of grown men on command. The basement in which they grew the weed was extensively rigged and booby trapped, to be razed at short notice in the worst-case scenario.

They rarely left the premises, and certainly never at the same time. Dympna and Arm’s trips out to them were short. Arm preferred to stay in the car while Dympna went inside to parley and complete the necessary exchanges.

Dympna and Arm were scheduled in fact to head to the farm the next day, and so would not have expected to hear from either of the uncles until then. But Hector had rung Dympna this morning, out of the blue, requesting a meet in Lally’s pool arcade on the main street, at two.

Lally’s was dim and cool, its gloomy space filled with six full-size pool tables. There were a couple of games in session, the players’ low talk lost beneath the overlapping reports of the balls colliding across each bright rectangle of baize, and now and then the prompt gurgle of a ball rattlingly sunk. The windows had fine mesh grilles over them, a penitentiary detail no regular much seemed to mind. There was no drinking licence for the premises, but the enterprising Mark Scriney sold cans and bottles out of a portable ice box at twice their supermarket prices. No woman had crossed Lally’s threshold in years, if ever.

Hector was in the back, sat at one of the flimsy chipboard tables arranged along the wall. An elderly man was with him, talking volubly while Hector only listened.

Dympna’s uncle was a squat, sturdy man in his fifties, with a paunch, wide forearms and a face rendered cracked and red from decades of working in the elements. He was spruced and prinked for his afternoon in civilisation, dressed in a cufflinked white shirt and navy pullover. His black hair, as yet only negligibly tipped with silver, was boxily trimmed and waxed. He would be heading to Roscommon later that day, Arm knew. The more presentable and socially adroit of the uncles, Hector had a woman by the name of Mirkin squirrelled away in Ballintober, a widow with whom he’d been pursuing a glacially paced courtship for the last three years; the woman, also in her fifties, had until recently lived with her ninety-something mother and, fretful of scandalising the old crone, had only permitted her suitor to visit one night every few weeks. Though the mother had died a couple of months back, the frequency of Hector and the widow’s rendezvous had not, as yet, increased. Hector, though, did not seem to mind, and Arm suspected the bitty, piecemeal nature of the relationship was in fact one of its prime appeals. Dympna had his own theories concerning the courtship. He was convinced that the widow was sitting on a lot of money, a potential double inheritance, and that Hector was on its track, painstakingly working the slow grift.