No longer able to remember why she was looking through his coat, she put it on, zipped it up like a hooded sleeping bag and climbed into bed, crashing straight out.

PART TWO

5

Pax had been drinking long enough and hard enough to have a striking capacity for recovery. Her body clock jolted her wide awake just after six, albeit totally disoriented, temples crashing and with a mouth like cinder.

Darkness. Small green light glowing on the ceiling. Large building. Distant noises. Closer to, somebody else’s breathing. Hotel room. She was wearing riding clothes and a coat that smelled of horse. Her marriage was finally falling apart. Mack wanted Kes to live with him in Scotland. The worst New Year ever.

She groped around for a light switch, knocking over a chewed phone, a dog-eared notepad and a glass of water before locating a row of small metal rectangles and clicking one at random. A dim picture light came on across the room.

Her Good Samaritan – or was he a hustler? – was asleep in the chair with a faded baseball cap tipped down over his eyes and the puppy on his lap. Dressed in frayed jeans, T-shirt and a checked shirt, he resembled a redneck hillbilly dozing on a veranda. All he needed was a guitar across his knee. Or a shotgun. Was he friend or foe?

Most of the previous night remained blacked out, but she could remember a tough, beleaguered kindness. ‘I have no choice,’ he’d said.

She groped in the pockets of the coat she was wearing, pulling out gum wrappers, flyers, tickets and a passport.

Gianluca Declan Matthew O’Brien, she read. Born in County Kildare thirty-six years ago. The clean-shaven photograph could have been of somebody else.

Groaning, Pax closed her eyes again, more fragments of the night flashing back in a horror strobe. Those awful calls from Mack. Drinking to forget. Abandoning the puppy. Flirting with a stranger in a bar. Kissing a stranger. All her money, her cards on the floor.

Was he the stranger she’d kissed? That detail was still in darkness. But one thing made sense: he’d known the moment he saw her dropped credit card who she was; his lift, his boss’s daughter, a drunk. Shame curled her toes into the bed sheets.

‘Are you awake?’ he asked, his voice soft and strangely placeless, a generic Celtic burr, Irish accent polluted from too much travelling.

‘Only if you tell me it’s all been a bad dream.’ She sat up, then realised that was way too ambitious.

‘It’s not,’ he said bluntly, lifting the cap. The smile was unexpected, wide and welcoming, over-bright even. Another flashback. That smile, water, taking her jeans off. Had she got in the bath with him?

‘Then I’m not awake.’ She lay back down, clamping her eyes tight and trying, trying to remember more.

*

Like many season-hardened old countrymen, Lester had an encyclopaedic knowledge of rural folklore, cynical when omens boded well and pessimistic when they didn’t. That morning, as he dressed, a barn owl screeched piteously from the roof of the main house. Even in pitch darkness, Lester knew precisely where it had landed, on the overflow pipe that protruded from the dormer ridge of one of the little attic windows. It had perched there just before dawn, day after day, the winter that Ann Percy died. Old-timers said an owl on one’s roof foretold a tragedy.