As he spoke, the family all turned and they saw her, in the distance, in the arms of the lady with the tight perm.

‘Allie!’

The mother’s desperate scream was signal enough for Kit to pinch viciously the pup fat at the back of Allie’s knees, causing the child to shriek and cry. The pinch was Kit’s procedure in such an emergency: upset in the child would justify the ladies’ intrusion.

‘Oh hush, baby, hush! Oh look it, look it … is this your mammy now … is this mammykins?’

The mother fell drunkenly on her child, and Ernestine took the father’s forearm.

‘Oh thank God!’ she said. ‘She was so upset! We were going for security! She thought she had ye lost altogether.’

‘Oh thank you so much,’ said the father.

‘Oh Allie, honey, shush!’ cried the mother.

‘Is that her name, is it Allie, isn’t she some beauty?’

‘Allie, we were only over there! Sweetheart, what is it?’

‘Ah she couldn’t see ye and the poor thing get herself all fussed.’

‘Ah poor baby Allie.’

In a chorus of cooings the matter was smoothed over, and Ernestine and Kit were gratefully thanked for coming to the aid of a small child in distress. The family was left intact, with Allie still weeping, and the ladies moved on with fond smiles and waves. They turned at once for the car park. They made it only just in time. As the Toyota moved, the father dashed into the sightline of the rearview mirror – the angel had spoken – but he was too late, and if he got the reg it was no matter. The plates were false, having been fixed that morning in the garage attached to the bungalow.

They sped twenty and thirty and forty kilometres beyond the speed limit through Sligo and into Leitrim and then Cavan. It was a useful tactic then to drive into Northern Ireland, a separate jurisdiction – the ladies planned for failure as much as success, failure being the commonplace – and it was not until they had crossed the bridge that marks the border, where Blacklion gives way to Belcoo, that they permitted themselves speech again.

‘I’ll tell you this much,’ Ernestine said. ‘I would not like to see a read of my blood pressure right now.’

‘It’d be crazy,’ Kit scolded.

They drove on, and at length they settled to the miserable fact that the day was done for.

‘As we’re on the road,’ Kit said, ‘we could hit the Asda in Enniskillen and pick up some wine.’

The cheaper wines from north of the border would provide a small consolation when they returned, just the two of them, to the floral-patterned walls of the bungalow. It lay blamelessly behind a windbreak of pines – the trees created about the home an aura of great silence. Birds did not nest in those trees ever.

Quickly, the Toyota was on the outskirts of Enniskillen, and traffic was heavy. Another festival – this time by the Erne – drew crowds to its merries, and the air was thick with barbecue smoke that travelled over the water. The afternoon ascended to its peak; the heat was terrific. They saw a shaven-headed, shirtless man and his long, dark-haired partner as they walked towards the carnival, with a small child between them, a little boy.