Noonan was at her desk drinking coffee black as a vinyl record from a battered silver cafetière and transferring a weekend’s worth of ­write-­ups from her notebook into the central computer system. The weekend had been unremarkable but busy: there had been a dozen or so minor traffic infractions, a ­fist-­fight between stocious teenage cousins outside a ­main-­street chipper late last night and a ­call-­out this morning prompted by what turned out to be a man’s empty duffel coat snagged in the weir gates of the Moy river, which was enthusiastically mistaken for a body by a band of visiting American summer students and their professor taking an early constitutional along the quays.

The notes, executed in Noonan’s irredeemable ciotóg scrawl, were the usual hassle to decipher, their transcription to the computer an activity of an order of tedium Noonan nonetheless found strangely assuaging. So absorbed was she in this task that she started in surprise when the phone on the main desk first rang out.

‘Pronsius,’ she commanded, without looking away from the screen. The phone continued ringing.

‘Pronsius!’

Noonan glanced up. Pronsius wasn’t at his desk. He wasn’t in the room.

Noonan made her way over to the main desk. She snatched the handset from its cradle.

‘Ballina Garda Station, Sergeant Noonan speaking.’

‘There’s been a shooting,’ a voice, a man’s, declared.

‘A shooting?’ Noonan repeated just as Pronsius appeared with a mug in his hand. Pronsius Swift was ­twenty-­four, out of Templemore less than three years, and an aura of adolescent gawkiness clung to him yet; he was tall but disposed to stooping, with an emphatic aquiline bump in his conk, jumpy eyes, and a guileless shine coming off his forehead. Even the chevrons of premature grey in his crew cut served only to emphasise his prevailing boyishness. When he heard Noonan say ‘a shooting’, he froze in place and stared at her with his mouth open.

‘When you say “a shooting’’ – a shooting as in someone’s been shot with a gun?’ Noonan asked the man.

‘What other kind of shooting is there?’ the man said.

‘Hang on, now,’ Noonan said. Keeping the cordless handset to her ear, she returned to her own desk, sat back down, and retrieved her pen and notebook.

‘How many people have been shot?’ she asked.

‘Just the one.’

‘The person shot. A man or a woman?’

‘A man.’

‘Is he dead?’

The man on the end of the line sighed.

‘He is not. He’s out there now in the back field. He’s in a bit of a bad way.’

‘How badly injured is he, in your estimation?’ Noonan said, raising a finger to fix Pronsius’s attention then pointing at the phone on his desk, meaning call the emergency at Castlebar General.