‘Does he have a pulse?’ Rory asked.

‘I don’t know if I know how to do that,’ Bimbo said, licking his thumb and sticking it right in under the young man’s nose. He was sure he felt the slight cool dab of exhaled air.

‘He is breathing, I reckon.’

‘Hello—’ said Mikey into his phone. He spluttered through a series of questions with the hospital operator, saying only that the young man had received a heavy ­accidental blow to the head. He relayed to the Alps the operator’s instructions about keeping the head elevated and the airways unobstructed. ‘OK,’ said Mikey. ‘OK, OK.’

‘How long?’ Rory said.

‘Said the ambulance would be thirty minutes.’

‘Thirty minutes!’ Rory shouted. ‘Here, get him up. Thirty minutes. We’ll have him to Castlebar General in fucking half that.’

‘That Hiace is a junkheap,’ Moira said. ‘No way you are doing the trip quicker than an ambulance.’

‘She’s lightning once she gets into her stride,’ Rory said. ‘Here, Softly, give us a hand.’

Softly hunkered down, grabbed Derek’s spare leg. Bimbo had the other one, and Eustace and Rory each took a shoulder. The quartet lifted the young man up and began to stagger forward. Mikey came out from behind the bar and held the door. Moira picked the sword up off the floor then she and her father, towing his trolleybag, followed the men out into the night.

The four men crunched across the gravel, floundering one way and then the other, but they did not drop the young man’s body, which sagged like a laden hammock between them. Bimbo glanced towards the floodlit pitch. There was now a cow under the crossbar, nibbling at the grass edging the rutted patches of the goalmouth.

Ahead of them, another cow was rubbing its ribs against a corner of the Hiace’s grille. Bimbo saw and sensed more big shapes gliding around in the dark of the car park

‘Cows,’ Peader stated.

‘Well spotted,’ Bimbo said.

‘Go on, get,’ Rory said, and with his head butted the neck of the cow that was using the Hiace as a scratching post. It mooed and started away.

‘Where’d they come out of, though?’ Eustace said.

‘The fencing is in an awful state down the far end of the grounds. They could be in from any of them fields adjacent,’ Mikey said, reaching out to pat the haunch of a nearby ginger heifer.

‘Never mind about the cows,’ Bimbo demanded. He let down the young man’s leg, pulled back the Hiace’s side door, sprung in and commenced kicking a clearing amid the boxes of ­various-­sized screws and the coiled yards of insulated wire. Rory, Eustace and Softly transferred the young man on to the van’s ­dirt-­caked mat.

Derek moaned, lifted his head up.

‘What’s happening?’ he asked.