Noonan kept walking toward Creedon at an even clip, not hurrying, taking care not to break stride. When she was a handful of paces from him he finally looked at her. Creedon had watery blue eyes, cheeks latticed with broken blood vessels, a head of windblown, thinning yellow hair, and a set of small, corroded teeth. He did not react as Noonan gripped the barrel of the shotgun, brought her second hand to the butt and transferred the weapon into her embrace as firmly and gently as if she were taking possession of a newborn. She checked the safety, broke the gun, slipped the ammu­nition from the chamber and pocketed the cartridges.

‘All right,’ Noonan said.

She handed the gun off to Swift, took a second look at Creedon to make sure he wasn’t considering anything, then addressed her attention to the man lying in the grass. The man was young, lanky enough by the sprawl of him, his dark hair sticking to his pale forehead in strings, and for a moment Noonan did not recognise him, his features crushed into anonymity with distress. It was only when his eyes, screwed shut, burst fearfully ­open – they were blue, but a deeper, more charged blue than the farmer’s, phosphorescent ­almost – that his face turned into one Noonan knew.

‘God above in Heaven is that you, Dylan Judge?’

Dylan Judge groaned in assent.

Dylan Judge was from Ballina town. He was what you would call ‘known to the police’. In his early twenties, he had already run up a decent tally of minor convictions. Breaking and entering, drunk and disorderly, possession; Judge was one of those prolific, inveterately ­small-­time crooks who possessed real criminal instincts but no real criminal talent. He was opportunistic, impulsive and undisciplined, requiring little in the way of ­convincing – and not even much in the way of ­incentive – to be roped into an underhanded scheme, so long as the scheme did not require much effort or forethought. Noonan kneeled down in the grass next to Judge and slid the emergency kitbag from her shoulder. She tore open a pack of nitrile gloves, worked the gloves over her hands.

‘Do you remember me at all, Dylan?’

Judge looked blankly up at her.

‘It’s Noonan, Sergeant Jackie Noonan out of Ballina. And that there is Garda Pronsius Swift.’

‘Pronsiusssss,’ Judge repeated with a sneer.

‘It’s a name that draws attention to itself, all right,’ Noonan said as she began scanning Judge’s wounds. There was a mess of hand towels plastered over his groin and tucked in under his backside. The towels, along with his jeans, were plum dark with blood. From the amount of blood, Noonan could tell he was in a very bad way. She unpacked the gauze, the trauma shears.

‘You remember the last time we met?’ Noonan asked. ‘We were chasing a consignment of cigarettes and wound up at your house.’