Another look at the map in bed, a finger working up into Donegal. Ross-something. There were several towns or villages on the north coast, and also a large area called The Rosses, but Maureen had said west, and a small place. That left three other black dots at the ends of roads, all on the coast and beginning with Ros.

The Northern Irish border was close to here, bulging round to the west. Matty could do the Wild Atlantic Way, skirt round all the green fingers on the map. Look for him in the Ros-pubs. If he was living there, he was bound to be in one of them. He’d look up from his pint, face opening in surprise, shock, before his head got kicked in.

Matty headed north and west, following the water.

***

Bleak out here. Signs for BARLEY, OATEN AND WHEATEN, ridges of raised peat in the fields covered in taut black plastic. There were horses in high-vis jackets and abandoned houses everywhere – not just old croft houses, but more recent ones, net curtains fluttering through broken windows. And as many new ones being built, bare concrete walls, the tarpaulin loose against scaffolding. Ghost-country. The rain inked the road.

A glut of water. You couldn’t tell what was field and what was pond, and loughs ran alongside everything.

It never rains, but it does cause biblical levels of flooding every bleeding day.

On another single road, Matty realised from the village name and the road markings that this was Northern Ireland. There’d been no sign, no grand welcome to the UK. The sheep continued to graze. The rain fell.

Irish politics wasn’t a specialist subject. It never had been much on the radar, apart from Joe explaining about the hunger strikes and why blowing people up was always a bad thing, no matter what you believed. The news had been on at Heather’s over Easter last year, the usual programmes dropped. Tony Blair’s wide goblin smile, the comical tie, and hail tumbling down on David Trimble’s head. The odd simplicity of it. There’d been Mo Mowlam in her suit in the run-up, the cancer obvious from her thinning hair, bullishly going into the Maze.

And the bombs over the years. Phone calls and tip-offs. The new Docklands turned inside out, the piles of glass like snowdrifts. Shoppers unwittingly sent towards the high street in Omagh on carnival day last year, into the mouth of it. Bombs under cars. Policemen. On the other side, British soldiers, firing at people to make one day of the week never sound the same again.