‘Did you see your friend?’

Dry throat. Dry heart. ‘No.’ Matty sat at the table, cradling the bad wrist, limp and inflamed. ‘Wasn’t in.’

Brigid was instinctive. She knew there was plenty not being said. ‘Will I strap that up for you?’

She brought new bandages from the bathroom and Matty let her hoist the wrist up, strap it around a shoulder. ‘Are you OK?’ she said, quietly.

Every movement felt tiny, caustic. Head shaken. Lip bitten. A thumbnail digging into a finger pad.

She put a hand on Matty’s knee. ‘Was it an old flame you were after?’

‘Something like that.’

The oven fan grumbled.

Brigid pushed a curl out of Matty’s eyes. ‘I was thinking. You’ll stay for Christmas? It’ll be nice.’

Where else was there to go? ‘OK.’

That night, Matty lay in the single room, having slipped out from under Brigid’s heavy arm. She spoke in her sleep, odd, otherworldly words, and had a slight snore, a tiny, comical sound on the inhale.

The wind did its high-flute whistle in the roof. A car, far off.

‘Where are you?’

No answer.

‘Where the fuck are you?’

He wasn’t there. Not in Matty’s head. Not in Donegal. He wasn’t anywhere.

Chapter 11

Cormac was at the house again. He seemed to be round pretty frequently, but there was never any talk of the case anymore.

Brigid was standing at the kitchen counter in front of a huge pile of branches. The shine of holly and clusters of darker, blood-clot berries on thinner sprigs. Scattered leaves on the floor.

Cormac was leaning against the sink. ‘Look at my atheist sister, getting all seasonal,’ he said, partly to Matty. ‘There’s hope for her yet.’

She snipped the end off another thin branch. ‘I’m not an atheist, as you well know.’

‘Going to church, then, on Christmas? I’ll come to the local one with you if you like.’

‘Not a chance. I don’t go in for all that patriarchal nonsense,’ she said as she went into the living room to put her branch on a shelf.

‘You never used to say anything like that.’

‘I never used to be so enlightened.’

There was always a sense that they were performing for Matty, each subtly trying to outdo the other.

‘And anyway, your man Buddha there was a fella,’ he said as she came back in. ‘Sid Arthur what’s-his-name. A human fella, which is probably far worse.’ Matty couldn’t help a tiny grin, and he saw it, and grinned, too, at the floor. More than once, Brigid had talked encouragingly about the noble eightfold path and meditation instead of TV. She’d said she wasn’t a Buddhist exactly, but she liked reading about it.

‘I’m not being drawn into this,’ Brigid said now. ‘I’ll be off down to Cork on Stephen’s Day if you’ve time.’