This revelation made me feel worse instead of better. If Stuart Chambers was intending to buy somewhere new rather than renting, then he’d be living with my parents for months rather than weeks. I told them this as gently as I could, but it didn’t seem to faze them. They insisted they were happy to have him.

Dad looked up at the sky as we left the park. “You’d better get on the road soon if you want to get there in daylight.”

“I know. I’ll go shortly.” I grinned. “I hope the Mini starts.”

“Oh. I’m sure it will,” he said, pushing his cap back. “Stuart’s been driving it and he says it’s been going fine.”

I stopped. “What?”

My father shrugged. “It seemed to make sense when you weren’t here. It’s good for it to be driven. And it was simple enough to insure – he’s on ours anyway and we just transferred it over.”

Chapter Three

THE DRIVE BACK to Inishowen was a bit of a struggle, not helped by an ache behind my eyes from too little sleep. Despite my yawning in the sitting room the night before, when I’d gone to bed, I’d fallen asleep for only half an hour before waking again, then lying there, mind racing, staring at the ceiling until nearly half three. I realized in retrospect that sleeping for a few hours in the afternoon hadn’t been the wisest move.

Not only had I had a lousy night’s sleep, but I wasn’t as comfortable driving the Mini as I used to be. It felt strange. Maybe it was the stiff steering, or the gears – I’d been driving an automatic in the States – or how low it felt to the ground, but there was also a strange smell in it; eucalyptus or something else medicinal. It was possible, of course, that I was imagining the smell since I knew the Usurper had been driving it, which was how I’d come to think of Stuart.

I’d been reluctant to leave Dublin. It felt weird seeing Stuart and my parents waving me off from the doorstep like a family of three. I was aware I was being a dog-in-the-manger about this; I wasn’t around for my mother and father and couldn’t be for the foreseeable future since my life was a four-hour drive away in Inishowen. They were perfectly entitled to have some company if they wanted it. But I kept asking myself what his game was? Why would a man like that want to spend so much time with a couple who were so much older than he was and whom he’d only just met? Yes, there was their common grief, but did that explain it entirely?