She had barely sat back down in her seat when her mam arrived and handed her a Styrofoam cup filled with lukewarm hot chocolate.

‘Sorry I took so long, Kitty-Cat,’ she said. ‘I wanted to call Eileen to keep her up to date. She’s absolutely beside herself, poor thing. She’s on her way down from Dublin and should be here around lunchtime. What’s that you’ve got?’

Cat looked down and realised she was still clutching the fairy’s hat.

‘Oh, it’s nothing,’ she said, shoving it into the front pocket of her hoodie. ‘I must have grabbed it from my room by mistake. Um, Mam … can I borrow your phone?’

‘I don’t know, Cat, I need it in case Eileen rings and I don’t want you wasting the battery playing one of your games.’

‘I’ll only be a second, I promise,’ Cat said. ‘I just want to look up something.’

Her mam handed over the phone and Cat quickly brought up the browser and began to search: ‘Fairy with red cap’.

The first result was for a creature called a Redcap – Funnily enough, Cat thought – an evil, murderous type of Goblin mostly found near the border of England and Scotland. She quickly dismissed that. Not only was she in the wrong country, the little man she had seen just hadn’t seemed all that evil. It seemed like he was there to watch over Granny, to make sure she was all right.

Cat tried searching for something different – ‘Small fairy man’.

The results came up – Elf, Brownie, Gnome – but none of them seemed right for the creature she had seen. She was about to give up and hand the phone back to her mam when she spied the entry for Leprechaun. The description wasn’t exactly right either, but it reminded her of something. A half-formed memory bobbed to the surface. She had read about something like this recently. In the Book of Secrets perhaps? Why couldn’t she remember?

It was something that sounded a bit like Leprechaun … but not quite, she thought. I think … I think it begin with a ‘c’?

It took her a few tries to get the spelling right but eventually she got there – Clurichaun: Lesser-known cousin of the Leprechaun. A solitary fairy known for its love of whiskey and ale. Though he may occasionally cause trouble, the Clurichaun watches over any family he has attached himself to as long as he is provided with enough alcohol to keep him happy.

She remembered now. Granny had told her the story about meeting the Clurichaun a month or so after Granddad died.

‘Did I tell you, I was coming home from the shops the other week when I spotted the bould fella perched on a stone in the front garden holding one of my shoes,’ she’d said one afternoon as Cat was finishing her homework. ‘Where he got a hold of it, I don’t know. He was dressed in a dirty brown tunic and a red cap.