‘Do you reckon the car is safe?’ he asked.

‘You’re a bit of worrier, aren’t you?’ Chloe replied, nudging into him. ‘The car’s the least of your problems now. You’ve an entire village to charm with that smile of yours.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘Oh, come on,’ she replied. ‘You could woo an Amazonian tribe with those teeth.’

‘Your smile is twice the size of mine.’

‘Yeah, but I only use mine for good. City boys like you are only after one thing.’

That was probably true once upon a time. But how would the rental company react if they knew that their shiny asset was half-sunken in a ditch? Ben hadn’t had much of a choice. The road had come to a dead end, as though whoever was building it realised the pointlessness of it all. It was easier to hang a gate and call it the end.

‘Don’t worry about the car,’ she said reassuringly. ‘Everything’s going to be fine.’

The bells still tolled over his thoughts but offered nothing in the way of song or sense. Their sound was more uneasy feeling than memory. He had brought with him more questions than he needed, but the tripwire added another to the tally. Why go to the trouble of rigging an alarm system if no one ever came this way? Hopefully the answer would come by word and not the sharp end of some farming tool.

The path ahead dipped out of sight, curving down alongside a vast open field cut into the hillside. Its soil had been freshly tilled and at its far end – like lead soldiers on a tabletop – Ben saw the distant shapes of a dozen or so men. They were standing around in a loose circle. A few of them leaned on tools. Others were squatted on the ground with tiny clouds billowing from their pipes.

‘Check it out,’ Chloe said, resting forward on the wall, ‘the Tír Mallachts in all their glory.’

A warm, sorrel light washed over the earth. Cocoa in the shade of its ploughed channels and bright as orange peel atop its taller ridges. The friable soil was already hardening in a crust of cold. Breaking into view was the child, a good twenty feet below them, running towards the men, bobbing from side to side like a boat on stormy water.

‘Well would you look who it is,’ Chloe quipped.