It carried more clout than saying someone I met on Tuesday.

‘We don’t get many visitors here,’ the man said.

‘Obviously,’ Chloe whispered under her breath.

Ben had expected to dazzle and confound these people with the factory cut of his denim jacket. But the man couldn’t have been less impressed. Tír Mallacht’s ambassador had yet to unclench his lumpy knuckles and the kid still ogled him like some mongrel under a table. Maybe they were genuinely unnerved by their arrival and their nerves had translated into this. Whatever this was.

‘If you bring us into the village and introduce me to some people,’ Ben said, bracing his smile against whatever response awaited him, ‘we’ll be gone before you know it, and you’ll never hear from us again. But we can’t leave until then.’

The man chewed his gums in thought for a long moment. He glanced down at the child as though seeking her counsel, and then nodded his head.

‘Run along now,’ he said to her. ‘Tell your mother we’ve visitors.’

The girl’s bare feet broke into a run, squishing across the mounds of earth. Ben could hear her panting fade behind them as he waited for his answer.

‘You’ll leave tomorrow,’ the man said as an order, not a request. ‘Though it’d be for the best if you walked now. We live away from the world here and we have our reasons. Whatever it is you hope to find, trust me when I tell you that you don’t want it. Do you understand me?’

If he had seen the five-figure sum on Ben’s contract, the lad wouldn’t have sounded so certain. And living away from the world was putting it mildly. They hadn’t just walked their bones to near fracture to turn back now.

No more letting people down. Only this time it was his daughter, his parents, and the odd monochrome creature that was Doctor Alec Sparling.

‘I understand,’ Ben replied, fixing his eyes on the man in a show of determination.

‘No,’ he said with a sigh, ‘you don’t. Nobody ever understands until it’s done. If you knew what you’d just walked into, you’d already be on your way.’

‘Like I said, we can leave as soon as I talk to a few people. We don’t want to be any trouble.’

With a plaintive groan the man looked to the sky and scratched around his chin with long, filth-edged nails. Their very presence seemed to irritate him like a rash. Dirt peeled from his skin and parted as shavings in the air.

His beady eyes considered Chloe with a look of unfiltered disapproval. It was enough to raise a few platinum hackles.

‘Are you going to take us or not?’ she asked him. ‘I’m sure we can find our way there without your stimulating company.’