Joe wondered much the same. Who would he leave his share to? Damned if any of those O’Clearys were going to put their thieving paws on it, not after the way they’d treated him, with their daidí not cold in his grave. For sure, he’d had a few whiskeys after the funeral, and who wouldn’t after what he’d been through? They’d all had a drop, and that was the truth. But to hound him out, that was harsh.

Pierre drove into the yard, yanking the handbrake before the car had stopped so it screamed in protest. Joe heard him crash the gears, put the thing into neutral. Pierre’d never learned to drive properly and was rich enough not to worry if he wore out the innards of a car long before the rust got to its bodywork. He’d be wanting his tea, too. Joe reached for three bowls and put them on the table as Pierre came into the kitchen. He didn’t bother knocking, not after all these years.

Pierre placed the Jameson on the table. ‘Duty-free,’ he said. He turned to Geoffrey, raised his voice, made a drinking gesture with his hands. ‘Shall I pour you one now?’

Geoffrey smiled, nodded. He didn’t have many pleasures in life, since his hearing was blown and now his eyesight was fading. Taste, touch and smell. Jameson did the lot. Pierre poured the glass and Geoffrey closed his arthritic fingers round it. He didn’t complain, but Joe knew they pained him. He could barely turn the page of a newspaper, let alone write, these days.

They didn’t have a big herd, no more than seventy milking cows at any one time, but Joe had hand-picked them all, and bred them. Betsy was their first cow, bought at the market in December 1945. When she’d calved in the spring, they’d called her daughter Betsy, and in turn, her daughter. Joe’d lost count of the generations now. They gave up naming the other cows, except the Betsys.

It was a trick he’d introduced to Geoffrey, putting them out to grass for a few years once their milking days were over, resting and fattening them on nothing but clover and grass. You couldn’t do the whole herd like that, for that would be a waste of the grazing, but one at a time. It took the three of them to slaughter her. There was a lot of meat on an old milker and a whole cow was too much for two, even with the chest freezer that Joe had bought second-hand. But Pierre knew a restaurant that would buy what they couldn’t use, charged a fortune for mature Galician beef. Paid Joe and Geoffrey in cash and kind, what with the drop of Jameson and a helping hand and a quiet word with the Food Safety boys.