The man was scrabbling on his hands and knees on the path, trying to reach his phone, but Katie kicked him again, in the shoulder, so that he fell over on to his back. She tried to seize his arm but he rolled over, twice, and then clambered on to his feet. She went after him again, but he turned and lolloped away, and by the time she had reached the pavement outside her house, he had vanished. He had probably jumped into a neighbour’s front garden, because not even an Olympic athlete could have run that fast, but there was no way of telling which garden he might have jumped into. She waited a few seconds, still panting, and then she saw the red tail lights of a car, about a hundred metres up the road. It sped away and disappeared around the bend in the road by Summer Point.

Kyna came out wearing Katie’s brushed-cotton bathrobe and holding out her revolver.

‘Never mind,’ said Katie. ‘He’s gone. But I gave him a good kicking where it hurts, so I suppose that’s some consolation. And he left this behind.’

Katie tugged the sleeve of her sweater down to cover her fingers and then she bent over and picked up the man’s mobile phone. The screen was cracked but apart from that it looked undamaged.

‘What are you going to do now?’ Kyna asked her.

‘Now? Nothing. I could ring Cobh station but what would be the point? I’d only be wasting time and money. I didn’t get much of a look at the fellow and I didn’t get a sconce of his number plate – even if that was him I saw driving off.’

She pressed the ‘on’ button on his phone but all that came up on the screen was ‘try again’.

‘What I can do is take this phone in to Bill Phinner in the morning and see if he can crack it open for us. Then at least we’ll know who the fellow was and maybe we’ll find out what he was after.’

They went back into the house. Barney and Foltchain had calmed down now, but all the same Katie went into the kitchen and gave them each a fondle to show them that everything was fine and the intruder had been chased away.

‘I wonder what he was after,’ said Kyna. ‘Even a total eejit can see that you have CCTV and a burglar alarm – and if he knew who you were, he must have realized that you were probably going to be armed. And what do you have in your garden that’s worth hobbling?’

‘My bike, that’s all. And that’s about a hundred years old with a flange bar, to put it crudely.’