Then the first of the visitors arrived. Tom waited with Haverty at the pier, and a man and a woman stepped off the ferryboat and the ferryman handed their suitcases to Haverty. The visitors tool-their places in the trap. Tom led the horse as Haverty had instructed him, Haverty himself following with the luggage in a cart. The man and the woman laughed and chattered, and when they came to the avenue the woman said she hadn’t been through the gates of Carriglas for thirty-one years. ‘What’s your name?’ the man called out to him, and he said it was Tom. ‘You’re a good boy, Tom,’ the woman said, and Tom heard her whispering to the man to be sure to give him a threepenny-piece. But when they arrived at the house the man forgot about that.

A clergyman came in the same manner, with his wife, who was a cousin of the late Colonel Rolleston, Haverty said. Tom knew what Colonel Rolleston had looked like from the photograph on the table in the hall, but the woman who was his cousin didn’t have a similar appearance, being as rotund as he’d been tall, her neck lost in the spreading flesh of her chins. The clergyman was severe, his bald head not tanned like the ferryman’s nor pinkly gleaming like Mr Coyne’s: it looked like suet. It was he who would conduct the marriage service, Haverty said, on account of being connected with the family. In the trap this couple did not laugh and chatter as the others had. They didn’t ask Tom his name.

A woman with a faded face came. She had hair that was faded to a nondescript greyness, and faded clothes, but her voice was different from the rest of her, being shrill and most determined. ‘Can that boy manage?’ she sharply questioned Haverty. ‘Suppose the horse bolts?’

In the trap she continued to exclaim, shrieking at Tom to take care of the pot-holes. She held on her knees a parcel she had refused to be parted from, a wedding present of great fragility. ‘Something’s up with this place,’ she commented as they approached the avenue gates. ‘They’ve let it go.’ Then she called out that the horse should be made to progress more slowly. ‘Show me where they murdered the butler,’ she peremptorily commanded, and Tom did, when they came to the spot.