“Hand grenades,” corrected Neil Fairlie. “And mighty useful they were, in the old days. I shouldn’t wonder” – he paused, and looked around him – “if there was a few more of them buried here and there in Cloncraig.”

After a reflective pause, Paddy Finane said: “Aye. There could be.”

“We don’t want the police ripping the village apart entirely, just to find a few bits of hand grenades.”

“Let it rest, I say.”

“It was hard on us,” said Neil Fairlie heavily, “but it’s done now. They cannot bring the children back with an inquest, or with the police ferreting all round the place.” He lowered his voice. “The less they know about what the children found, the better. Maybe it’s just as well there’s no one left to come out with the evidence.”

Paddy Finane nodded. “Just as well. It might give them something to go to work on, else …” He looked across at James Costello. “I heard tell that Esther was still fast in her bed.”

“Yes, she is that.”

“How is she, then?”

“The same,” said Costello. “The same.”

Esther Costello was indeed the same; and the word had, for her, a fearful connotation. She could not talk, though she could moan briefly when she wanted to attract attention: she could not see: she could not hear, however hard they roared at her. She was just a body, pretty enough to the eye, but seemingly abandoned and tenantless … The doctor from Wexford, a country GP with a large, near-pauper practice, had tried his hardest, groping about in a territory he scarcely comprehended: before long he had brought in a friend, a big man from Dublin, to help find out what the trouble was. But nothing came of the visit and, after three months, Esther still lay as if drugged, mutely defying their care and skill.

“Maybe, with money to spend, we could do something more,” the doctor said once to James Costello. “She could go to America for treatment. There’s fine hospitals there, and new ideas about everything.”

“Money,” said James Costello, and shrugged. “I haven’t the price of one drink on me, at this very moment.”

“Better for you if you haven’t,” said the doctor shortly. He was a busy man, and a tired one, and he was near to feeling that he was throwing away his time, caught in this uncharted maze with these shiftless people.

Mrs Costello looked up at him. She was a worn woman of forty, a few years older than her husband: a woman of vitality and no looks, whom the bearing of two children seemed to have emptied of all spirit, all life. Sometimes she nagged, mostly she let things drift. The house was very dirty, and she with it.

“What do we do, then?” she asked.

“Look after her well,” the doctor answered, with little confidence in his tone. He glanced around the filthy room, and then down at the girl, who lay with her eyes closed and her hands folded on her breast. “Keep her clean, too. It’ll all help. And wait and see what happens.”