‘Jesus, Keeva!’ shouted Tig as the chair landed at his feet.

‘Are the boys in their bed?’ shouted Paddy in such a way that it seemed to Keeva he half expected the answer to be no.

She could hear the fear in his voice and she knew something was very wrong. Her skin prickled with fear at what might have been if Aedan hadn’t had the presence of mind to run away and over the road. Twenty years ago, the villages had been rife with stories of children that went missing, but that was a rarity now, since the Garda had built new barracks and then a police station. And since the death of Shona, the tales of missing children and heartbroken mothers had stopped altogether.

‘The boys are sleeping – all of them,’ shouted Tig. ‘Is there anything taken, Daddy?’

‘Aye, there is.’ Paddy slammed the bar door as hard as he had the fridge door and walked into the bar. ‘Two bottles of whiskey and as much pig as one man could carry – cooked and ready to eat, it was. Aedan was imagining nothing. There was someone here and the boy may have stopped more from being taken.’

As the men moved back into the bar, they gathered around Paddy, caps lifted, heads scratched.

‘Who the hell could it be?’ asked Seamus. ‘There’s not a car passed through the village tonight.’

‘Well, if it was only as much bacon as one man could carry, that tells us something,’ said Michael. ‘It was someone acting alone.’

‘A genius you are, Michael,’ snapped Paddy.

‘Sorry, Paddy.’ Michael wondered how he would feel if his shop was broken into and goods taken. It had never happened, but he could still feel the anger rising from somewhere in his belly. He tried to make amends. ‘But I’m thinking who would it be that knew where the walk-in fridge was and that everyone was over at my place?’

‘And,’ interjected Father Jerry, who had joined them, ‘it cannot be a stranger. Any other night and the bar would have been busy, so this was someone who knew there was a party on over the road. And whoever it was had assumed the back door would be left open.’

They all looked from one to the other, stumped. Father Jerry was right. This was a village where no door had ever been locked, not ever. Honesty was a virtue preached from the pulpit and practised in the homes and on the streets.

‘Well, whoever it was, he left us a souvenir.’ Paddy held up a woman’s shawl and as he did so, Michael’s blood ran cold.

Michael had seen it before, on that most tragic of nights, a wild and windy night that changed his life forever; the night of Angela’s murder. He had just returned from the war and had ridden out to the coast to collect his Sarah. The shawl was Angela’s: she’d made it herself, as all the fishing wives did, with wool from the Aran Islands off the coast that was thick and coated in natural lanolin, protection against the coastal rain and storms. She’d knitted it in a distinctive pattern and she used to wear it as any man would a coat.