They all stared at her, open-mouthed. She had spoken the truth and it was not something even one of them had thought of.

‘We will that,’ said Paddy, equally as proud of his grandsons. ‘You never know, one of our boys could be a key witness. Who knows what this fella is up to. ’Tis a strange affair, it is.’

Tig grinned. The Devlin boys had been transformed from village villains to heroes in the blink of an eye. His chest swelled with pride.

*

Jay left his caravan and exhausted horse tucked away half a mile from the coast and headed to the escarpment, where he could avoid the coast road and slide down the cliff to the beach. He had strapped a wicker lobster pot to his back containing food. There was always water in the streams, but he knew that if McGuffey was on the run from someone, he wouldn’t risk searching for food. Jay had already eaten half of the stolen cake, still surprisingly good, even though it was a few days old now, but he’d only taken a couple of nips from one of the whiskey bottles.

His heart was pounding against the walls of his chest and his mouth dried when he reached the clifftop as the fear of ghosts crept deep into his bones. He knew McGuffey would be in the cave. That was where he’d last seen him, years back, before McGuffey had taken a shot at him. Jay’s thigh throbbed at the memory of that parting gift. But it sounded like McGuffey might finally be paying the price. Jay had to keep reminding himself of what the smuggler in Donegal had said. ‘He doesn’t look in a good way to me. Those fighters, they get old, and once they can’t fight any more, they don’t know what they’re here for. He must be sixty, but he looks ninety. You can’t stay on the run from the IRA for long – they’ll always get you in the end. He needs your help.’

It was those last four words that had pushed Jay to come all the way back to Tarabeg. That and morbid curiosity. Although he wouldn’t admit it to himself, Jay was lonely with Shona gone and was actually looking forward to seeing his former friend and enemy again. But not here, not on this cliff, where Angela McGuffey had been murdered in cold blood.

His eyes darted across the top of the escarpment, out to the ocean and back to the cottages. ‘Why here?’ he asked himself again as he began to shake with fear. This small fishing village, this coastline – everyone knew Angela’s ghost haunted it. She’d been seen by many a fisherman over the years, pacing the clifftop, her shawl billowing in the wind, in exactly the spot Jay had to pass on his way down to the cave. The locals said she stood there looking out across the ocean, searching for her daughter, Sarah, who had tried that night to escape with Captain Bob in a fishing boat, fleeing her father and his vow that he would marry her off to Jay. That made him, Jay, indirectly responsible for the awful things that had happened and for the haunting of the coastal village. Never before had he felt that as keenly as he did right now. He had travelled for days to get here and had worn out his horse in the process, but now that he was here, he wanted to be somewhere else.