Jay looked deeper inside the parcel and immediately threw it to the ground, repulsed. ‘Ask me, what sane man would do that – keep a dead woman’s clothes? A murdered woman at that. Does he have no fear whatsoever of the Divil in him? And to think he’s kept it all this time.’

‘Aye, well, that’ll be it. I told you, he’s a madman with a taste for blood. You watch your back.’

Jay tied up the brown parcel with the string he’d pulled free and threw it into the back of the caravan as though it was burning his hands. He mounted the front board, clicked the reins and without a backwards glance moved on into the night. It would take him more than a week to reach Tarabeg. He was both begrudgingly admiring and plain startled that McGuffey clearly held none of the fears that plagued him; fears of ghosts and memories. The man was even returning to the scene of his crime, to Angela’s cottage.

‘He kept the fecking shawl,’ he muttered as he glanced over his shoulder, expecting to see Angela’s ghost sitting under the tarpaulin.

He decided that on the way to Tarabeg and McGuffey he would take a risk, try and pick up as much information as he could. He would call and see the tinkers at Ballycroy. They had returned to the Bog after years of being banished by Shona. They would feed and shelter him and in exchange for whiskey would give him all the news he needed.

With every rut the wheels rolled over he heard the crackle of the brown paper in the back of the caravan. One thing he was sure of, he wanted to be rid of that parcel at the earliest possible chance.

*

Nola had gone about her usual day, making breakfast for the men, clearing it away, and then starting on the next meal ready for when they came in from the cows. As the temperature had dropped and there were no crops in the fields, they returned to eat well before one o’clock. Now that the days were getting shorter, Seamus and Pete spent the last hours of afternoon light down the hill in the village, sitting at a wooden table in front of the fire in Paddy’s bar.

‘Ah, Jesus, I need the apples,’ said Nola to her friend Bridget, who was sitting on the settle next to the fire.

Bridget had called in to the farm to buy butter. Nola’s reputation for churning the best butter in Mayo extended far and wide, but few were allowed to buy it. As always, Bridget, who lived in a sad house out on the edge of the peat blanket, lingered in the warm kitchen for a cup of tea and a gossip.

‘There’s plenty of them,’ Bridget said.

‘True enough.’ Nola sprinkled flour over her rolled-out pastry. ‘Seamus said ’twas the best year for the apples he could ever remember. I’d ask him to fetch them from the old house, if he wasn’t snoring on the bed like a fecking sow.’