Mrs O’Keefe took her into her arms. ‘You poor love,’ she murmured. ‘Her mother died when she was a child,’ she said to William over Mary Kate’s head.

‘Nicholas told me,’ he whispered back. ‘Mary Kate,’ he said in a slightly louder voice, his tone gentle, ‘I wanted to tell you what Nicholas said just before he died. His last words. I was with him when he went.’

Mary Kate caught her breath and, pulling away from Mrs O’Keefe, stared at him intently. ‘You were… You were with him? What did he say? Did he give you a message for me?’

William looked deep into her eyes. This was important. There must be no ambiguity. As his last duty to his dear friend, he must convey absolutely correctly the words Nicholas had whispered into his ear.

‘He said, “Tell Mary Kate to go home to Tarabeg. Tell her she must return to her family. Her future is there.” He said he had heard you talk about it so often. He said to tell you that that was where he would look for you, and that he would finally get to see Tarabeg. “Go home, Mary Kate. Go home.” Those were his last words.’

Chapter 6

Paddy Devlin stood leaning on the bar, gazing out of the windows, waiting for his first customer of the afternoon. Unless there was a wake or a death to attend to, that first customer would often be Father Jerry. Paddy’s son Tig was banking up the fire with peat ready for the afternoon and evening, and Paddy could hear his wife Josie and Tig’s wife Keeva chattering in the butcher’s shop as they began to wipe down and close up for the day. He could smell the stew on the stove in the kitchen that his bar and the shop shared with the house and his mouth began to water.

The regulars would be in for a few hours but would hurry back up the boreens before night fell. The only time the winter routine altered was when a full moon lit up the boreens and the fern-lined paths. If his customers didn’t leave for home before the light disappeared, their chances of falling down a bog hole were high. The history of Tarabeg was littered with the stories of accidents, many fatal and all of them the fault of sleeping goblins and malevolent fairies and nothing to do with the drink following a night in Paddy’s bar.

Keeva called through the fly curtain to him as she made her way to the walk-in fridge with a dish of pig’s trotters. ‘Did you see the doctor’s car coming through, Paddy?’ she asked as she pulled the brightly coloured plastic ribbons aside. ‘Mrs Doyle says he’s away up to Captain Carter’s house again. That will be every day for the past three days on the run.’

Mrs Doyle, the postmistress, had unique access to the telephone switchboard and doubled as the village oracle, a constant source of irritation to Father Jerry. Between Mrs Doyle and Bridget McAndrew, the village seer who healed people and undeniably spoke to the dead, the priest frequently found his authority challenged.