Cal heads back through the village, which has its Saturday up and running now. The aging blond woman who owns the boutique is decking out her window mannequin in an outfit running riot with ferocious tropical flowers, Noreen is polishing the brasswork on her door, and Barty the barman is giving the windows of Seán Óg’s a wipe with newspaper. Cal nods to them all, and picks up his pace when he sees Noreen whip round with her polishing cloth raised and a gleam in her eye.

He walks the lanes for a while before he heads for home. In his mind, he’s spreading out and arranging what he’s got so far. If Eugene is right and Brendan is on the run from the police, then at the top of the list of potential reasons has to be drugs. Brendan had contacts, even if they were just low-level ones, and he wanted cash. Maybe he wanted to start selling, or actually had started selling, but he didn’t have the constitution for it. The first time the police came sniffing around—or maybe the first time his suppliers got a little bit scary, and Cal knows suppliers can get plenty scary—he panicked and ran.

Officer O’Malley up in town didn’t mention anything about a drugs op focused on the village, or about Brendan Reddy being in anyone’s sights. But then, Officer O’Malley might not know.

Or Brendan’s business plan might not have involved drugs at all. There are plenty of ways for a kid to pick up some cash on the wrong side of the law around here: running stolen cars across the border, helping out the guys who launder agricultural diesel. And those are only the ones that run close enough to the surface that even a stranger can see them. A kid like Brendan, with ideas and an entrepreneurial streak, could have come up with a lot more.

Another possibility, one that Eugene the boy genius hasn’t thought of, is that Brendan’s moneymaking scheme and his fear of the police were two separate things. Maybe he was planning on taking his odd-jobs business legit, or getting famous on YouTube. And meanwhile, unrelated, he was doing something bad.

And then there’s the possibility that neither the moneymaking scheme nor the bad thing was ever real. Brendan’s mind could have been misfiring. Everything Cal has heard puts him on the unsteady side: one minute on top of the world and spinning big plans, the next minute panicked and running away from nothing, the next minute blowing it all off. Nineteen is the right age for a lot of things that can start misfiring inside someone’s mind.

Among the cases Cal liked least were the ones where he was trying to pick up a trail that had never existed outside someone’s mind. If a guy ran to Cleveland because his favorite cousin was there, or his old cellmate, or the girl who got away, the trail was solid; Cal could find it and follow it. If he ran to Cleveland because a voice from the TV told him an angel was waiting for him in a shopping mall there, then the trail was made of nothing but wisps and air. Cal needs to find out whether Brendan’s mind was making things out of air.

He considers the possibility that Brendan is up in the mountains, living off the grid in some abandoned cottage, and coming down at night to slice sheep to rags. The image unsettles him a little bit more than it should. He sincerely hopes that he’ll never have to pass it on to Trey.

In fact, when it comes to Trey, Cal isn’t inclined to pass on any of the morning’s events, at least not until he finds out why Brendan was running scared of the police. He promised to tell the kid anything he found out, but he feels it would be allowable to wait until he has something real, rather than a foggy cluster of hints and possibilities. There are things Brendan could have done that the kid would need to be told carefully.

It occurs to Cal that this is the first time he’s made the decision to take on a case. On the job, he took cases because they got assigned to him. He never spent much time weighing up the intricacies of whether the people concerned and the wider society and the forces of good would be best served by him taking on the investigation; partly because he was going to do it anyway, but mainly because he believed that it was in fact the right thing to do in a general sense, if not necessarily in every particular instance. Most of the guys felt the same, at least the ones who cared one way or the other. There were exceptions—occasionally some short-eyes got himself beat up and the witnesses somehow never did get tracked down, or some pimp with a worse-than-average rep ended up shot and no one put too much effort into unraveling who had pulled the trigger—but on the whole, your name came up so you did your job. This is the first time Cal has been in a position to choose whether or not to take a case, and has made the choice to do it. He hopes, even more sincerely, that he’s doing the right thing.

TEN

On his way home Cal stops by Mart’s place, to check if Mart made it through his night watch. Mart answers the door with a paper towel tucked in the neck of his sweater and Kojak, snorting threateningly, at his knee. The house smells of old turf smoke, cooking meat and a baffling mix of spices.

“Just checking that the aliens didn’t abduct you,” Cal says.

Mart giggles. “Sure, what would they want with the likes of me? You’re the one who should be watching yourself, great big fella like you. Plenty there to probe.”

“I better make myself a tinfoil suit,” Cal says, cupping his hand for Kojak to sniff.

“Ask Bobby Feeney for a lend of his. I’d say he has one hanging in his wardrobe, to wear when he’s out hunting the little green men.”

“You see anything last night?” Cal asks.

“Nothing that’d do what we saw. I protected your property from a big bruiser of a hedgehog, but that’s as dangerous as it got.” Mart grins at Cal. “Were you afraid I was lying out in them woods with bits cut off me?”

“Just wanted to know if I could cross those cookies off my shopping list,” Cal says.

“Don’t be holding your breath, boyo. Whatever done that, it’d better bring its friends and relations if it wants to take me on.” Mart holds the door wider. “Come in, now, and have a bit of spaghetti and a cup of tea.”

Cal was about to say no, but the spaghetti catches his curiosity. He had Mart down as a meat-and-potatoes guy. “You sure you’ve got some to spare?” he asks.

“Sure, I’ve enough there to feed half the townland. I do make a big pot of whatever I fancy, and then see how long it lasts me. Go on.” He motions Cal in.

Mart’s house isn’t dirty, exactly, but it has an air of having been low priority for a long time. It has sludge-green walls and a lot of linoleum and Formica, and most surfaces have been worn down till they’re speckled. In the kitchen, Kylie Minogue is singing the Locomotion from a big wooden transistor radio.

“Sit down there,” Mart says, pointing at the table, where his meal is laid out on an old red-checked oilcloth. It looks like spaghetti Bolognese, barely started. Cal takes a seat, and Kojak flops down by the fireplace and stretches out with a pleasurable groan.

“Here I thought you’d have your place painted every color of the rainbow,” Cal says. “After all the shit you gave me about plain white.”