“I didn’t paint this place at all,” Mart informs him, with the air of a man scoring a point. He pulls another plate and another mug out of a cupboard and starts scooping spaghetti out of a big pot on the cooker. “My mammy, God rest her, she did it up this way. When I do get around to painting it, you can bet your life it won’t be any plain white.”

“Yeah, but you won’t get around to it,” Cal tells him. He figures it’s past his turn to yank Mart’s chain a little bit. “You can tell yourself whatever you want, but if you haven’t done it by now, it’s because deep down, you like it this way.”

“I do not. It’s the color that’d come out of the arse of a sick sheep. I’m thinking bright blue in here, and yella out in the hall.”

“Won’t happen,” Cal says. “Bet you ten bucks: this time next year, every wall you own is still gonna be sheep-shit green.”

“I’m not putting any deadlines on myself,” Mart says with dignity, setting a heaped plate in front of Cal. “Not to suit you or anyone else. Now: get your laughing-tackle round that.”

The spaghetti needs plenty of chewing and the Bolognese sauce is heavily seasoned with mint, coriander and something that tastes like aniseed. It kind of works, as long as Cal takes it on its own terms.

“It’s good,” he says.

“I like it,” Mart says, pouring Cal tea from a teapot shaped like a Dalek. “And I’ve only myself to please. There’s great freedom in that. As long as the mammy was alive, nothing but good aul’ meat and potatoes came in this house. She’d boil them till you couldn’t tell one from the other if you’d your eyes closed, and no seasoning: she said the spices were half the reason foreign places had the divorce and the gays and all. The spices got in their blood and addled their brains.” He pushes a carton of milk and a bag of sugar across the table to Cal. “Once she was gone, I went a bit experimental for myself. I went into Galway, to one of them fancy yuppie shops, and I bought every spice they had. The brother didn’t like it, but sure, he’d burn water, so he had to lump it. Dig in there, before it goes cold on you.”

He pulls up his chair and settles back to his food. Cal has apparently stumbled on the one circumstance where Mart doesn’t believe in conversation: he eats with a hard worker’s single-minded dedication, and Cal follows his lead. The kitchen is warm from the cooking; outside the window, the hills are soft with mist. Kylie has wrapped it up and another woman starts singing, pure and sweet, with practiced soulfulness: no frontiers . . . In his sleep Kojak makes little huffing noises and twitches his paws, chasing something.

“The rain’ll hold off,” Mart says eventually, pushing his plate away and squinting out the window, “but that cloud’s going nowhere for a while yet. No matter: anything I don’t see, I’ll hear.”

“You gonna be out there again tonight?”

“I will, later on,” Mart says, “but I’m off duty this evening. I might see if P.J. fancies taking the odd shift, if you’ve no objection. I can’t be missing my beauty sleep forever.” In fact he looks surprisingly bright-eyed. The only sign that he spent the night sitting out under a tree is an extra hitch to his movements, like his joints are troubling him more than usual, but he says nothing about it.

“P.J.’s welcome to hang out in my woods,” Cal says. He knows P.J. a little bit: a long-legged, hollow-cheeked guy who nods to Cal over walls without starting conversations, and who sometimes sings as he goes about his evening rounds, melancholy old ballads in a surprisingly poignant tenor. “How long are you gonna give this?”

“Wouldn’t I love to know that myself,” Mart says, topping up his tea. “Whatever this creature is, it’s got to get hungry sooner or later. Or get bored, maybe.”

“Lotta sheep around here,” Cal says. “You got any particular reason to think it’s gonna come after P.J.’s?”

“Well, sure,” Mart says, glancing up from the sugar with his face crinkling into a grin, “I can’t watch every sheep in Ardnakelty. P.J.’s are convenient.”

“Right,” Cal says. He has a strong impression that Mart is keeping something back.

“Besides,” Mart points out, “don’t we know the creature likes this area? And a lot of the other farms around here are cattle, and they mightn’t be any good to it: it mightn’t be big enough to take down a cow. If I was this yokeymajig, P.J.’s is where I’d be heading next.” He taps his temple. “The aul’ psychology,” he explains.

“Never hurts,” Cal says. “Has it been just those two sheep, yours and Bobby Feeney’s? Or has this been going on awhile?”

“There was one other, beginning of the summer. Francie Gannon’s, beside the village.” Mart grins and points his mug at Cal. “Don’t you be going all Columbo on me, now, asking questions. This is under control.”

So the sheep-killing started not long after Brendan went missing. Cal thinks of that tumbledown cottage again, or a cave in the mountainside. There were wild men out his granddaddy’s way, or at least rumors of them. Cal and his buddies never saw them, but they saw campfire sites and snare wires, coolers hidden in underbrush, animal skins pegged to branches to dry, deep in the woods where no one should have been spending any amount of time. One time Cal’s buddy Billy almost fell into an expertly hidden pit trap. Whoever dug it, probably he started out as a restless teenager prowling the perimeter of his life for an escape route.

“Now,” Mart says, scraping back his chair, “I know what you need, to finish off with.” He bends over with a painful grunt, pokes around in a cupboard and comes up holding a packet of cookies. “There you go,” he says, putting it triumphantly on the table. “Time you found out what all the fuss is about.”

He’s so delighted with his inspiration that it would be unmannerly for Cal to refuse. The cookie tastes exactly like it looks: sugar and foam rubber, in a variety of consistencies. “Well,” Cal says. “We don’t get these back home.”

“Have another one there, go on.”

“I’ll leave ’em to you. Not really my style.”

“You can’t be coming over here insulting the Mikados,” Mart says, miffed. “Every child in Ireland is weaned on these.”

“No disrespect intended,” Cal says, grinning. “I don’t have much of a sweet tooth.”

“D’you know what that is?” Mart demands, struck by a thought. “That’s them American hormones. They’re after wrecking your taste buds. The way, when a woman’s pregnant, she’ll eat fruitcake with sardines. Come back to me in a year and try those again, once we’ve got you recalibrated back to normal, and we’ll see what you think of them then.”