By the time people start to leave, Cal is drunk enough to accept a ride home from Mart, mainly out of a confused feeling that it would be uncivil to refuse, given that he owes Mart his beard. Mart sings all the way, in a cracked tenor with surprising volume, jaunty songs about girls who are all the prettiest in town, with some of the words missing. Cold air streams through the open windows, and the clouds are breaking up so that stars and darkness whisk dizzyingly across the windshield. At every pothole the car soars. Cal figures either they’ll get home or they won’t, and joins in on the choruses.

“Now,” Mart says, pulling up with a jolt outside Cal’s gate. “How’s the aul’ stomach holding up?”

“Pretty good,” Cal says, fumbling for his seat-belt clip. His phone buzzes in his pocket. It takes him a moment to work out what on earth that might be. Then it comes to him that it must be Alyssa, WhatsApping him: Sorry I missed you, catch you later! He leaves the phone where it is.

“It is, of course. No better man.” Mart’s wispy gray hair is sticking straight out on one side of his head. He looks beatifically happy.

“Barty looked pretty glad to get rid of us,” Cal says. The last time he looked at his watch, it was three in the morning.

“Barty,” Mart says with magnificent scorn. “Sure, that pub’s not even rightly his. He only got his hands on it because Seán Óg’s son fancied himself sitting in an aul’ office, the big jessie. He can put up with us having a wee carouse every now and again.”

“Should I have given Malachy a coupla bucks?” Cal asks. “For the”—he can’t come up with the right word—“the ’shine?”

“Sure, I looked after all that,” Mart tells him. “You can sort me out some other time. You’ll have plenty of oppornoon—opteroon—” He waves a hand at Cal and gives up.

“Whoops,” Cal says, as he clambers out of the car. He regains his footing. “Thanks for the ride. And the invitation.”

“That was some night, bucko,” Mart says, leaning over a little too far to talk through the passenger window. “You’ll remember that one, hah?”

“Not sure I’ll remember a damn thing,” Cal says, which makes Mart laugh.

“Arrah, you’ll be grand. Get a good sleep, that’s all you need.”

“I intend to,” Cal says. “You too.”

“I will,” Mart says. His face crunches into a grin. “Here I was planning on taking over guard duty from P.J. halfway through the night, d’you remember? I shoulda known better. That was never on the cards. But I’ve been an optimist all my life.” He waves to Cal and revs off up the road, taillights weaving.

Cal decides not to bother getting as far as the house just yet. Instead he lies down on his grass and looks up at the stars, which are thick and wild as dandelions right across the sky. He thinks about that telescope Mart suggested, and decides it wouldn’t suit him. He feels no urge to understand the stars better; he’s contented with them as they are. It’s always been a trait of his, whether for better or for worse, to prefer setting his mind to things he can do something about.

After a while, he sobers up enough to feel the rocks poking at his back and the cold seeping into him. It also occurs to him, gradually, that it might not be smart to lie out here with something or someone on the loose that takes the throats out of sheep.

When he picks himself up his head spins, and he has to lean over with his hands on his thighs for a little bit till it stops. Then he trudges across the lawn, which feels very wide and bare, towards his house. There’s no movement in the fields, and no sound in the hedges or the branches; the night has come to its deepest point, the deserted pre-dawn borderland. His clump of woods is a dense smudge against the stars, silent and still. Mart’s house is dark.

TWELVE

Cal wakes up late: sun is pouring in at his bedroom window. His head is a little tender and feels like it’s been stuffed with sticky carpet fluff, but apart from that he’s in surprisingly OK shape. He runs his head under the cold tap, which clears it a little bit, and fixes himself some fried eggs and sausages, a couple of painkillers and a lot of coffee for lunch. Then he tosses his bag of dirty laundry into the trunk of his car and heads for town.

The day is deceptively bright, with a hard chill in the shadows and a little breeze that flirts its way close and then slices right in. The Pajero bumps rhythmically over the potholes at an easy lope. Alongside, the shadows of small clouds glide across the brown mountains.

Cal is clear that last night he got warned. The warning, however, was done with such subtlety that—whether by design or not—he’s unsure what, exactly, he was being warned off. He has no idea whether Ardnakelty has worked out that he’s looking into Brendan Reddy’s disappearance and wants him to knock that shit off, or whether he’s just been poking around too much for a stranger and needs instruction in local customs.

One interesting part is where and how the warning was delivered. Mart could have just given him a few quick pointers in private, over the gate some afternoon; instead, he saved it up for the poteen party. Either he wanted Cal to hear the message from a bunch of people at once, to drive it home, or he wanted to make sure everyone else knew Cal had been warned. Cal has come away with the strong impression that it was the second one, and that this was for his protection.

He’s unsure what circumstances might make this necessary. Cal is accustomed to being in the dark at the start of an investigation, which means it’s taken him a while to realize that this is an entirely different thing. He has no idea, not just what the people around him know and what they believe, but also what they might think of it, what they want, why they want it, or how they might go about achieving it. Their decades of familiarity, which seemed like a comfort at the beginning of last night, weave themselves into an impenetrable thicket; its layers obscure every action and every motivation till they’re near indecipherable to an outsider. He understands that this effect is, at least in part, deliberate and practiced. The guys like him blindfolded. It’s not personal; keeping him that way is, to them, an elementary and natural precaution.

Cal is aware that he seems like the kind of placid, amenable guy who would heed that warning. That appearance has come in handy plenty of times. He’d love to let it keep being useful here: let the townland relax into the belief that he’s gone back to minding his own business and painting his house. The trouble is, he has no options that allow for that. Back on the job, he could have stayed accommodatingly away from Brendan’s associates and focused on the behind-the-scenes stuff for a while: hooked up with the techie guys to dump Brendan’s phone and track his locations and go through his emails, got the bank to check whether and where his bank card had been used, run all those associates through the system, talked to Narcotics about the Dublin drug boys. He could have bounced possibilities off his partner, O’Leary, a little cop-bellied cynic with a deceptive air of laziness and a keen sense of the ridiculous, and got O’Leary to do some legwork for him.