Nealon grins at him. “I know you did. You caught the smell off him, yeah?”

“I wasn’t sure,” Cal says. “Who was he?”

“Fella called Terence Blake. Not a nice fella. He was from London, like he said; the Met have had their eye on him for a while now. He had a bit of a line in money laundering, bit of a line in drugs, bit of a line in brassers—he liked to keep his portfolio diversified, Terry did. He was no Mr. Big, but he’d built up a solid little organization for himself.”

“Huh,” Cal says. He’s getting warier by the minute. Nealon shouldn’t be telling him this. “Was Johnny Reddy one of his boys?”

Nealon shrugs. “He’s not on the Met’s radar, but that doesn’t say; if he was only hanging round the edges, they could’ve missed him. Johnny says he hadn’t a clue about any of it. As far as he knew, a lovely fella called Cillian Rushborough got talking to him in the pub, Johnny mentioned he was heading home to Ardnakelty soon, and Rushborough was only dying to see the place. Johnny’s shocked, so he is, to find out that wasn’t the truth. Shocked.”

Cal doesn’t ask whether Nealon believes any or all of it. He understands the parameters of this conversation. He has license to ask about facts, although he may not get answers, or true ones. Inquiring about Nealon’s thoughts would be overstepping.

“Blake have any connections here?” he asks.

“Great minds,” Nealon says approvingly. “I asked myself the same thing. Not a one, as far as we’ve found. All that about his granny being from round here, that was bollox: he was English straight through. Never set foot in the country before, that we know of.”

Nealon’s rhythms, in their familiarity, are distracting Cal so that he has to snap himself back to listen to the words. If he had thought about it, he would have expected an Irish detective to sound different from the ones he used to know. The accent is different, the slang and the sentence shapes, but under all that, the blunt, driving rhythms are the same.

“That could’ve been what brought him here,” Nealon says, tilting his head to consider his beer glass. “These small-time setups, they’ve always got some kinda beef going on. They use amateurs, stupid young fellas, and those lads fuck up or start in throwing shapes at each other: next thing you know, you’ve got a feud on your hands. Blake could’ve needed to get outa town for a while. He ran into Johnny, just like Johnny says, and reckoned Ardnakelty was as good as anywhere. From what I’ve been told, it’d be his style. He was unpredictable, did things on a whim. Not a bad way to live, if you’re in his line of business. If there’s no logic to what you do, no one can be one step ahead of you.”

Cal says, “So someone could’ve followed him over here.” If Nealon is working along those lines, it means he’s not hanging his hat on Trey’s story. Cal would love to hear that he’s found a reason to dismiss it as irrelevant, but he can’t afford to let Nealon know he has any feelings on the subject. As far as Nealon is concerned, Trey’s story needs to stay a straightforward thing.

“They could, yeah,” Nealon agrees. “I’m not ruling it out. All I’m saying is, if they followed him over here from London and then found their way all round that mountain in the dead of night, fair play to them.”

“There’s that,” Cal says. “Anything on his phone?” He’s had this conversation so many times that it comes to him with the effortlessness of muscle memory. Whether he likes it or not, it feels good to be doing something that comes easily and well. This is why Nealon is telling him too much: to shape him back into a cop, or remind him that he was one all along. Nealon, just like the guys in the pub, is aiming to put Cal to use.

Nealon shrugs. “Not a lot. It’s a burner, only a few weeks old—I’d say Blake started fresh every coupla months. And he didn’t use texts, or WhatsApp; he was too cute to put anything in writing. Plenty of calls back and forth with the London lads, and plenty with Johnny Reddy, including a couple of long ones the day before he died—according to Johnny, they were having a chitchat about what sights to go see.” The wry twitch of his mouth says he’s not convinced. “And two missed calls from Johnny the morning you found him. When he was already dead.”

“Johnny’s no dummy,” Cal says. “If he killed someone, he’d have the sense to leave missed calls on their phone.”

Nealon cocks an eyebrow at him. “Your money’s still on Johnny?”

“I don’t have money in this game,” Cal says. “All I’m saying is, for me, those calls wouldn’t rule Johnny out.”

“Ah, God, no. He’s in the mix, all right. So are a lot of people, but.”

Cal has no intention of asking. His best guess, if he had to make one, is that Trey was accidentally sort of right: one or more of the guys killed Blake and dumped him on the mountain road for Johnny to find, assuming that Johnny would dispose of him in the nearest convenient bog or ravine and then take off running. Only, before he could do that, Trey came along.

They sit watching Rip streak zigzags across the back field, leaping and snapping for the swallows. Nealon sways the rocking chair in easy, unhurried arcs.

“He ever catch one?” he asks.

“He’s caught a few rats,” Cal says. “He’d give a lot to catch a rook, with all the shit they give him, but I don’t think much of his chances.”

“You never know, man,” Nealon says, wagging a finger. “Don’t write him off. He’s got the persistence, anyhow. I’m a big believer in the aul’ persistence.”

The swallows, unworried by Rip’s persistence, loop blithely above his head like he’s been put there for their enjoyment. Cal would bet Nealon wants a smoke with his beer, but he hasn’t asked permission; he’s being the perfect guest, not presuming on Cal’s hospitality. Cal doesn’t offer. He isn’t aiming to be the perfect host.

“We got the postmortem results back,” Nealon says. “Your man Blake died somewhere between midnight and two in the morning, give or take. He took a fierce belt from a hammer, or something like it, to the back of his head. That would’ve probably done the job on its own, over an hour or two, only it didn’t get the chance. Someone stabbed him three times in the chest. Got the heart, boom, finished him off inside a minute.”

“That woulda taken some strength,” Cal says.

Nealon shrugs. “A bit, yeah. A little kid couldn’t’ve done it. But Blake was out cold, remember. Our fella had plenty of time to pick his spot, lean on the knife to get it through the muscle. You wouldn’t need to be a great big bodybuilder.” He takes another swig of beer and grins. “Imagine that: a bad bastard like Blake, getting taken out by some scrawny little bollox from the arse-end of nowhere. You’d be scarlet for him.”

“I bet he never saw that coming,” Cal agrees. He thinks of Blake in the pub, the arrogant sweep of his eyes around the alcove, faintly amused by the halfwit peasants who believed they had the reins. It strikes him that he’s hardly thought about Blake once since he walked away from the body. Alive, the guy spread through the whole townland like poison through water. Now it feels like he barely even existed; all that’s left of him is hassle.

“So that does fuck-all to narrow things down,” Nealon says. “One thing that’s going to help, but: the man was a bleedin’ mess. Covered in trace evidence: dirt, fibers, bits of plants, bits of insect, cobwebs, rust flakes, coal dust. Some of it was stuck to the blood, so it got there after he was kilt. And not all of it came from the place where you found him.”

“I figured he was moved,” Cal says. And, when Nealon raises an inquiring eyebrow: “It didn’t look like there was enough blood.”

“Once a cop,” Nealon says, giving him a nod. “You were bang on.”

“Well,” Cal says, “that fits with what the kid saw.”

Nealon doesn’t bite on that. “And,” he says, “you know what all that trace means, yeah? When we find the place where he was killed, or the car he was moved in, we should have no trouble showing a match.” His eyes skim leisurely across Cal’s back yard, pausing for a second with mild interest on the shed. “The problem’s pinning them down. Sure, you know yourself, I can’t just get a warrant to search every building and every car in the townland. I need a nice little bitta probable cause.”

“Damn,” Cal says. “Long time since I heard those two words. I don’t miss ’em one bit.”

Nealon laughs. He stretches out his legs and lets out something between a sigh and a groan. “Jaysus, this is great. I needed a break. This place is doing my head in.”

“They take some getting used to,” Cal says.

“I’m not talking about the people, man. I’m well used to bog monsters. I’m talking about the actual place. If this fella had got himself killed in a city, or even a half-decent town, I could’ve tracked his every move, and yours, and everyone else’s, off your phones. Sure, you’ve done it yourself. Easy as watching a game of Pac-Man, these days.” Nealon mimes with his fingers in the air. “Beep-beep-beep, here comes Blake, beep-beep-beep, here comes one of them ghost yokes to eat him all up; beep-beep-beep, here comes me with my handcuffs to take the ghost yoke away. In this place, but…” He casts his eyes up to heaven. “Christ al-bleedin’-mighty. There’s fuck-all reception. There’s fuck-all wi-fi. The GPS works grand until you get too close to the mountain, or in among trees, and then it loses the plot altogether. I know Blake was somewhere near his cottage till around midnight, and after that, fuck me. He’s halfway up this side of the mountain, a minute later he’s on the other side, then he’s back, then he’s halfway to Boyle…That goes on all fuckin’ night long.”

He shakes his head and consoles himself with a swig of his beer. “Once I get a decent line on a suspect,” he says, “I can try tracking him, but it’ll be no better. And that’s if the fella even brought his phone along. Nowadays, with all the CSI, they know more about forensics than I do.”

“One time I pulled in this guy that broke into a house,” Cal says. “Kid had watched way too many cop shows. Started giving me a hard time about whether I had his DNA, fibers, I don’t know what-all. I showed him his dumb ass on CCTV running away. He said that’s from the back, you can’t prove it was me. I said yeah, but see that bystander watching you run? You’re reflected in his cornea. We enhanced the image and matched it to the biometric data from your mug shot. Dumb shit folded like origami.”

That gets a great big laugh out of Nealon. “Jaysus, that’s beautiful. It’d be great if this one turned out to be that thick, but…” He’s stopped laughing. Instead he sighs. “If he was, I’d have a line on him by now. But we’ve talked to every man in this townland, and not one of ’em jumps out at me.”

Cal says, knowing he’s taking the bait, “You’re sticking to this townland?”

Nealon’s eyes flick to him for a second, intrigued and assessing. “Theresa Reddy’s story checks out,” he says. “As far as I can check it, anyway. Her da says he heard voices and heard her going out that night, but he thought she just snuck out meeting some pals, so he left her to it. The ma says she heard nothing, but she remembers Johnny sitting up in bed like he was listening to something, and then lying back down again. And my lads found another kid, round by Kilhone, who says she saw headlights going up the mountain and stopping halfway.”

“Well,” Cal says. “That should help narrow things down.”

“You could still be right about Johnny,” Nealon reassures him. “He could have pals that’d be willing to come help him move a body, if the shit hit the fan. And himself and the missus could be lying their arses off. Theresa didn’t check if her daddy was in his bed before she went out.”

“You get any tire tracks?” Cal asks. “Footprints?”

“Ah, yeah. Both, all round where the body was found. Only little bits of them here and there, but; not enough to get a match. Those bleedin’ sheep got rid of the rest. And with the weather the way it’s been, we can’t tell which tracks were fresh and which were there for days. Weeks, even.” He reaches down for his glass. “Dublin may not be this good-looking, but at least there I don’t have to worry about sheep trampling my evidence.”

He laughs, and Cal laughs along.

“So Theresa’s story holds,” Nealon says, “so far. And it’s great to have things narrowed down to Ardnakelty. But not one man in the place admits to being up that mountain.”

“I’d be more surprised if they did,” Cal says. “Guilty or innocent.”

Nealon snorts. “True enough. And sure, it’s early days. I’m only after doing the preliminary stuff. I haven’t gone at anyone hard; it’s all been the tippy-toes and the nice light touch.” He smiles at Cal. “Time to start rattling the cages.”

He’ll do it well, and thoroughly. Cal can’t tell whether he likes the guy or not—he can’t see him straight, through all the layers of things going on between them—but he would have liked working with him.

“It’d be great if Theresa could have another think,” Nealon says, “see if she can put a name to any of the voices. Maybe you could ask her. I got the sense she’d listen to you.”

“I’ll ask her next time I see her,” Cal says. The last thing he wants is for Trey to get specific. “Not sure when that’ll be, though. We don’t have a regular schedule.”

“What about yourself?” Nealon asks, cocking an eye at him over the glass. “Would you have any new ideas? Anything you’ve heard around the place, maybe?”

“Man,” Cal says, giving him a look of disbelief. “Come on, now. You think anyone’s gonna tell me something like that?”

Nealon laughs. “Ah, I know what you mean. Places like this, they wouldn’t give you the steam off their piss, in case you’d find a way to use it against them. But you could’ve picked something up. I’d say they might underrate you, round here, and that’d be a mistake.”

“Mostly,” Cal says, “people just want to pick my brains for what I might have heard from you. They don’t have much to offer in exchange.”

“You could ask,” Nealon says.

They look at each other. Over the field, the swallows’ twitters and chirrs swirl in the warm air.

“I could ask,” Cal says. “I doubt anyone would answer.”

“You won’t know till you try.”

“This place already thinks I’m buddy-buddy with you. If I start sticking my nose in, asking questions, I’m gonna get nothing but a fuckton of disinformation.”

“I don’t mind that, sure. You know how it works, man. A few answers would be great, but just asking the right questions could do a lot to get things moving.”