Lena finds herself, suddenly and for the first time in a long time, losing her temper. Out of all the possibilities in the world, the last way she would have chosen to spend her summer was getting herself tangled neck-deep in a snarl of Ardnakelty drama, with Dymphna Duggan picking through her secret places and Mart Lavin calling round to discuss her relationship. She wouldn’t have done it for anyone in the world but Trey and possibly Cal, and now the contrary little fucker is giving her shite for it. “I’d only love to leave you alone. I’ve no wish to have anything to do with this bloody—”

“Then do it. Go home. Fuck off, if you’re not gonna help me.”

“What do you think I’m doing here? I’m trying to help you, even if you’re too—”

“I don’t want that kinda help. Fuck off to Cal’s, and the pair of ye can help each other. I don’t want you.”

“Shut the fuck up and listen. If you keep on at what you’re doing, this townland will tell Nealon it was Cal that kilt Rushborough.” Lena’s voice is rising. She doesn’t give a damn if everyone on the mountainside hears her. It’ll do this place good to hear things said out loud for once.

“They can all go and shite,” Trey snaps back at her, just as loud. “And Cal as well. Same as you, treating me like a kid, telling me fuckin’ nothing—”

“He was trying to look out for you, is all. If he—”

“I never asked him to look out for me! I never asked for anything off either one of ye, only—”

“The hell are you on about? What difference does that make?”

“The only thing I asked you for was who kilt Brendan, and you told me to get fucked. I owe you nothing.”

Lena is on the edge of shaking her till some sense comes out. “So you’re grand with Cal going to jail, is it?”

“He won’t go to fuckin’ jail. Nealon can’t do anything on him with no—”

“He can, yeah. If Cal confesses, he can.”

Trey opens her mouth. Lena doesn’t give her a chance to get anything out of it. “If Nealon’s got no evidence against Cal or anyone, he’ll go looking at the one person that was out on the mountain when Rushborough got kilt. This place’ll be well on board with that. Everyone knows you’re the one dropping them in the shite; they’ve the knives out for you already. They’ll give Nealon a motive for you and all, tell him Rushborough was abusing you or the little ones—”

“I’m not fuckin’ scared of them. They can say whatever they—”

“Shut up and listen to me for one fucking second. If Nealon starts going after you, what d’you reckon Cal will do?”

Trey shuts up.

Lena leaves her plenty of time before she says, “He’ll say it was him that done it.”

Trey punches straight for her face. Lena half-knew it was coming, but all the same she’s barely in time to block the punch away. They stare at each other, breathing hard and balanced like fighters, ready.

“Kid stuff,” Lena says. “Try it again if you want. It’ll change nothing.”

Trey wheels and starts walking fast up the path, with her head jammed down. Lena keeps pace with her.

“You can throw all the tantrums you like, but that’s what he’ll do. Are you going to let him?”

Trey speeds up, but Lena’s legs are longer. She’s done talking, but she’s not going to let Trey walk away.

They’re high on the mountainside, out of the spruce groves and into the wide expanses of heathered bog. Whatever about earlier, no one is watching them now. A small, hot wind strays down from the mountaintop, pulling at the heather with a child’s absentminded destructiveness; the sky off to the west has a dingy haze.

Trey says, down to the path, “Are you and Cal getting married?”

Lena wasn’t expecting that, although she feels like she should have been. “We are not,” she says. “I thought you’d more sense than that. I already told you I’m done with marriage.”

Trey has stopped moving again. She’s staring Lena out of it, unconvinced. “Then why’s everyone saying you are?”

“Because I told them so. I was trying to get the place off Cal’s back. It woulda worked, only for you setting Nealon on them, getting them all stirred up.”

Trey shuts her mouth. She walks on more slowly, her eyes down, thinking. Insects buzz and zip in the heather around them.

“If we hadda been getting married,” Lena says, “do you not think you’da heard about it before Noreen did?”

Trey glances up sharply at that. Then she goes back to trudging along, scuffing up dust with the toes of her runners. Her silence this time has lost its quality of stubborn resistance; all her mind is on working this through.

“I was an eejit,” she says gruffly, in the end. “Thinking ye were getting married, like. Not the rest.”

“You’re all right,” Lena says. “Everyone’s an eejit now and then. Now’s not the moment for it, but.”

Trey goes back to her silence. Lena lets her have all she needs. Things are shifting in the layers of Trey’s mind: plates grating across each other, crushing old things and heaving new ones to the surface, faster and more painfully than they should have. There’s nothing Lena can do about that; it’s a demand of the circumstances and the place, neither of which has any truck with mercy. All she can do is give Trey these few minutes to get her bearings amid her new landscape.

Trey asks, “How’d you know it was me that said it to Nealon? About men on the mountain that night?”

“Cal. And he said it was a load of shite.”

“He knew I made it up?”

“He did, yeah.”

“Then how come he didn’t say it to me? Or to Nealon?”

“He reckoned,” Lena says, “God help us all, that it was your choice to make. Not his.”

Trey digests that for another while. “He know you were coming here?”

“No,” Lena says. “I don’t know whether he’da argued with me or not. I’da come either way. You’ve a right to know what you’re in.”

Trey nods. That much, at least, she agrees with.

“I don’t blame you for wanting revenge,” Lena says. “But you haveta take into account where it’ll lead, whether you like it or not. That’s what I mean when I tell you not to act like a child. Children don’t take things into account. Adults have no choice.”

“My dad doesn’t,” Trey says. “Take into account where things’ll lead.”

“Right,” Lena says. “Your dad’s not what I’d call an adult.”

Trey turns her face upwards. This high on the mountainside, what’s around them is mostly sky, with a wide rim of heather that gives the air a wild, expansive sweetness. A hawk, tilting on currents, is only a flick of black against the blue.

“I had every right,” she says. A deep note of sadness weighs down her voice. “To get back at them. Whatever way I could.”

“Yeah,” Lena says. She understands that she’s won. “You did.”

“It was going great,” Trey says. “I done everything right. It woulda been good. And then some fucker went and kilt Rushborough, and ruint it all.”

Something in the way her head falls back, the skid of her eyes across the sky, looks like she’s worn too thin: she’s done too much trying, come too long a road, she’s relinquishing too much. Lena doesn’t regret asking it of her, but she wishes with all her heart that she could drive Trey straight to Cal’s and send the pair of them out to get a rabbit for dinner, instead of bringing her into town and aiming her into a detective’s hands. She wishes, for the thousandth time, that Johnny Reddy had never come home.

“I know,” she says. “I reckon you’re better off this way, myself, but I can see where you’d be pure pissed off.”

“Yeah,” Trey says. “Well.”

Lena finds herself grinning. “What?” Trey demands, instantly prickly.

“Nothing. You sound like Cal, is all.”

“Huh,” Trey says, the way Cal says it, and the two of them actually laugh.

—

Trey—settled in the back office of the shabby little Garda station with a Coke and a packet of crisps, in front of a chewed-looking MDF desk with a discreet voice recorder in one corner—plays a blinder. Lena, tucked away on a lopsided chair beside a filing cabinet, is watching for missteps, ready to shift in her chair as a warning, but there’s no need. She didn’t really expect there to be. When she asked Trey to do this, she didn’t overlook the fact that the undertaking would spook many a grown adult. She’s also aware that Cal would never have asked such a thing of Trey, who he feels has already dealt with more than enough in her life. Lena thinks differently. In her view, Trey’s hard-edged childhood has left her capable of more than the average kid her age. If she makes use of that when it’s needed, then at least all she’s been through has a point to it.

Nealon makes it easy for her. He putters about, boiling the kettle and keeping up the steady stream of talk, complaining cheerfully about the downsides of the job, staying in B & Bs and leaving the missus to mind the kids, spending his time annoying people who’ve all got better things to do than talk to the likes of him. Lena watches him and thinks of Cal, and how he must have done this a thousand times. He would have done it well; she can see him at it.

“And it’s not like on the telly,” Nealon informs them, pouring tea for himself and Lena, “where you have the one chat with someone and you’re done. In real life, you have the chats with everyone, and then one fella comes back to you saying he needs to set a few things straight. And o’ course you’ve been going off his statement when you talked to other people, so then you’ve to start all over again. D’you take milk? Sugar?”

“Just milk, thanks. D’you get that often?” Lena asks helpfully. “People changing their stories?”

“Wouldja stop,” Nealon tells her, passing her a big stained mug that says dad joke champion on the side. “You wouldn’t believe how often. People get caught on the hop, if you get me, the first time we talk. They feel like they’re on the back foot, and they keep things to themselves, or they come out with some load of aul’ rubbish. And then they go home and think, What the hell was I at? Then it takes them ages to come back in and put things right, ’cause they’re afraid they’ll get in trouble.”

Trey glances up at him, nervous, but she can’t hold his eyes. “Do they get in trouble?”

Nealon looks surprised. “God, no. Why would they?”

“Wasting your time.”

Nealon, pulling up his chair behind the desk, laughs. “Sure, that’s most of this job: wasting my time. Filling in this form and that form, and I know no one’ll ever look at the bleedin’ things, but it has to be done anyway. Come here, can I have one of those crisps?”

Trey holds out the packet across the desk. “Lovely,” Nealon says, selecting a crisp with care. “Cheese-and-onion’s your only man. Think about it this way: say some fella feeds me a load of rubbish, and then he’s got the sense to come back and clear it up before I go making an eejit of myself. Now, if I give him hassle, word’ll get around, and the next person who needs to set the record straight, they’re going to keep their lip zipped, aren’t they? But if I just shake his hand and thank him, nice and polite like, then the next person won’t have any problem coming in to me. And everyone’s happy. D’you get me?”

“Yeah.”

“When everyone’s happy,” Nealon says comfortably, leaning back in his chair and balancing his mug on his belly, “I’m happy.”

Trey glances over her shoulder at Lena. Lena nods encouragingly. She’s trying to look like a respectable pillar of the community, but she’s not in practice.

“What I told you that day,” Trey says, and dries up. Her face is pinched with tension. Nealon slurps his tea and waits.

“About hearing lads talking. The night your man died.”

Nealon cocks his head to one side. “Yeah?”

“Made that up,” Trey says, to her Coke can.

Nealon gives her an indulgent grin and a finger-wag, like he just caught her mitching off school. “I knew it.”

“You did?”

“Listen, young one, I’ve been doing this job since you were in nappies. If I couldn’t spot someone giving me the runaround, I’d be banjaxed altogether.”

“Sorry,” Trey mumbles. She’s got her head well down, picking at the skin around her thumbnail.

“You’re grand,” Nealon tells her. “Tell you what: you can fill out my expense claim for me, and we’ll call it quits. How’s that?”

Trey manages a small puff of a laugh. “There you go,” Nealon says, smiling. “So come here to me: was any of that story true?”

“Yeah. The morning stuff, how I found him. That part all happened like I said.”

“Ah, lovely,” Nealon says. “That’ll save us some hassle. How about the night before?”

Trey twists one shoulder.

“Did you go out at all?”

“Nah.”

“Don’t be picking at your nails,” Nealon tells her. He’s clearly come to the conclusion, after meeting Johnny, that Trey must be craving a father figure. “You’ll give yourself an infection. Did you hear voices outside?”

Trey obediently flattens her hands on her thighs. “Nah. Made up that part.”

“See headlights? Hear a car?”

“Nah.”

“We’ll start over, so,” Nealon says cheerfully. “You just slept through the night, is it? Then woke up early and brought the dog for a walk?”

Trey shakes her head. “Say it out loud,” Nealon reminds her, tapping the voice recorder. “For this yoke here.”

Trey gives the recorder a nervy glance, but she takes a breath and keeps going. “I did wake up in the night. Like I said. ’Cause I was hot. Just lay there for a while—I was thinking about getting up and watching the telly, only I couldn’t be ars— bothered. After a bit…”

She stops and glances over at Lena. “You’re grand,” Lena reassures her. “Just tell him the truth, is all.”

“Heard someone moving about,” Trey says. Her voice has turned jerky. “In the house, like. Real quiet. And then the door opening, the front door, and then it shut again. So I went out to the sitting room to look out the window, see who it was.” She glances up at Nealon. “I wasn’t being nosy. It coulda been my brother, he’s only little, and sometimes he walks in his sleep—”

“Listen,” Nealon says, grinning, “I’ve no problem with anyone being nosy. The nosier the better. Did you see someone?”

Trey takes a tight breath. “Yeah,” she says. “Saw my dad.”

“Doing what?”

“Not doing anything. Going out the gate, just.”

“Right,” Nealon says, very easily. “You’re sure it was him? In the dark?”

“Yeah. The moon was up. Full, like.”

“What did you reckon he was at?”

“At first…” Trey’s head goes farther down, and she scrapes at something on the thigh of her jeans. “I thought maybe he was leaving, like. Going off on us. ’Cause he did before. I was gonna go out to him, try and stop him. Only he didn’t take the car, so…” One shoulder lifts. “I reckoned it was grand. He was just going for a walk ’cause he couldn’t sleep either.”