Johnny is laughing. “Mart Lavin,” he says, shaking his head affectionately. “You’re the same as ever.”

“Theirs went wrong in the end, though,” Mart informs him. “One day they shut it down, just like that; sealed off the tunnel, no word of an explanation. Fifty or a hundred years later, an explorer found the tunnel again, deep down under London. The carriage was still sealed up inside. A dozen men and women still sitting in their seats, in their top hats and hoop skirts and pocket watches, every one of them nothing but bones.” He smiles at Johnny. “But, sure, yours wouldn’t go wrong. We’ve all the finest technology these days. Yours’d be only great. You get onto that, now.”

After a moment Johnny laughs again. “You oughta be the ideas man, not me,” he says. “Come on up to my place and you’ll hear it all. See you tomorrow night.” To Cal, he says, “Good to meet you.”

“You too,” Cal says. “See you round.” He has no desire to be invited over to drink to Johnny’s return, under a roof he fixed himself, but he does have an ingrained dislike for rudeness.

Johnny nods to him, touches his temple to Mart, and heads off towards the road. He walks like a city boy, picking his way around anything that might dirty his shoes.

“Worthless little fecker,” Mart says. “The best part of that fella ran down his mammy’s leg. What did he want from you?”

“Check out the guy who’s hanging out with his kid, I guess,” Cal says. “Don’t blame him.”

Mart snorts. “If he gave a damn about that child, he wouldn’ta run off on her. That fella never did anything in his life unless he was after a few bob or a ride, and you’re not his type. If he dragged his lazy arse down here, he wanted something.”

“He didn’t ask for anything,” Cal says. “Yet, anyway. You going to his place tomorrow night, get in on his big idea?”

“I wouldn’t have one of Johnny Reddy’s ideas if it was wrapped in solid gold and delivered by Claudia Schiffer in the nip,” Mart says. “I only came down here to let him know not to be trying to get his hooks into you. If he wants to mooch, he can mooch offa someone else.”

“He can try all he wants,” Cal says. He doesn’t want any favors from Mart. “Did he hook up with Mrs. Dumbo?”

“He did his best. That lad’d get up on a cracked plate. Don’t you be letting him around your Lena.”

Cal lets that go. Mart finds his tobacco pouch, pulls out a skimpy rollie, and lights it. “I might go on up to his place tomorrow night,” he says reflectively, picking a shred of tobacco off his tongue. “Whatever he’s at, there’s some eejits around here that’d fall for it. I might as well have a good view of the action.”

“Bring your popcorn,” Cal says.

“I’ll bring a bottle of Jameson, is what I’ll bring. I wouldn’t trust him to have anything dacent in, and if I’ve to listen to that gobshite, I’d want to be well marinated.”

“I figure I’ll stick with ignoring him,” Cal says. “Save myself the booze money.”

Mart giggles. “Ah, now. Where’s the entertainment in that?”

“You and me got different ideas of entertainment,” Cal says.

Mart draws on his rollie. His face, creased against the sun, is suddenly grim. “I’m always in favor of paying heed to the sly fuckers,” he says. “Even when it’s an inconvenience. You never know when there might be something you can’t afford to miss.”

He nudges one of Cal’s tomatoes with the point of his crook. “Them tomatoes is coming along great,” he says. “If you have a few going spare, you know where to find me.” Then he whistles for Kojak and starts off back towards his own land. When he crosses Johnny Reddy’s trail, he spits on it.

—

Ignoring Johnny turns out to be harder than Cal expected. That evening, when Lena has sent Trey home and come over to his place, he can’t settle. Mostly his and Lena’s evenings are long, calm ones. They sit on his back porch drinking bourbon and listening to music and talking, or playing cards, or they lie on the grass and watch the expanse of stars turn dizzyingly above them. When the weather is being too Irish, they sit on his sofa and do most of the same things, with rain padding peacefully and endlessly on the roof, and the fire making the room smell of turf smoke. Cal is aware that this puts them firmly in boring-old-fart territory, but he has no problem with that. This is one of the many areas where he and Mart don’t see eye to eye: being boring is among Cal’s main goals. For most of his life, one or more elements always insisted on being interesting, to the point where dullness took on an unattainable end-of-the-rainbow glow. Ever since he finally got his hands on it, he’s savored every second.

Johnny Reddy is, just like Mart spotted from all the way over on his own land, a threat to the boringness. Cal knows there’s nothing he can do about the guy, who has more right to be in Ardnakelty than he has, but he wants to do it anyway, and quick, before Johnny starts in fucking things up. Lena is drinking her bourbon and ginger ale, comfortable in the back-porch rocking chair that Cal made for her birthday, but Cal can’t sit. He’s throwing a stick for Rip and Nellie, who are surprised by this departure from routine but not about to turn down the opportunity. Daisy, Rip’s mama, who doesn’t have a sociable nature, has ignored the stick and gone to sleep beside Lena’s chair. The fields have sunk into darkness, although the sky still has a flush of turquoise above the treeline in the west. The evening is still, with no breeze to take away the day’s leftover heat.

“You fed her dinner, right?” he asks for the second time.

“Enough to fill a grown man,” Lena says. “And if she needs more, I’d say Sheila might have the odd bitta food lying around the house. D’you reckon?”

“And she knows she can come back to your place if she needs to.”

“She does, yeah. And she can find her way in the dark. Or in a snowstorm, if one comes up.”

“Maybe you should go home tonight,” Cal says. “In case she comes back and you’re not there.”

“Then she’ll know where to look for me,” Lena points out. Lena spends maybe two nights a week at Cal’s place, which naturally the entire village has known since the day it began and probably before. At the start he suggested tentatively that she might walk, or he could walk to hers, to avoid people seeing her car and making her a target of gossip, but Lena just laughed at him.

Rip and Nellie are having a ferocious tug-of-war with the stick. Rip wins and gallops triumphantly over to drop it at Cal’s feet. Cal hurls it back into the darkness of the yard, and they disappear again.

“He was nice to me,” Cal says. “What was he nice to me for?”

“Johnny is nice,” Lena says. “He’s got plenty of faults, but no one could say he’s not nice.”

“If Alyssa was hanging around some middle-aged guy when she was that age, I wouldn’t’ve been nice to him. I’da punched his lights out.”

“Did you want Johnny to punch your lights out?” Lena inquires. “Because I could ask him for you, but it’s not really his style.”

“He used to hit them,” Cal says. “Not often, from what the kid’s said, and not too bad. But he hit them.”

“And if he tried it now, she’d have somewhere else to go. But he won’t. Johnny’s in great form. He’s the talk of the town, he’s buying the whole pub drinks and telling them all the adventures he had over in London, and he’s loving it. When the world’s being good to Johnny, he’s good to everyone.”

This fits with Cal’s assessment of Johnny. Except on the most immediate level, he isn’t reassured.

“He told Angela Maguire he was at a party with Kate Winslet,” Lena says, “and someone spilt a drink down the back of her dress, so he gave her his jacket to cover up the stain, and she gave him her scarf in exchange. He’s showing the scarf all around town. I wouldn’t say Kate Winslet would go near that yoke for love nor money, but it makes a good story either way.”

“He told Mart he had an idea,” Cal says, also for the second time. “What kind of idea does a guy like that come up with?”

“You’ll know day after tomorrow,” Lena says. “Mart Lavin’ll be straight down here to spill the beans. That fella loves being first with a bitta gossip.”

“Something that’d be good for this place, he said. What the hell would that guy reckon would be good for a place? A casino? An escort agency? A monorail?”

“I wouldn’t worry about it,” Lena says. Daisy whimpers and twitches in her dream, and Lena reaches down to stroke her head till she settles. “Whatever it is, it won’t get far.”

“I don’t want the kid around a guy like that,” Cal says, knowing he sounds absurd. He’s aware that gradually, over the past two years, he’s come to think of Trey as his. Not his in the same way as Alyssa, of course, but his in a specific, singular way that has no relation to anything else. He sees it in the same terms as the drystone walls that define the fields around here: they were handmade rock by rock as the need arose, they look haphazard and they have gaps you could stick a fist through, but somehow they have the cohesion to stand solid through weather and time. He hasn’t seen this as a bad thing; it’s done no one any harm. He can’t tell whether he would have done anything differently if he had expected Johnny to come home, bringing with him the fact that Trey is not, in reality, Cal’s in any way that carries any weight at all.

“That child’s no fool,” Lena says. “She’s got a good head on her shoulders. Whatever Johnny’s at, she won’t go getting sucked into it.”

“She’s a good kid,” Cal says. “It’s not that.” He can’t find a way to express, even to himself, what it is. Trey is a good kid, a great kid, on track to make herself a good life. But all of that seems so vastly against the odds that to Cal it has an aura of terrifying fragility, something incredible that shouldn’t be disturbed until the glue has set hard. Trey is still too little for anything to have set hard.

Lena drinks her bourbon and watches him hurl the stick with all his force. Normally Cal has the innate calm of a big man or a big dog, who can afford to let things alone for a while and see how they play out. Regardless of the situation, a part of her welcomes seeing this different side of him. It lets her know him better.

She could settle his mind, temporarily at least, by bringing him to bed, but she decided right from the beginning that she wasn’t going to make Cal’s moods her responsibility—not that he has many, but Sean, her husband, was a moody man, and she made the mistake of believing that was her problem to fix. The fact that Cal never expects her to do that is one of the many things she values in him. She has no intention of wrecking it.

“Mart says all Johnny’s ever looking for is women and cash,” Cal says. “I could give him cash.”

“To leave, like?”

“Yeah.”

“No,” Lena says.

“I know,” Cal says. There are far too many ways Johnny Reddy could misread that, or make use of it, or both.

“He wouldn’t take it, anyway,” Lena says. “It’s not the money Johnny’s after, or not only. He’s after a story where he got the money by being the big hero. Or the dashing bandit, at least.”

“And for that,” Cal says, “he’s got his big idea. Whatever it is.” Rip makes his way back up the garden, hauling the stick by one end, with Nellie dragging off the other. Cal detaches it from the pair of them, throws it, and watches them vanish into the dark again. The last of the light is ebbing out of the sky, and the stars are starting to show.

Lena is trying to decide whether to tell him the thought she had, the day before, as she watched Johnny saunter away. She’d like to have Cal’s views on it—not only because, having been a detective, he has a wider knowledge of trouble and its many forms, but also because of the way he considers things, without hurry or strain. Before he even says a word, that makes the thing seem more manageable, susceptible to being held still and examined at leisure.

His restlessness is stopping her. She has only a guess, based on nothing but a scruffy haircut and old memories. Unsettled as Cal is, it would be unfair to put that on him, just for her own convenience. Lena herself is wary and watchful, but she’s not unsettled. She isn’t by nature a peaceful woman; her calm is hard-won, and Johnny doesn’t have enough force in him to shake it. She’s not altogether convinced that he has enough force to bring any trouble bigger than a debt-collection notice in his wake, but Cal, knowing less of Johnny and more of trouble, might see it differently. Then, too, she knows the stakes here aren’t the same for Cal as they are for her.

She adds the tightness in Cal’s face, and the fact that she finds herself shielding him, to the list of reasons she despises Johnny Reddy. The man hasn’t been in town long enough to muddy the shine on those pretty shoes or that pretty smile, and already, without even aiming to, he’s making problems where there were none.

“Come on,” Cal says suddenly, turning to her and holding out a hand. Lena thinks he wants to go inside, but when she takes his hand and lets him pull her out of the rocking chair, he leads her down the porch steps, onto the grass.

“I figure I oughta mind my own beeswax for a while,” he says. “When was the last time we took a nighttime walk?”

Lena tucks her hand through his elbow and smiles. Rip and Nellie follow them, Rip taking big bounds over the long grass just for the fun of it, as they head for the road that twists away between the fields, faint and pale in the starlight. The night flowers have the rich, honeyed scent of some old cordial. Daisy opens one rolling eye to watch them on their way, and then goes back to sleep.

—

Even though Cal tries not to say it, Trey knows he doesn’t like her being out on the mountain in the dark. When she’s at his place for dinner, he keeps one eye on the sky and orders her home as soon as the west starts to glow gold. He worries about her falling into a ditch and injuring herself, or straying off the path and getting sucked down in a bog, or running into one of the scattering of people who live high on the mountain and who have the reputation of being half wild. None of these things worry Trey. She’s been on the mountain her whole life, which means her body knows it better than her mind does; the slightest unexpected shift in the consistency of the earth under her feet, or the slope of it, is enough to warn her if she’s going wrong. The mountainy men have known her since she was a baby, and sometimes give her a few quid to do their messages at Noreen’s shop, or to bring a few eggs or a bottle of poteen to a neighbor a mile or two up the road. She’s considering being one of them when she’s grown up.