“Top form, and thanking you. Is that himself inside in the car with you?”

“None other.”

“The funeral, I take it? Or what are we calling it, the memorial service?”

“I’m not sure of the official title. To pay our respects.”

Burke squinted at the shiny windscreen of the Peugeot, mischief flickering around his mouth. Minogue half-remembered Kilmartin grumbling about Burke’s self-promotion some years back: was it a wall-eyed bastard he had called him?

“You frisked Jim, I hope.”

Minogue prepared to give him the eye, and to verify if Burke’s eyes did indeed merit Kilmartin’s jibe, but a gust of wind took Burke’s hair and drew it straight up. Minogue glanced up to the rioting comb-over instead. He hoped Kilmartin was watching.

“What do we have up the road?” he asked Burke.

“Crash,” said Burke. “Fifteen, twenty minutes ago. The ambulance came already. Hardly worth your while to find another road now. Not that there are any up here.”

Delahunty closed his phone and issued Minogue a nod.

“They’ll give us the go-ahead in a minute,” he said. His modulated Cork accent couldn’t quite shed that nasal uplift at the end, and robbed of its melody, it came across to Minogue as strained, and even querulous.

The wind was now prancing about in uncertain bursts, tugging and then releasing Minogue’s coat. He looked at the drooping brambles that swayed and jerked over the roadway, and the new rushes bowing in the breeze.

He caught Burke glancing back at his new Peugeot.

“Wild enough, here,” said Burke, stifling a yawn. “Nice all the same,” Minogue said.

“I suppose,” said Burke, suspecting contrariness. “But if it’s wild we want, we should go back to Dublin, hah?”

Minogue made no reply. He had long ago given up trying to find a subtle way to advertise that he, a countryman like most of his fellow Gardai, was not therefore a reflexive slagger of Ireland’s capital city.