Minogue had been drawn to Tully and its stones by his sense that it had been built, like so many other churches, on a site of druidic worship. Several fields away was a tumulus, the burial site of a chieftain, which predated the upstart saints Patrick and Bride by a millennium. Less than a mile over the fields was one of the best-preserved dolmens in the country, ranking even with those stark masses of the ridges of The Burren in County Clare.

He flattened out other sketches from the heap of paper. There were charcoal sketches of stones with whorls worked into them, symbols of sun and moon. Beneath the sketches were pencil drawings of a dolmen, the huge menacing boulder on its three stone legs.

"Mr Combs was English?" Minogue called out.

"I believe so, sir," said the technician, a brick-red-faced young man with the beginnings of a porter-belly. He had the heavy blond eyebrows of Norse descendants in County Wexford.

"Yes, sir. They have his passport and everything taken away in the bags, but he was definitely from across the water."

Minogue turned toward the window again. When he didn't hear the two moving, he turned back to them. They couldn't help his puzzlement any more than he could himself.

"Thanks very much, lads."

He prowled the other rooms upstairs. A bedroom that Combs must have used, with the clothes torn off the bed. The mattress had been slashed on both sides. Looking for money in there…? A bathroom with new fixtures. The medicine box had been emptied out, too. Next door was an empty room the size of a box-room. The old man had been economical to the point of asceticism with furnishings. Minogue kept expecting to open a door on a room that would be cluttered with the stuff which should fill houses. There was none. He couldn't decide if the sense of incompleteness here was a sign of transience or a permanent feature of an austere life. If this was it, Minogue thought, then the old man had led a lonely life.