Often as he stood atop the hill, the wind teasing his jacket, Minogue thought that all the good land in west Clare would amount to less than the ordered land below him. Looking north from the summit, you could see the Mourne Mountains if the air over Dublin city wasn't bad. On a good day you could see Wales to the east. Minogue could almost feel the hilltop breezes tunnelling into his shirt still.

"Da. What do you do up in that place?"

"Tully? I visit the place is what I do." Minogue felt defensive yet.

"Yes, but do you do anything, though? Like, would you explore?" Iseult went on.

"Sometimes."

"And would you explore the graveyard, for instance?" Iseult harried him from behind a slice of bread she drew to her mouth.

"Honest to God, Iseult," Kathleen interrupted. "Do you think your father does be digging them that's buried there these hundreds and hundreds of years up out of their graves and talking to them?"

Iseult leaned back in her chair. She flicked her hair back over one shoulder, then another. She held her hand to her mouth and began coughing and laughing.

"It's nice to have the place to yourself at that time of day. And it doesn't cost me anything. So there."

"All right, Da. I believe you, but thousands wouldn't." Minogue tried to put some sense on the way the conversation was weaving.

"Anyway. I was a bit out of the way when that man was murdered. If you're looking for an alibi, I can only say that I'm very disappointed in you. All I can plead, is that I was up at Tully, thinking," Minogue protested.

"That's your story and you're sticking to it, right?" Iseult added.

"Ask me if I can prove that I was thinking," Minogue retorted.

He lifted a quarter of a not-quite-ripe tomato off the end of the fork with his tongue. What he called thinking, his mother would have called romancin'. His father would have called it idling, and he would have been right for the wrong reasons, Minogue reflected.