“You stupid fucking yob!” hissed Ciaran. He reached for the pistol but Finbarr turned and held it out of his reach. “Put it away and stop playing with it. Do you think it’s a bloody toy or something? Give it to me!”

His friend chortled, thumbed the safety and dropped it onto the plastic. He raised the bottle again.

“Well now, Ciaran. For a man who was supposed to have had a good time there, you seem awful jittery to me.”

“If I am a bit jittery, it’s because I’ve been watching you swallowing vodka and waving that gun around!”

He unhitched his gun and laid it carefully next to the pistol. As he stood stretching, he turned on his heels. Around him lay the Burren. Like the last place on earth, he thought. He had worked on the buildings in England for six years until the slump came. This is what he had wanted to come home to? Below him was the cottage they had been gutting and renovating for the new owners. They had been hired by Howard whose company acted as a go-between for the Germans who had bought the place. Do it right, Howard’s foreman had told them, and there’d be plenty more work like it.

“Might as well have a bit of crack,” said the one with the bottle. “What’s wrong with that?”

“It’s not crack we’re about at the present time,” said the other. He squatted down beside the guns and began wrapping them and the clips in the plastic.

“Jesus, it’s not like we’re doing stuff that really needs doing by a certain time now, is it? I’m getting fed up waiting around. Breaking windows is all we’re about so far as I can see.”

The one wrapping the gun was a few years older than his companion. He concentrated on fingering the rubber bands over the ends of the package.

“Well?”

“Well what?”

“When do we get to, you know-”

“To what?”

“Ah come on now, Ciaran. You know. Use the fucking things right.”

“Jesus, are you mad? You can’t just decide to go around the place Waving these without having thought it out carefully. We’ll do the German’s place tomorrow night like we planned, and that’s it for the time being. So don’t keep on asking me.”