The Jamesons was sharp and it cut at the back of his throat. There was nothing new about Gardai drinking hard off-duty. Hoey’s girlfriend, Aine, had signed up to teach for a stint in Zimbabwe and had flown out in September. Minogue had met Aine twice. She was cheerful, freckled and opinionated. That was teachers for you, he supposed. Hard on the heels of his last gulp from the tumbler came an urge for more. Duty-free, Minogue’s familiar gargoyle jeered nearby. Might as well at that price, go on, can’t you? He took the bottle into the living room, slipped out of his shoes and lay on the couch.

The prevailing winds sweep in from the Atlantic and skim spume from the waves before they slam into the cliffs and inlets of west Clare. Carried up over the cliffs come the faint and massive slaps of the water’s battery, the screeches of sea birds, the winds’ roar. Behind the cliffs’ edges, the grasses flatten and hiss as the gales buffet the headlands of this western edge of Clare and Ireland and Europe known as the Burren. The winds whistle through gorse and heather before they move across the patchwork of fields and drystone walls which creep up the Burren hillsides. Above the fields, boulders appear as a thickening crop which the soil cannot resist pushing to the surface. Higher yet, on the plateaus where the boulders give way to fissured limestone terraces, the gales race on. But in this wilderness which looks to be the work of nature alone, a careful eye can spot marks of ancient settlement. The Famine completed the work of centuries of erosion and left the Burren almost deserted. Behind them, the waves of settlers have left their ruined castles and churches, their deserted villages, their ancient ring-forts and their graves.