Over Fanore and Kilcorney, through Lismara and Tuamashee, the winds course, battering and caressing, rippling the surfaces of turloughs, those seasonal lakes brimming with dark water. Like cattle labouring home full, the clouds move with the wind over the towns and villages and the long wet ribbons of roads that lead across the midland plains. With rain on the wind, the whole island can be wet within hours of those first clouds descending on the Burren. Although the hills on the west coast draw down heavy, dreary rains, they still leave enough for the midland pastures and even for Dublin city. In the Kilmacud suburb of that city, Minogue, long exiled from the precincts of the Burren, slept fitfully on the couch.

Kathleen Minogue, Dublinwoman, opened the bedroom curtains just in time to see the Dublin Mountains fade into the mist as the rain rolled down into the suburbs. She plugged the kettle in, tiptoed back to the doorway and surveyed her husband. He stirred and laid an arm over his eyes. Asleep in his jacket even, she thought. She was caught between exasperation and pity. He was very long.

“I know what you’re thinking,” he murmured. She started. His eyes stayed dosed as he raised his forearm from his eyes and stretched. The kettle wheezed and ticked stronger in the kitchen.

“Don’t be so sure of yourself,” she said.

Awake but fuzzy from the whiskey, Minogue tried to pull back a piece of his dream as it fell into obscurity. All that remained was a face indistinctly recalled and fading fast: a man, young, smiling at him, asking him or telling him something. Familiar, gone. At least it wasn’t Jelly Nolan’s face.

“Looking over the wreckage and wondering, I’ll bet,” he said. “Go on, tell me you aren’t now. I’m a detective. You can’t cod me.

“We have an early start on Hallowe’en here with you on the couch. Frankenstein or something.”