Borderlands

Chapter Nine

Thursday, 26th December

Boxing Day broke with spectacular blue skies and an explosion of a sunrise on the mountains behind the house. I had not slept again, keeping watch all night, until the sky turned to grey and the remaining puddles from the previous evening's rain froze and sparkled under the first rays of the morning sun. There was no wind, only a sharp chill that would keep the grass stiff until afternoon, so that it crunched beneath your feet as you walked. I told myself that it was a new day and tried to dismiss from mind our late-night visitor.

At 7.15 a.m. I threw warm water on the windows of the car to defrost them, then left the engine idling while I gathered my notes for the meeting with Williams and Costello. By the time I came back out to the car, the water on the windscreen had frozen again. Inside, my breath condensed and froze to ice on the interior of the glass. I sat in the car, letting the engine warm up, and smoked a cigarette. The details of the case had bubbled inside my head all night. Having gathered all the evidence the day before to prove that Whitey McKelvey had killed Angela Cashell, I now had to start proving that he hadn't.

I reached the station twenty minutes early, but Costello was already there and Williams arrived soon after me. Just before 8.00 a.m., a blue van pulled up outside. Several minutes later, a smaller white van with a radio antenna on the roof wound its way around the bend in the street and slid to a halt against the concrete posts outside the front doors.

A young woman, wrapped tightly in a sheepskin jacket and wearing gloves and a scarf, picked her way carefully along the pavement and into the reception area of the station. We heard her introduce herself as a radio news reporter for 108 FM, a local independent station. I had heard her once or twice before on the news, though she was much younger than her voice suggested. She was wondering if we would like to comment on either the death in custody of William McKelvey or the attack on livestock the previous night by the "Wild Cat of Lifford".

I wandered up to the reception desk and listened in. Mark Anderson had contacted the radio station that morning to say that one of his sheep had been mauled the night before and its innards removed from its body. He had told the receptionist at 108 FM that he had asked twice for assistance from Gardai, and both times nothing had been done.

I was hoping to hear more details, but Costello cut the discussion short, telling the young lady that he would be making a statement later and there would be no comment until then.

Our meeting was brief. First, Costello informed us that ballistics had found a match on the gun used to murder Terry Boyle. Apparently it had been used in a filling-station robbery in Bundoran a year or so previously.

Costello then turned his attention to Angela Cashell and the fallout from McKelvey's death. He had decided to run with McKelvey as our killer for now, while we checked background details again. If another party entered the frame, in his words, we would deal with the McKelvey fiasco as necessary. If our investigation yielded nothing, we were to fold it quietly away and McKelvey would, to all intents and purposes, remain Angela Cashell's murderer.

I asked him about the ring which McKelvey claimed to have sold.

"Forget about bloody rings, Benedict. I want a quick result. Don't ignore the obvious just because it is obvious!"

Williams and I returned to the murder room with the files. We worked through the morning, examining the anomalies and loose ends which hung over the initial investigation. I became increasingly convinced that the ring which Angela Cashell had been wearing was somehow central to the whole thing.

"Why?"

"She was stripped naked; her clothes were kept or destroyed; someone washed her body; used a condom. Everything seems to have been done to reduce the possibilities of forensic evidence. Everything was removed, except her pants and this ring. Why leave her pants?"

"Well, the panties suggest some form of respect. Some residual affection or liking for the girl. Someone wanted her to have some dignity."

"Her father?"

"Maybe. Worth looking at again, certainly. Or a woman," she suggested.

"Why?"

"I dunno. It just seems like something a woman would do. It was a conscious decision to put her underwear back on her. I don't think a man would do that. In fact, you'd think if sex was involved somewhere, he'd want to keep something as intimate as that – a trophy, you know?"

It made sense. "What about the ring? It has some significance. None of her family or friends knew about it."

"Whitey McKelvey did. Maybe he did give it to her."

"More likely than him selling it to someone who then came back and killed her," I said.

"So, he steals it from Ratsy Donaghey, gives it to Angela Cashell, and she gets killed wearing it."

"Do you think it's worth killing over?"

"I dunno. Maybe we should get it valued."

"But if it was worth anything, surely whoever killed Angela would have taken it," I pointed out.

"True. So, it's a message."

"To whom?"

"I don't know. But you're right. We'll follow it up."

I asked Williams whether she had had any luck contacting the Garda in Bundoran who had dealt with Donaghey's murder.

"Not yet. He's off until tomorrow, I'm told. I need to speak to him about the gun used to kill Terry Boyle, too. What do you think is the Donaghey connection with Cashell? Drugs?"

"Maybe," I said, "But he was a different generation. More of an age with Johnny Cashell than Angela. Follow it up anyway. Get that video of the bar again as well. McKelvey denied being with Angela that night. Let's recheck it and see if he was lying or not. In the meantime, I'm going to a wake."

"Whose?"

"Angela Cashell's. Her body was brought back on Christmas Eve. She's to be buried tomorrow. I want to see Sadie Cashell before that."

"Is it not a bit early? It's only just gone ten?"

"Morning's the best time for us; less chance of a fight brewing." I lifted my keys. "Do you want to come?"

"Are you kidding?" she said, grabbing her coat.

A wake is a long-held tradition in Ireland. The body is laid out for two nights before the burial. Neighbours and friends congregate – ostensibly to pay their respects, but on occasions the wake becomes a party. Mourners comment on how well the deceased looks, as though he or she were not dead. Plates of cigarettes are passed around like sandwiches. At some stage the whiskey is opened and passed among the mourners; someone produces a tin whistle or a fiddle and a full-scale ceilidh breaks out, with people jigging and reeling around the coffin and resting their empty glasses on the white satin lining.

The following morning, the wake-house smells like a pub that has been left unaired. Tea-stained cups are gathered and washed; sandwiches are made in preparation for the next night, which promises to be even bigger than the previous.

Sadie Cashell was sitting by her daughter's coffin when we entered the house and, despite the early hour, three neighbours sat with her. I gave her the Mass card I had had signed by Father Brennan on the way in, offered my condolences, and stood beside her at the coffin and prayed three Hail Marys for the redemption of the soul of Angela Cashell. Sadie leaned over the coffin, pushed a wisp of Angela's blonde hair back from her face and arranged the ruffle at the throat of the shroud she was wearing. I finished my prayers and laid my hand gently on Angela's, which were joined in front of her, intertwined with a rosary. Her skin was cold and hard, almost like wax. Her expression was one of serenity: angelic. It was an appearance certainly preferable to my last sight of her, lying on a bed of leaves and damp moss, the empty winter sky reflected in her unblinking eyes.

I sat beside Sadie on one of the hard wooden chairs which a neighbour must have lent her and passed her a half-bottle of Bushmills that I had bought in McElroy's Bar out of hours.

She held my hand in both of hers, which were shaking slightly, and rubbed the back of my hand with her thumb. She told me that Johnny had not been released for the wake, but hoped to be back for the funeral. She told me how the other girls had taken it. Muire had run away the day before, but was found by a neighbour walking to Strabane. Then she asked if we knew who had taken her daughter from her, and I told her that I thought we did and that, if she believed in God, he would be facing justice. She smiled and gripped my hand tighter.

"Sadie," I said. "I want to ask you a favour. About the ring Angela was wearing. Do you have it?"

"Why?"

"Listen, Sadie, I know it wasn't hers, but I don't care. Keep it if you want. But I'd like to borrow it for a day or two. I think it might have something to do with what happened to her."

She seemed initially unwilling, but eventually agreed and, with some reluctance, turned away from her daughter's coffin and left the room. I heard her going up the stairs and moving about above us. Half a minute later she returned with the ring, still sealed in the plastic evidence bag in which the pathologist had placed it. She handed it to me without a word and sat again beside her daughter.

"Have you touched this, Sadie? I asked. "Since you got it back. I need to know – for fingerprints."

She looked at me and shook her head, once.

"I'm sorry, Sadie," I said. "I had to ask." I told her that we had to leave and she stood to walk us out to the door.

"Johnny was angry at me, you know. For taking that money," she said. "He told me we don't need a copper's charity."

"We all need a little help sometimes. Johnny's just raw over Angela. It's understandable."

"She was his favourite, you know. In a strange way, she was his favourite. He treated her as if she were his own daughter."

I took her hand in mine and looked her in the eyes. "She was his daughter, Sadie, and I'll not let anyone say any different."

She pulled me close to her quickly, gripping my arms in her hands, and muttered something into the nape of my neck. I felt the wetness of her tears against my skin.

By the time we arrived back at the station a fairly large group of reporters had gathered across the road in front of the visitors centre. Someone was holding court before them. He was too slim to be Costello. For some reason I was not wholly surprised when I realized that the figure in the dark suit decrying Garda incompetence was Thomas Powell, attempting to assume the mantle his father had passed to him. It was perhaps no accident that he had chosen the road in front of the old courthouse, from whose roof eighteenth-century recidivists were hung in front of crowds of thousands, to give his lecture on crime and justice in Lifford.

"In the past weeks, three young people have died, one while in Garda custody, and yet nothing seems to have been done. Livestock is being slaughtered by a wild animal of some sort, but again nothing has been done." He scanned the group as he spoke, making eye-contact with as many of them as possible, perhaps trying to remember faces for future press conferences. Then, his eye caught mine and I swear he smiled. "Instead, we have officers following personal agendas while we suffer the effects of their incompetence." He pointed in my direction. "Perhaps Inspector Devlin here would elucidate further on what Gardai are doing to clean up this mess?" He turned to the cameras, dictaphones and microphones, clearly assuming that I would stick to Costello's "no comment" dictate. "My father campaigned tirelessly against Gardai incompetence and I regret that I seem to have to do the same and represent the people of Donegal with an impartial voice."

"Let's take the fight to him, shall we?" I said to Williams, and walked over to stand beside him in front of the reporters. I felt Williams tug at my jacket, saw the panic register on her face; then she stepped back, away from the glare of the lights.

Powell was alerted to my presence by the radio reporter I had met earlier. "Inspector, any comment on these claims?"

I raised my hand and waited until the gaggle quietened a little. I spoke slowly and clearly, without looking at Powell, who stood beside me, his arms folded, "I've just returned from visiting one of three houses on both sides of the border, where a family has spent Christmas in mourning for the loss of a child. I think perhaps we should respect that, rather than using their coffins as soap boxes from which to electioneer, don't you?" I smiled sweetly, then turned and walked into the station. Costello glared at me from his office door, having watched the performance from between the slats of his drawn blinds.

I asked Williams to take the ring to Patsy McLaughlin, one of our oldest forensics experts, a man known for his care in lifting evidence.

While he checked the ring for fingerprints, I phoned my father, the man Powell Sr had described as the "furniture man". My father has worked with antiques all his life and, consequently, knows most of the older and more knowledgeable antique dealers in the area. I didn't know if the ring was an antique, but it looked old enough to at least be worth checking. I also wanted some indication of its value, for it seemed no more plausible that such an object should belong to a drug dealer like Ratsy Donaghey than to Angela Cashell.

My father said he would phone me back in five minutes. Halfan-hour later, he got back to me to say that he had found a man in Derry, Ciaran O'Donnell, who would look at the ring. I arranged to meet them at O'Donnell's shop on Spencer Road at 5.00 p.m., by which time I hoped Pat McLaughlin would be finished with it. As it transpired, he was done with it much sooner, for an hour later he and Williams arrived at the murder room with the news that they had found nothing, which didn't explain why the two of them seemed so happy. McLaughlin explained.

"I laughed when she brought it. Do you know how many sets of prints you get off something like a ring? But there was nothing. Do you realize what that means?"

"Obviously not, or I'd be smiling like you two. Astound me," I said.

"Think about it, Detective. Your prints aren't there, are they?"

"Of course they're not. I didn't touch it…" I said impatiently

"What about the pathologist? Her prints aren't on it either."

"Because she wears gloves when she's working," I said, my excitement rising fast as I reached the clear conclusion.

"Exactly. And so did whoever put the ring on the girl's finger, because she clearly didn't do it herself. Someone was very careful about putting this ring on her."

At five o'clock we met Ciaran O'Donnell and my father outside his shop, an old unit built on a slope off Spencer Road in Derry. The slope runs down to the River Foyle, which splits the city in half.

Having been closed for Christmas, the shop was bitterly cold, making my fingers so stiff and blue that I pulled my coat sleeves down over my hands and balled them into fists. The air was musty and damp underneath the sweet smell of furniture polish that pervaded every surface.

O'Donnell was an old man, bent slightly from the mid-section of his spine. His hair grew symmetrically on both sides of his bald dome in wisps of grey and white. He wore thick-lensed glasses, which he removed to examine the ring, putting a jeweller's loupe in his right eye. He sat at an old oak desk and flicked on a tiny desk-lamp and examined the ring in minute detail for a few minutes, turning it in various directions, brushing it lightly with a tool that resembled a tiny toothbrush. Then he set it down and lifted a green book from the bookcase in the corner of the room. He carried the book to the desk, put the glass in his eye again, and examined the ring with his left eye shut, then perused the book with his right eye shut. Finally satisfied, he put everything on the desk in front of him and called us over.

"An interesting piece," he began. "The ring is eighteen-carat gold with a moonstone insert, surrounded by twelve rose-cut diamonds. What's interesting about this is – well, two things, really – one of the diamonds has been replaced. It's a very neat piece of work, but it's sourced differently from the others: there's a slightly pinkish tint to it under this light. The second thing, which isn't really interesting, is that this is not an antique. I'd say it's thirty years old at most."

"Any idea about where it came from?" Williams asked.

"Well, there's good news on that front," he said. "It was made in Donegal. By Hendershot amp; Sons to be precise. They were very exclusive jewellers during the '70s and '80s, though they've disappeared into the woodwork recently, so to speak"

"How can you tell that?" I asked, while my father smiled and nodded his head.

"Very simple, really. They stamped the ring with their own mark beside the gold mark."

"What about the engraving, the 'AC'?" I asked.

"No idea. Except I think it was engraved when the ring was made; the inside surface of the engraving is as dulled as the rest of the ring. More recent work would leave a slightly shinier surface."

"What would you recommend we do now?" I said, glancing at Williams.

"Well, you're the policemen – police officers – so I wouldn't want to say. But I'd contact Hendershot amp; Sons and see what they can tell you."

"I thought you said they'd vanished into the woodwork," Williams said.

"Yes," he said. "In terms of market share and so on, they have. But they're still open. It was a side street off from the Atlantic last time I was there, but that was some years ago and they may have moved. Check the phonebook."

We thanked Mr O'Donnell for his help and I promised my father we would visit him and my mother soon. "Do," he said. "And give the kids a hug from me." I promised I would. Then Williams and I drove home.

"Well, do you fancy a trip to Donegal?" she asked as we drove past Prehen Park and up the Strabane Road.

"Why not? Especially if I get mileage allowance for it."

"We could kill two birds with one stone and head on to Bundoran – check out the officer in charge of the Ratsy Donaghey killing while we're at it." Williams said, smiling.

Before I signed out of the office for the evening, I received a call from the doctor who had attended me on Christmas Eve, whose name, I learnt, was Ian Fleming.

"My father was a Bond fan, if that's any use to you," he explained, though I had not passed comment. I nodded into the receiver. Then I realized that he couldn't see this gesture and managed a grunt, despite the dryness in my throat.

"Good news, Inspector," he said. "All clear so far – a late Christmas present."

I almost wept as I thanked him.

"Don't forget. Check again in a few months time. Without giving too much away, I spoke to the boy's GP this afternoon at the dogs. Explained about the bite. He checked for me. Figures the boy was clean, too. So hopefully…"

Debbie let slip a tear or two when I told her, then made tea, as it seemed the only thing to do. I invited her to join Williams and me the next day, in case she wanted to go shopping in Donegal, but she had promised her mother she would take her to Derry. We ate dinner in companionable silence, though I suspected that my kiss with Miriam Powell still played on her mind.

At around 8.45 p.m., we heard Penny calling from upstairs. She had gone to bed twenty minutes earlier and normally took after her mother in that she fell asleep as soon as her head touched the pillow.

Her bedroom is at the front of the house and we found her kneeling on her bed, her head and half her body hidden underneath the curtains while she watched something out of her window. She lifted the curtains above her head slightly when she heard us and invited us into her makeshift tepee. Then we saw what had got her attention.

On the road outside, a number of the local farmers were gathering with shotguns and torches. In the middle of the group, Mark Anderson was standing like some tin-pot general, issuing orders and pointing first at a scrap of paper in his hand and then to various points in the fields around our house. Someone was taking pictures, and in the light of one of the flashes, Anderson evidently saw our three faces peering down at him from the bedroom for he pointed us out to the photographer and said something that caused him to laugh. Unable to hear anything, we watched him silently throw back his head with his toothless mouth wide open, then splutter and cough, before spitting onto the ground.

I went downstairs, pulled on a jacket and went out to see what was happening. The photographer was writing names in his reporter's notebook and seemed to be packing up. I called him over.

"What's going on?"

"They're searching for the wild cat that's been killing Mr Anderson's livestock." He was barely out of his teens and still had the fresh red scars of acne across his cheeks and around his mouth.

"The last time he was called Mr Anderson was in court, sonny," I said, "so I wouldn't waste it on him now. Where are they going with the guns?"

"Haven't you heard, mister," he said, bristling at the 'sonny' comment. "Thomas Powell has offered a reward of a thousand euros for whoever can capture the cat, dead or alive. Says the Garda aren't doing anything so he has to instead. Care to comment, Inspector?" the boy said, smiling at his guile.

"Yeah, you're standing in my driveway. Piss off."

I went back into the house and put on a jumper and waterproof coat and my rubber boots. Then I padlocked Frank in the shed, just as a precaution.

I found Anderson about a quarter of a mile up the road, standing at the gate of his field, which ran all the way down to our home and up another mile or so to his own house. The moon was high and the sky clear, and in the lilac light the veins which had burst on Anderson's cheeks and nose through years of drinking stood out. As he talked, his toothless gums seemed purple and angry.

"I warned you I'd deal with things," he said, as I approached. "You're a bit late now."

"A wild cat's a little different from my dog. Are you sure whatever's worrying your sheep is an animal? How is Malachy, by the way?

"Are you here for a reason?" he sneered, choosing to ignore the implication in my question.

"Just thought I'd keep an eye on things. Don't want someone shooting you by accident, now, do we, Mark?"

I chose a slight rise in the field to lie against and joined two other men there. One I recognized as a clay-pigeon shooter from Raphoe, though I did not know his name. The ground beneath us had frozen to iron and the cold seeped up through my body so that I had to shift continually to keep warm. And there, in the frost, we lay and waited, straining against the dark to see shapes shifting around the sheep, whose wool seemed all the more brilliant in the moonlight. The holly hedge around the field was thick and lush now with big blood-red berries. Small animals skittered through it. Directly above us was a weeping birch whose branches were so heavy they trailed along the ground.

At around 10.30 p.m. someone shouted, and at one corner of the field the loud clear cracks of shotguns rang out a second after the bright gunfire flashes. A number of the men lying about clambered to their feet and ran to the spot where something had been seen, while two men argued about who had shot first.

"Looks like someone's made a grand," the Raphoe man said, getting to his feet. I followed suit, only to have my legs buckle under me with stiffness from lying in one place so long in the middle of winter. I hobbled behind the men to the spot where a group had gathered, but even before I got there it became apparent, from the disgusted shakes of collective heads, that the quarry was not the wild cat they had hoped. Instead, in the middle of the circle of men, lay the body of a fox, its side shredded by the shotgun blasts, oozing blood as black as tar onto the sugar-frosted grass. Its tongue lolled in and out of its mouth, its breathing was laboured and harsh. With each breath, a fresh spurt of blood pumped out of its side. My companion from Raphoe loaded a shot in his gun, placed it above the fox's head and fired so close that blood and tissue spattered on his shoes and the barrel of the gun. The air carried the smell of cordite and burnt fur.

"Do we go home then?" someone asked disappointedly.

"Weren't no fox attacked my sheep," Anderson said, spitting on the carcass. "Leave this here – might attract whatever that thing is."

He half-heartedly kicked the body, which flopped over on the grass, then wiped his boot on the back of his trouser leg. "Back to your positions," he said, then fixed his cap on his head and trod back to where he had been hiding.

I returned to the mound again and lay in a different position this time and lit a cigarette.

"Best not do that," the other man, whose name was Tony something, said. "Them cats could smell smoke miles away. That'll scare them off."

"If this cat can smell the smoke of one cigarette, but can't smell the stink of thirty Donegal men lying in a field of sheep shit, it deserves to get blown away," I said, then inhaled deeply for effect, though the air was so cold it burned my lungs. The Raphoe man laughed and took out a tobacco tin to roll a cigarette, so I gave him one from my packet.

"Aren't you hunting?" he asked, noting the fact that I was the only unarmed man in the field.

"Nope. Just making sure nobody shoots anybody else," I said, adding, "or my dog."

"What?"

"Anderson thought it was my dog that was attacking his sheep. I suppose I should be grateful that this cat has appeared."

"I suppose so, officer," he said, joining with my laugh.

I smiled. "I know your face. I can't place you, though."

"You gave me a speeding ticket a few years back. You were in uniform then"

"Shit," I said. "Sorry."

"Don't be. I was doing a hundred and two along the Letterkenny Road. I was lucky I wasn't killed. I got off light, all things considered."

I recalled the event now and remembered the face, although the man had had a moustache then. He seemed to assume that I remembered his name, so I didn't want to ask. "A red Celica was it?"

"Close enough. A red Capri."

"Have you still got it?" I asked. "It was a lovely car, even as a blur."

"No. Wife had a kid; I got rid of the car. Driving a family car now."

"This is lovely," the man called Tony said, "and I hate to interrupt, but could you two shut up?"

We sat in silence for another hour or so, smoking periodically. The evening was so still the smoke hung in a silver cloud above our heads. At around 12.30 a.m. I stood up to stretch the stiffness out of my legs, and it was while doing so that I saw a black shape snaking its way down from the top of the field just above us. It crept slowly towards a group of sheep that seemed to be sleeping, its belly pressed so close to the ground its coat must have been dusted with frost. I couldn't tell what it was as it slinked down along the furrows tractors had made in the field.

"Stand up," I hissed to the two beside me, and they did so, rubbing their legs while they straightened up. The Raphoe man spotted the shape then and loaded a shell, as did Tony.

They both shouldered their shotguns together, steadying the barrels. The Raphoe man shifted his stance a little, widening his legs so he was standing in a solid position. I noticed the mist of his breath stop as he took aim, and I found myself instinctively holding my own breath as I watched the shape slow and stop, as if it too were suddenly aware of the events which were about to unfold. Afterwards, I would recall that he shifted his aim just slightly in the final milliseconds before he shot, though I cannot be sure.

Slowly then, he pulled the trigger, a fluid movement, and his gun jerked as the blast echoed across the field and left my ears ringing. Tony fired a second later, another sharp crack, like a stick being snapped. Then the three of us set off at a run, stumbling through the furrows and sliding across the sheep dung, scattering the slumbering sheep who watched us with wide, terrified eyes. As we ran, we saw the black shape dash back the way it had come, its running erratic. We reached the spot where it had been when shot, and saw the black blood of its wound spattered on the white grass. We followed its path, the grass greener where the frost had been disturbed by the creature, and saw more blood on the ground. Then the path disappeared into a thicket hedge and we could follow it no further.

"Hard luck," I said to the man from Raphoe, who smiled slightly.

"Time to go home I think, partner," he said, shouldering his shotgun and picking his way carefully back down the field, while others ran to see what had happened.

I walked back down the road to the house about half an hour later and went around the back of the house to check that the shed was locked. I rattled the padlock on the bolt and was turning to go into the house when I heard a soft whimpering from inside the shed. I unlocked the door and went in.

Frank lay in the corner, curled up, blood congealing on the floor of the shed beneath him. He raised his head an inch and looked at me, but his usually bloodshot eyes were pale and dull. He licked ineffectually at the area on his flank where the shot had skinned him, and I noticed that his right ear, which before had hung almost to the ground, was tattered and torn, the surface bloody and dark. His snow-white chest was pink and red with blood, though I could not tell if he was bleeding there or if this had come from the wound to his ear.

He yelped weakly when I lifted him and carried him out to the car. I set him on the back seat with a picnic blanket under him, working quickly lest some of the farmers wandering down the field, disappointed with the night's hunt, should see him and realize what had happened. I quickly ran up the stairs to Debbie, who was sitting up in bed reading a magazine. She had heard the shots earlier and was interested to hear what had happened. I told her to call the emergency vet in Strabane, as I was afraid if we took him to a Donegal vet, word would eventually filter back to Anderson.

I had to wait outside the surgery for twenty minutes until the vet arrived and she helped me carry Frank onto the steel table in the surgery. There, she gave him a shot that knocked him out in seconds, before washing his wounds. I told her half of the story, saying that I had been shooting at a fox and that the dog had run into the line of fire.

"Oh, right," she said, "I thought maybe it had to do with the cat hunt over there." She brushed one of her bangs back from her face with a bloody, gloved hand and smiled before returning to cleaning the wounds.

The shot had skinned Frank's leg but there were no deeper injuries. His ear was badly torn and was about half its original length, which meant that part of his ear, a scrap of bloodstained velvet, was lying in Anderson's field. She bandaged his ear, tying it up behind his head, and put a dressing over the thick white ointment on his leg. Then she went into the storeroom and brought out a bottle of pills, antibiotics to reduce infection.

Finally she checked his eyes and teeth and helped me carry him back out to the car.

"I hope you weren't shot by accident, too," she said, nodding at the dressing on my hand, while I manoeuvred Frank onto the back seat.

"No, I was bitten."

"By him?" she said, looking concerned.

"Oh, no," I said. "By a person," I closed the back door of the car while she looked at me, now more concerned about my mental wellbeing than my physical health.

"Figures," she shrugged finally, taking the money I offered her.