The Hunter

Twenty

Cal is doing the dinner dishes when the knock comes at the door. Mart is on the step, car keys jingling on his finger.

“Saddle up the prize pony, Sunny Jim,” he says. “We’ve a job to do.”

Cal says, “What kinda job?”

“Johnny Reddy’s worn out his welcome,” Mart says. “Leave the dog behind.”

Cal has had it up to the back teeth with being herded like a damn sheep by Mart and his plans and his sidelong dark warnings. “Or what?” he asks.

Mart blinks at him. “Or nothing,” he says gently. “I’m not giving orders, man. We could do with you there, is all.”

“Like I told you,” Cal says. “Johnny Reddy’s not my problem.”

“Ah, for feck’s sake,” Mart says, exasperated. “You’re marrying one of our women, bucko. You’re raising one of our childer, God help you. You’re growing tomatoes on a piece of our land. What else is there?”

Cal stands there in the doorway, with the dishcloth in his hand. Mart waits patiently, not hurrying him. Behind him, this year’s young rooks, gaining confidence with their wings, tumble and play knock-down tag in the warm evening air.

“Lemme get my keys,” Cal says, and he turns back into the house to put the dishcloth away.

The low chatter of the telly is coming from the sitting room, but in spite of that the house feels silent, sunk deep under stillness. Trey can tell by the air that her dad is out, not just asleep. She doesn’t know what to make of this. He hasn’t left their land since the day Rushborough died.

She finds her mam in the kitchen. Sheila is sitting at the table, not peeling anything or mending anything, just sitting there eating toast thick with blackberry jam. Trey can’t remember the last time she saw her mam doing no work.

“I fancied something sweet,” Sheila says. She doesn’t ask where Trey went with Lena, all this time. “D’you want a bit? The dinner’s all eaten.”

Trey says, “Where’s my dad gone?”

“Men came for him. Senan Maguire and Bobby Feeney.”

“Where’d they take him?”

Sheila shrugs. “They won’t kill him, anyway,” she says. “Not unless he’s stubborn, maybe.”

With everything else on her mind, Trey hasn’t looked at her mother properly in days. At first she can’t tell what seems strange about her, until it comes to her that Sheila is the first person she’s seen in weeks who looks peaceful. Her head is tilted back, to take the late warm light through the window full on her face. For the first time, in the high harsh sweeps of her cheekbones and the wide curves of her mouth, Trey sees the beauty that Johnny talked about.

Trey says, “I went into town with Lena. To the Guards. I told them there was no one on the mountain that night, only my dad went out.”

Sheila takes another bite of toast and thinks that over. After a bit she nods. “Did they believe you?” she asks.

“Yeah. Think so.”

“So they’ll arrest him.”

“Dunno. They’ll bring him in there and ask him questions, anyhow.”

“Will they come search this place?”

“Prob’ly. Yeah.”

Sheila nods again. “They’ll find what they’re after,” she says. “ ’Tis all in the shed for them.”

In the long silence, the faint telly chatters busily on.

Sheila points with her chin at the chair opposite her. “Sit down,” she says.

The chair’s legs rake dully on the linoleum as Trey pulls it out. She sits down. Her mind can’t move.

“I saw what you were at,” Sheila says. “First you only wanted your father gone, same as I did. Isn’t that right?”

Trey nods. The house feels like a place in a dream; the row of faded mugs hanging from hooks under the cupboard seem like they’re floating in mid-air, the chipped enamel of the cooker has an impossible glow. She’s not afraid that any of the little ones will burst in, or that Nealon will come knocking at the door. Everything will be motionless till she and her mother are done here.

“ ’Twas no use,” Sheila says. “I saw that early. He was going nowhere, as long as he had that Rushborough fella on his back. All he could think of was getting that money.”

Trey says, “I know that.”

“I know you do. The night him and Cal had that fight, there was me cleaning the blood off him, and him acting like I wasn’t there. He never did see me. But I was there. I heard what he was at. He was taking you to use.”

“He didn’t take me. I wanted to help him.”

Sheila looks at her. “This place has no mercy,” she says. “Once you step foot over the line, they’d ate you alive. You’da been gone, one way or the other.”

“I don’t give a shite,” Trey says. Her mind is starting to stir again. It hits her full force that her mother is a mystery to her. She could have anything folded away inside her silence.

Sheila shakes her head briefly. “I lost one child to this place,” she says. “I’m not losing another.”

Brendan is a swift slice through the air between them, bright as life.

Trey says, “That’s why I wanted to help my dad. To get back at them. He wasn’t using me. I was using him.”

“I know that,” Sheila says. “You’re as bad as him, thinking I know nothing. I knew that all along. I wouldn’t have it.”

“You shoulda left it,” Trey says. She finds her hands are shaking. It takes her a moment to realize it’s from anger.

Sheila looks at her. “You wanted your revenge on themens,” she says.

“I had it. Had it fuckin’ sorted. I had ’em.”

“Quiet,” Sheila says. “The children’ll come in.”

Trey can barely hear her. “They were walking straight into it. All you hadta do was leave me at it. The fuck did you go interfering for?” Fury has her on her feet, but once she’s there she can’t find what to do with it. When she was a kid she would have thrown something, smashed something. She wants that back. “You wrecked fuckin’ everything.”

In the sunlight Sheila’s eyes are blue as flames. She doesn’t blink against it. “You’re my revenge,” she says. “I won’t have you ruined.”

That stops Trey’s breathing. The peeling cream paint of the walls is achingly radiant and the stained linoleum has a simmering, risky translucence, ready to boil up. She can’t feel the floor under her feet.

“Sit,” Sheila says. “I’m talking to you.”

After a moment Trey sits back down. Her hands on the table feel different, humming with strange new kinds of power.

“Cal knew what you were at, as well,” Sheila says. “That’s why he bet up your dad: he wanted him gone as much as I did. Only your dad wouldn’t go. In the heel of the hunt, Cal woulda had to kill him. Or kill Rushborough, one or the other.”

She considers her piece of toast and reaches for the knife to add more jam. Sun catches in the jar, lighting it the rich purple of a jewel.

“He woulda done it,” she says. “I knew by your dad, by how afraid he was: Cal almost done it that night. The next time, or the next, he’da done it.”

Trey knows it’s true. Everyone around her is changing, layered with things barely held in check. The scrubbed grain of the table looks too sharp to be real.

“Cal’s your chance,” Sheila says. “At having more than this. I couldn’t have him ending up in prison. You can do without me, if you haveta.” Her voice is matter-of-fact, like she’s saying something they both know well. “So I reckoned I’d haveta do the job instead.”

Trey says, “Why Rushborough? Why not my dad?”

“I married your daddy. I made him promises. Rushborough was nothing to me.”

“You shoulda gone for my dad. He was the one that brought Rushborough.”

Sheila flicks her head, dismissing that. “That woulda been a sin,” she says. “I’da done it if I had to, but there was no need. Rushborough was good enough. I mighta done different if I’da known you were going to come up with that loada shite about men up the mountain, maybe. I don’t know.”

She considers this for a moment, chewing, and shrugs. “What stopped me at first,” she says, “was the little ones. Cal would take you, if I went to prison, but he couldn’t take the lotta ye; he wouldn’t be let. I wasn’t having them go into care, and I wasn’t having your sister give up the life she’s made in Dublin and come back here to look after them. I was stuck.”

Trey thinks of the last weeks, her mam cutting potatoes and ironing her dad’s shirts and washing Alanna’s hair, and all the time steadily working at this. The house was nothing like Trey thought.

“Only then,” Sheila says, “Lena Dunne came here telling me she’d take us in. The lot of us. She’s the last woman I’da expected that out of, but Lena was always a woman of her word. If I hadda been taken for this, she’da had the little ones till I could come back for them.”

Trey sees Cal solid beside her at his kitchen table, while she lied her arse off to the detective. The thought of him has such force that for a second she can smell him, wood shavings and beeswax. She says, “And me. Cal wouldn’t want me.”

Sheila says, with no sharpness but with finality, “He’d do what needs doing. Same as I done.” She smiles across the table at Trey, just a small flicker and a nod of approval. “No need now, anyhow. Not after what you said to the Guards. They’ll take your da, if he comes back here. If he doesn’t, they’ll go after him.”

Trey says, “They’ll be able to tell it was you. Not him.”

“How?”

“Cal told me. They have people that look for evidence. Match things up.”

Sheila swipes a dab of jam off her plate and licks her finger. “Then they’ll take me,” she says. “I thought they would anyhow.”

Trey’s mind is moving again, gaining a steady, cold momentum that feels beyond her control, ticking through the things Cal said. If there’s Sheila’s hair and fibers from her clothes on Rushborough’s body, those can be explained away; they could have come off Johnny. The wandering sheep trampled her footprints.

She says, “How’d you do it?”

“I called the man,” Sheila says, “and he came. Not a bother on him. He never saw me there, either.”

Cal said the Guards would check Rushborough’s phone. “Called him when? Offa your phone?”

Sheila is watching her. The look in her eyes is strange, almost like wonder; for a second Trey thinks she’s smiling.

“The same night I done it,” she says. “Once your daddy was asleep. Off your daddy’s phone, in case your man wouldn’t answer a number he didn’t know. I told him I’d money saved, only I didn’t wanta tell your daddy or he’d take it all off me. But your man Rushborough could have it, if he’d leave this place and take your daddy with him.”

She thinks back, biting a crust. “He laughed at me,” she says. “He said your daddy owed him twenty grand, and did I have that saved outa my dole? I told him I’d fifteen that my granny left me, and I’d been keeping it for you to go to college. He stopped laughing then. He said that’d do, it’d be worth leaving the other five to get outa this shitpit, and he’d take the rest outa your daddy one way or another. He talked different,” she adds. “He didn’t bother with the posh accent for me.”

Trey says, “Where’d you meet him?”

“Out at the gate. I brought him up to the shed—I said the money was hid there. I’d the hammer in the pocket of my hoodie. I said the money was in that aul’ toolbox on the shelf, and when he bent down to get it, I hit him. I done it in the shed in case he shouted or fought, but he went down easy as that. That big bad bastard that had your daddy terrified: not a peep outa him.”

If Rushborough didn’t fight, then there’s none of Sheila’s blood on him, no trace of her skin under his nails. His body, somewhere beyond reach in Nealon’s hands, is harmless.

“I’d put the kitchen knife ready in the shed,” Sheila says. “That sharp one that we’d use for the meat. Once he was dead, I got him in the wheelbarrow and brought him down the road.” She examines the last crust of her toast, thinking. “I felt like there was someone watching me,” she says. “I’d say ’twas Malachy Dwyer, or Seán Pól maybe. Them sheep didn’t let themselves out.”

“You coulda thrown your man down the ravine,” Trey says.

“What good would he have done there? I needed your daddy knowing he was dead, so he’d go. I woulda left him on the doorstep, only I didn’t want ye seeing him.”

Sheila wipes the last of the jam off her plate with the crust. “And that was the end of it,” she says. “I done right by you then, even if I never did before. That time, I done what you needed.”

Trey says, “Didja wear gloves?”

Sheila shakes her head. “I wasn’t bothered,” she says.

Trey sees the shed blazing up with evidence like marsh fire: fingerprints on the hammer, the wheelbarrow, on the door, the shelves, in blood, footprints tangled on the floor. Rushborough’s body is nothing; the danger is here.

“The clothes you were wearing,” she says. “D’you remember what ones?”

Sheila looks at her, the strange look in her eyes strengthening to a half-smile. “I do,” she says.

“D’you still have ’em?”

“I do, o’ course. I gave them a wash. They needed it.”

Trey sees her mother’s familiar faded T-shirts and jeans alight with tiny incandescent trails, Rushborough’s hairs, wisps of shirt cotton, spatters of blood, matted deep into the fabric. Once Sheila had set this in motion, she never even tried to move out of its way; she just stood still and waited for it to hit her or miss her. Trey can’t tell whether this was exhaustion or a defiance deeper than any she’s known before.

“Get ’em anyway,” she says. “And the shoes.”

Sheila pushes her chair back and stands up. She’s smiling full-on at Trey, her head going up like a wild proud girl’s. “Now,” she says. “Like I said: we do what needs doing.”

The sun is sinking. Out in the fields, the light still turns the grass gold, but here at the foot of the mountains the shadow is deep as dusk. The heat is different, not the naked blaze from the sky, but the thick accumulated heat of the day seeping up from the earth. The men stand silent, waiting. Sonny and Con are shoulder to shoulder. P.J. shifts from foot to foot, rustling the dry brush; Francie smokes; Dessie whistles a shapeless tune between his teeth, and then stops. Mart leans on a spade. Francie has a hurley tucked under his arm, and P.J. is absently swinging a pickaxe handle. Cal watches them without seeming to, and tries to gauge what they’ve come here aiming or willing to do.

The sound of Senan’s station wagon comes to them faintly from far around the bend. It pulls up away on the road next to the other cars, and Francie crushes out his smoke underfoot. Johnny gets out of the car and picks his way through the grass and weeds towards them, with Senan and Bobby at his back like guards.

When he gets close enough, Johnny glances from one face to another and half-laughs. “What’s all this, lads?” he asks. “God almighty, ye’re looking awful serious.”

Mart holds out the spade. “Dig,” he says.

Johnny looks at it in disbelief, grinning. Cal can see his mind skittering for escape routes. “Ah, now,” he says. “I’m not dressed for—”

“You said there was gold,” Sonny says. “Let’s see it.”

“Jesus, lads, I never said ’twas on this spot. Your man Rushborough never pinned down the places that close. And sure, I told ye from the start, the whole thing coulda been—”

“Here’ll do,” Francie says.

“Ah, lads,” Johnny says. “Is this my penance, is it, for bringing Rushborough here? Sure, I’ve lost more than any of ye, but I’m not—”

Mart says, “Dig.”

After a moment Johnny shakes his head like he’s humoring them, steps forward and takes the spade. For a second his eyes catch Cal’s. Cal looks back at him.

He strikes the spade into the earth, with a small gritty scrape, and drives it home with his foot. The ground is dried hard; it sinks only a couple of inches. Johnny glances up wryly, inviting the other men to share the absurdity. “We’ll be here all night,” he says.

“Then you’d better get moving,” Con says.

Johnny looks around their faces again. None of them change. He bends back to the digging.

Nobody wants to get in the car. Somehow they’ve all picked up something in the air, something they don’t understand but don’t like, and they all turn defiant against it. Liam shouts, demanding to know where they’re going and why and where Daddy is, till Sheila shoves him, still yelling and kicking out at her, into the back seat. Alanna, sobbing piteously, attaches herself to Trey’s legs and has to be peeled off, while Sheila retrieves Liam from halfway across the yard and throws him back into the car with a slap to keep him there. Even Banjo hides under Trey’s bed; Trey has to drag him out, while he howls tragically and tries to burrow into the floor, and carry him to the car. The catch of the boot is broken; with so much stuff jammed into it, it keeps flying open, and every time it does, Banjo tries to make a break for it over the back seat.

Maeve gets into bed, pulls the sheet over her head, and refuses to move. Trey tries dragging her and tries hitting her, but she just kicks and stays put. Sheila, battling the others, can’t help. Trey doesn’t have time for this shit. Nealon could drive up any minute.

She kneels by Maeve’s bed. She can tell by the shape under the sheet that Maeve has her hands over her ears, so she pinches a fold of arm and digs her nails in. Maeve squeals and kicks out.

“Listen to me,” Trey says.

“Fuck off.”

“Listen or I’ll do it again.”

After a second Maeve takes her hands off her ears. “I’m not going,” she informs Trey.

“That detective’s coming for Daddy,” Trey says.

That puts a stop to Maeve’s fussing. She pulls the sheet off her head and stares. “Why? Did he kill your man?”

“Rushborough was dodgy,” Trey says. “Daddy was only protecting us. Now we’ve to protect him. I’m gonna stop the detective getting him.”

“You are not. How?”

Outside, the car horn beeps. “Don’t have time to explain,” Trey says. “The detective’s coming. You haveta help Mammy get the little ones away, quick.”

Maeve is giving Trey a suspicious stare. Her hair is a mess from being under the covers. “Daddy’s not even here. He went out with some guys.”

“I know, yeah. They’re gonna rat him out if we don’t move quick.” Trey is sick to death of coming up with the stories people want to hear. All this talking feels unsafe and fake, like she’s pretending to be someone else. She wants Maeve gone, all of them gone, so she can get on with things in quiet. “Come on,” she says.

After a moment Maeve kicks off the sheet and gets up. “You better not fuck up,” she tells Trey, as they head out.

Sheila has the car pointed at the gate and the engine running. “Wait till you see the car,” she says to Trey, out the window. “And then run like mad, after.”

“Yeah,” Trey says.

Maeve slams the car door. Sheila reaches a hand out the window and grips Trey’s arm for a second. “Jesus,” she says. That smile is back on her. “I never reckoned on you.” Then she puts the car into gear and takes off, out the gate and down the road.

Trey watches the car’s dust cloud wander lazily across the yard, golden in the last sunlight splitting through the pines, and then dissipate. The sound of the engine fades. The birds, unfazed by all the yelling and carry-on, are settling for evening, flipping back and forth between trees and bickering over perches. Under the dusky air, its windows shuttered by the reflections of trees in the glass, the house looks like it’s been empty for weeks. For the first time Trey can remember in all her life, it feels peaceful.

She supposes she should walk through it one more time, but she has no impulse to do that. She’s already taken Brendan’s watch out of its slit in her mattress and strapped it on her wrist. She would have liked to take away the coffee table that she made at Cal’s, but she has nowhere to take it. Apart from that, there’s nothing she wants from here.

She picks up the spare petrol can from the dirt of the yard, where her mother left it, and heads for the shed.

The shadow of the mountain has stretched far across the fields, and the sky has dimmed to a dull, filmed lilac. The hole in the dirt is growing, but slowly. Johnny is soft, a limp-muscled wisp next to the dense, unspared bodies around him; he’s panting, and the gaps between spade strikes are getting longer. Cal barely notices him. Johnny, after weeks at the center of Ardnakelty’s universe, isn’t important any more; nothing he does will make a difference now. Cal is watching the men watching him.

“Come on, lads,” Johnny says, raising his head and shoving hair out of his eyes with a forearm. “We’ll find fuck-all here. If it’s gold ye want, at least let me take ye where Rushborough said it’d be. I’m not guaranteeing anything, I never did, but—”

“You’re not deep enough,” Senan says. “Keep going.”

Johnny leans on the spade. Sweat shines on his face and darkens the underarms of his shirt. “If ye want your money, I’ll pay ye back. All this drama, there’s no need for—”

Con says, “We don’t want your money.”

“Lads,” Johnny says. “Listen to me, lads. Give me a few weeks, just, and I’ll be outa your hair for good. I swear to God. I’m only waiting till it won’t bring that Nealon fella after me, is all. Then I’ll be gone.”

“You’re waiting for him to settle on some of us, instead,” Bobby says. Mostly Bobby is a funny little man, but the depth of his anger has burned that away; no one would make fun of him today. “Get to fuck.”

“Ye don’t want Nealon pulling me in. I’m telling ye. I’d never say a word about what went in the river, ye know I wouldn’t, but there’s stuff on my phone. If he starts looking into me, we’ll all be in the shite together. If ye’ll just hang on a few—”

“Hold your whisht,” Francie says. His voice comes down hard across Johnny’s, flattening it. “Keep digging.”

The mountain feels different. Trey stands balanced on the stone wall opposite her gate, watching the road far below for her mam’s car. The fields should have the dreamy ease of evening, but instead they’re swollen with a strange bruised glow, under a thickening haze of cloud. Closer around Trey, shadows flick silently among the underbrush, and branches twitch in no wind. The air simmers; she feels watched from every direction at once, by a hundred hidden, unblinking eyes. She remembers how she used to move about this mountain when she was a kid, feeling herself passed over as too light for notice, just another half-grown wild thing to be allowed free rein. She’s worth watching now.

A gorse bush rattles with the sharpness of a deliberate taunt, and Trey barely keeps her footing on the wall. She understands for the first time what hunted her dad indoors and kept him penned there, these last few days.

She recognizes this as an inevitable response to what she told Nealon. Something brought her the chance of revenge, the same way it brought her Cal, only this time she turned it down. Whatever’s up here isn’t on her side any more.

She marks out the route she’ll take, cutting across fields and over walls, the quickest way down the mountain for anyone who knows it like she does. It’s starting to get dark, but the summer dusk is still long; she’ll have time. She’ll be careful.

Her mam’s silver Hyundai appears on the road, tiny with distance but still identifiable, going fast. Light flashes off it as it turns into Lena’s gateway. Trey jumps down off the wall.

Lena is on her sofa, with a mug of tea and a book, but she’s not reading. She’s not thinking, either. Trey’s face and Cal’s are in her mind, oddly alike in the closed-off, determined set of their features, but she lets them be, not trying to work out what to do about either one of them. The air feels thick and restless, pressing in from all sides; at the window, the evening light has a sickly greenish-purple tinge, like something rotting. Lena stays still, conserving herself for whatever is going to happen.

In their corner, the dogs twitch and huff irritably, trying to doze and getting on each other’s nerves. Lena drinks her tea and eats a couple of biscuits, not out of hunger but while she has the chance. When she hears the car coming up her drive, even though it wasn’t what she was expecting, she rises to meet it without any real surprise.

The car is bursting at the seams: Sheila and the children and Banjo spilling out of the doors, bin liners full of clothes hanging out of the boot. “You said you’d have us if I need it,” Sheila says, on the doorstep. She has Alanna by the hand and a stuffed holdall on her shoulder. “Will you?”

“I will, o’ course,” Lena says. “What’s happened?”

Banjo is squashing his way past her legs, making for her dogs, but there’s no sign of Trey. Lena’s heartbeat changes, turning slow and hard. She wouldn’t put it past Trey to have told Johnny straight out how she spent the afternoon. After all this time, she still can’t predict Trey. She should have found a way to ask Cal. Cal would have known.

“There’s a fire in our yard,” Sheila says. She shifts the bag higher on her shoulder, so she can catch Liam’s arm and stop him climbing on Lena’s geranium planter. “By the shed. I’d say Johnny threw a smoke that wasn’t out.”

“How bad?” Lena asks. She doesn’t understand what’s going on. She feels like all of this must add up in ways she can’t see.

Sheila shrugs. “Small, only. But everything’s dry as a bone. Who knows what it’ll do.”

“What fire?” Liam demands, trying to twist away from Sheila’s hand. “There’s no fire.”

“It’s behind the shed,” Maeve tells him. “That’s why you didn’t see it. Shut up.”

“Did you call the fire brigade?” Lena asks. She can’t get a grip on Sheila’s calm. It’s not her usual heavy shield of detachment; this is the vivid, alert coolness of someone expertly managing a complicated situation on the fly. Lena turns to look at the mountain, but her house blocks the view.

“I’ll do it now,” Sheila says, fishing in a pocket for her phone. “I’ve no reception up there.”

“How do you know?” Alanna asks Maeve.

“Trey said. Shut up.”

Alanna thinks this over. “I saw the fire,” she says.

Lena says, “Where’s Trey?”

Sheila, phone to one ear and a hand over the other, glances at her. “She’s coming,” she says.

“Is she up there? Is Johnny with her?”

“She’s coming,” Sheila says again. “I’ve no clue where he is,” and she turns away. “Hello, I’ve to report a fire.”

The door of the shed sways open, showing the tumble of things piled in the wheelbarrow; the smell of petrol curls out like a thick shimmer. Trey picks up the whiskey bottle she left by the door and finds her dad’s spare lighter in her pocket. She lights the soaked rag stuffed in the bottle’s neck, lobs it into the shed, and is running before she hears the smash of glass.

Behind her the shed goes up with one huge, gentle whoof, and a dangerous crackling starts to rise. At the gate, Trey turns to make sure. The shed is a tower of fire, house-high; the flames are already snapping at the spruce branches.

Trey runs. As she jumps for the top of the wall, something sounds in the recesses between the stones, a hollow scrape like bone along rock. Trey, startled off balance, misses her footing. She comes down hard and feels her foot bend inwards underneath her. When she tries to stand up, her ankle won’t take her weight.

The rhythm of the spade has become part of Cal’s mind, something he’ll be hearing long after he leaves this place. Johnny sags after every blow. The hole is thigh-deep on him, long and wide enough to fit a small man. Around its edges, dirt is piled high.

The sky has darkened, not only with the coming night: a sullen layer of purple-gray cloud has rolled in from somewhere, on no wind that Cal can feel. It’s been so long since he’s seen cloud that it looks alien, bringing the sky unnaturally close. The fields have a strange, unfocused luminosity, as if the remaining light is generated from within the air itself.

Johnny stops again, leaning heavily on the spade, his head falling back. “Hooper,” he says. Cal can hear his breath deep in his chest. “You’re a man of sense. D’you wanta be mixed up in a bad business like this?”

“I’m not mixed up in anything,” Cal says. “I’m not even here.”

“None of us are,” Sonny says. “I’m having a few cans in front of the telly, myself.”

“I’m playing cards with these two,” Mart says, indicating P.J. and Cal. “I’m winning, as per usual.”

“Hooper,” Johnny says again, more urgently. His eyes are wild. “You wouldn’t let them leave Theresa without her daddy.”

“You’re no kinda father to her,” Cal says. “And you’ll be no loss.” He catches Mart’s small grim smile of approval, across the deepening hole.

He still can’t tell whether they’re just here to run Johnny out of town, or whether the men intend more than that. Johnny, who knows them better than Cal does, believes they mean more.

Cal could try to talk them out of it. He might even succeed; these aren’t hardened killers. He doesn’t know whether, if it comes to it, he’ll try. His personal code doesn’t allow for letting a man be beaten to death, even a little shitweasel like Johnny Reddy, but he’s gone beyond his code. All he cares about is making sure Trey has what she needs, whether that’s an absent father or a dead one.

“Lads,” Johnny says. The stink of sweat and fear comes off him. “Lads, listen to me. Whatever it is ye want, I’ll do it. Just tell me. Sonny, man, I got you outa hot water before…”

Cal’s phone beeps. It’s Lena.

I have Sheila and the children. Trey is at her house. Get her.

Johnny is still talking. As Cal lifts his head from the phone, he smells a faint trace of smoke on the air.

The turn towards the mountain seems to take him forever. High on its dark shoulder is a small, ragged splash of orange. A pillar of smoke rises, glowing, against the sky.

The other men follow his turn. “That’s my place,” Johnny says blankly. The spade drops from his hand. “That’s my house.”

“Call the fire department,” Cal says to Mart. Then he runs, brambles clawing at his legs, for his car.

He’s halfway there when he hears the thudding and panting of someone behind him. “I’m coming with you,” Johnny says, in between raw gasps.

Cal doesn’t answer and doesn’t slow for him. When he reaches the car, Johnny is still at his shoulder. While he’s fumbling his key at the ignition with fingers that feel thick and numbed, Johnny wrenches open the passenger door and throws himself inside.

Trey pulls herself up by the wall, hissing through her teeth to manage the pain, and braces her way along it to the nearest tree. The crackle and flutter of the flames is growing, mixed with strange popping and creaking sounds; when Trey looks over her shoulder, she sees a patch of the spruce grove is made of fire, every needle perfect and blazing against the dusk.

The tree is brittle from the drought, but all the same it takes her four tries to hang her weight from a branch hard enough that it snaps off. The recoil jolts her ankle and for a second she’s light-headed with pain, but she leans over the wall and takes long breaths till her vision comes back.

It’s clear to her that she might be going to die, but she doesn’t have time to have any feelings about that. She pads the end of the branch with her hoodie and tucks it under her armpit. Then she starts down the path, step and hop, as fast as she can go.

Birds are shooting up from the spruces and the gorse on every side, calling hard and high for danger. The air smells of smoke, and the heat is churning it: small things whirl and eddy in front of Trey’s face, flakes of ash, scraps of flame. The path is steeper than she ever realized before. If she speeds up, she’ll go sprawling. She can’t afford either to lose her crutch, or to get hurt worse than she is.

She keeps her pace steady, and her eyes on the ground for rocks. Behind her, the mutter of the fire is building towards a roar. She doesn’t look back.

“God almighty,” Johnny says, with an exaggerated puff of air, “I’m glad to be outa that.”

Cal, flooring it and dodging potholes, barely hears him. The one thing on their side is the windless air. The fire will spread fast enough all by itself, in this bone-dry country, but with no breeze to twist it, it’ll lick uphill. Trey will be heading down.

Johnny leans closer. “They weren’t going to kill me or anything mental like that, now. You get that, don’t you? Me and the lads, we’ve known each other all our lives. They’d never hurt me; they’re not fuckin’ psycho. They just wanted to give me a bit of a fright, like, just to—”

Cal swings the car hard left, up the mountain road. He says, “Shut your fucking mouth or I’ll kill you myself.” What he means is If anything’s happened to the kid I’ll kill you myself. He’s not clear on how exactly this is Johnny’s doing, but he has no doubt that it is.

Up the road in front of them, too close, is the fire. It backlights the trees with a ruthless, pulsing orange. Cal is wishing for Trey with such ferocity that every time they round a bend he truly expects to see her in the headlights, loping down the path, but there’s no sign of any human creature. He drives one-handed to check his phone: nothing from Lena.

At the fork where Rushborough was dumped, Cal hits the brakes. He doesn’t dare take the car any farther; they’ll need it safe to get them out of here, if they come back. He grabs his water bottle and the raggedy towel he keeps for wiping down his windows, soaks the towel, and tears it in two. “Here,” he says, tossing half at Johnny. “You’re coming with me. It might take two to get her out. Give me any hassle and I’ll throw your ass in there.” He jerks his chin uphill, at the fire.

“Fuck you,” Johnny says. “You were only a lift. I’d be here with or without you.” He jumps out of the car and starts up the path towards his house, wrapping the towel round his head, without waiting for Cal to catch up.

Cal has never been near a fire before. His old job brought him to the aftermath of a few, soggy black ash and sour reek, sulky threads of smoke curling here and there, but that was no kind of preparation for this. It sounds like a tornado, a vast relentless roar sliced through by crashes, squeals, groans, sounds that gain added terror from their incomprehensibility. Above the treetops, smoke boils in great rolls against the sky.

Johnny can only be a few paces ahead, but the dusk is coming down hard, the air is hazy, and the fluttering glow confuses everything. “Johnny!” Cal yells. He’s afraid Johnny won’t hear him, but after a moment there’s an answering shout. He heads for it, makes out a shape, and grabs Johnny’s arm. “Stay close,” he yells in Johnny’s ear.

They hurry up the path with their elbows clumsily locked together, heads bent, like they’re fighting through a blizzard. The heat charges at them like a solid thing trying to wrestle them back. Every instinct in Cal’s body is clawing at him to obey; he has to force his muscles to keep moving forward.

He knows Trey could already be long gone, by some hidden back trail, or else trapped behind the flames where he’ll never reach her. The air is blurred with smoke and whirling with blazing scraps riding the currents. A hare hurls itself across the path, practically under their feet, without a glance their way.

The crackling roar has grown to something almost too furious to hear. Up ahead, the path disappears into a billowing wall of smoke. They come to a standstill, without meaning to, in the face of its immensity.

The Reddy place is behind that, and everything behind that is gone. Cal twists the wet rag tighter around his head and takes a deep breath. He feels Johnny do the same.

For a splintering second, the thing hobbling out of the smoke looks like no living human. Blackened, lopsided, juddering, it’s one of the mountain’s hidden dead, woken and animated by the flames. Cal’s hair rises. Beside him, a sound comes out of Johnny.

Then Cal blinks and sees Trey, smoke-blotched and limping, one arm spasming from the pressure of her makeshift crutch. Before his mind even figures out whether she’s dead or alive, he’s running for her.

Trey’s senses have split apart. She sees Cal’s eyes and for some reason her dad’s, she hears their voices saying words, she feels arms across her back and under her thighs, but none of those things connect. Smoke floats between them, keeping them separate. She’s nowhere, moving too fast.

“Keep her foot up,” Cal says. There’s a hard bump as her arse hits the ground.

It jolts things back into focus. She’s sitting on the dirt, with her back up against the tire of Cal’s car. Her dad, bent over with his hands on his thighs, is panting. Thin streams of smoke drift, unhurried, down the path and between the trees. Below them, twilight covers the road and the heather; uphill, the mountain is blazing.

“Kid,” Cal says, close to her face. His head is covered in something red and white; the parts of his face that show are smudged and sweaty. “Kid, listen to me. Can you breathe OK? Anything hurt?”

Trey’s ankle hurts like fuck, but that feels irrelevant. “Nah,” she says. “I can breathe.”

“OK,” Cal says. He stands up, pulling the towel off his head, and winces as he rolls one shoulder. “Let’s get you in the car.”

“Not me, man,” Johnny says, lifting his hands, still breathing hard. “I’m not chancing my arm going back. I was lucky to get outa there alive.”

“Whatever,” Cal says. “Trey. In the car. Now.”

“Hang on,” Johnny says. He kneels down in the dirt in front of Trey. “Theresa. We’ve only a minute. Listen to me.” He takes her by the arms and gives her an urgent little shake, to make her look into his eyes. In the flickering muddle of dusk and firelight his face is ancient and shifting, unfamiliar. “I know you think I just came back to squeeze a bitta cash outa this place, but that’s not true. I wanted to come anyway. I always wanted to. Only I wanted to come in a limousine spilling over with presents for all of ye, fire a cannon fulla sweeties outa the window, diamonds for your mammy. Show ’em all. This isn’t the way I meant to come home. I don’t know how it all went like this.”

Trey, glancing over his shoulder at the smoke, says nothing. She can’t fathom why he’s telling her this, when it makes no difference to anything. It strikes her that he just wants to talk—not because he’s upset, but because that’s how he operates. Without someone to listen and praise or commiserate, he barely exists. If he doesn’t tell her, it won’t be real.

“Yeah,” Cal says. “Let’s go.”

Johnny ignores him and talks faster. “Didja ever have them dreams where you’re falling off something high, or down a hole? One minute you’re grand, the next you’re gone? My whole life, I’ve felt like I was in one of them dreams. Like I’m slipping all the time, digging my nails in but I just keep sliding, and there was never a moment when I could see how to stop.”

Cal says, “We need to move.”

Johnny takes a breath. “I never had a chance,” he says. “That’s all I’m telling you. If this fella’s giving you a chance, take it.”

He lifts his head, scanning the mountainside. The fire is spreading, but it’s mostly spreading upwards. Along the sides, there are still wide stretches of blackness; ways out.

“Here’s what happened,” he says. “Myself and Hooper, we split up when we got here: he took the path, and I cut up through the woods towards the back of the house, in case you were coming that way. When Hooper found you, it was no good him calling me, in all this noise, and the fire was too close for him to go after me. And that’s the last anyone saw of me. Have you got that?”

Trey nods. Her dad’s skill with stories is, finally, doing something worthwhile. This one is simple enough, and close enough to the truth, that it’ll hold while he slips through every noose and away. And, at last, it lets him be a hero.

Johnny is still intent on her, his fingers tight on her arms, like he wants something more from her. There’s not one grain of anything that she’s willing to give him. “I get it,” she says, and pulls her arms out of his hands.

“Here,” Cal says. He takes out his wallet and hands Johnny a fold of notes.

Johnny, straightening up, looks at them and laughs. He’s got his breath back. With his head raised and the firelight catching in his eyes, he looks younger again, and mischievous. “Well, God almighty,” he says, “this fella thinks of everything. I’d say the two of ye will do great together.”

He takes out his phone and tosses it in among the trees, a long hard throw towards the flames. “Tell your mammy I’m sorry,” he says. “I’ll send ye a postcard someday, from wherever I land.”

He turns and starts running, light as a boy, up the other fork that leads towards Malachy Dwyer’s and over to the far side of the mountain. In seconds he’s disappeared, into the dusk and the trees and the thin drifts of smoke.

Somewhere far away, under the wordless roar of the fire, Trey hears a rising whine: sirens. “Let’s go,” Cal says.