Three short raps played on the door.
An eyelid peeled open – a strained fissure of sight with a mind too weary to grasp what it was looking at. This wasn’t Mina’s apartment nor – mercifully – was it the coop. The cottage resembled a faded photograph in the hazy light seeping through the windows below. She had no memory of going to bed. But she’d obviously climbed that rickety coil of stairs and somehow undressed herself. A cold veil had fallen over her face as she’d slept, chilling her cheeks and making the bed cosy as a womb. Whatever the hour, now certainly wasn’t the time to get up.
‘Are you alive in there?’ came Peadar’s voice, soft and fatherly.
She tugged the duvet up to her chin. Neither Mina nor the yellow one answered. The unspoken consensus being that if they kept their mouth and beak shut respectively, the man might leave them be. She couldn’t face another day yet, not until she remembered when the last one ended.
‘For the love of God,’ she whispered, ‘please fuck off.’
Another quick succession of knocks came as a response, louder this time. It wasn’t going to stop, like an alarm clock out of reach, indifferent to the basest sympathy.
Mina lifted up from the pillow and raked a hand through her hair. ‘Yeah, I’m up, Peadar,’ she shouted, each word ricocheting around the room like cannon fire. ‘I’ll be down in a minute.’
She dropped back onto the pillow with a dull thud; it was rigid as a sandbag. Hungover again. Eyeballs only burned like this after an ill-judged skinful the night before, the toxic residue left behind by her repeat bad decisions. She pursed them shut, puzzled by the last starry shards of whatever freak show her subconscious had conjured this time. Had she dreamt of her sister again? Or had she caught sight of herself in one of those million mirrors that paved the walls of her mind? The more she tried to remember, the faster the reflection seemed to fade, but that was probably for the best given her tender state of mind; Mina’s days were dark enough without brooding over her nightmares.
‘Okay,’ she mumbled, kicking the duvet down to the end of the bed. ‘Let’s get this over with.’
A pair of skinnies were dragged up her legs. They were Caroline’s but fit just fine. Red socks, also Caroline’s; handpicked from the chest of drawers that’d been so meticulously organised before she’d got her hands on it. The ankle boots were Mina’s. All of the shoes on offer were a size too big and a tad too sensible in their stylings to ever grace her feet, with the slippers being the obvious exception. The throbbing above her eyes intensified as she staggered over to the wardrobe of which she was now sole custodian. Caroline had a tragic weakness for pastels and floral dresses, but there were a few jumpers that favoured comfort over fashion, and it was the mustard-coloured one of these that Mina’s hand seemed to independently reach for. She wore her own denim jacket whenever the chance presented itself. It was one of the few remaining vestiges of the identity she’d lost somewhere between the city and the coast, and acted as some proof to Peadar and June that she wasn’t taking too many liberties with Caroline’s belongings.
Downstairs, holding on to the kitchenette’s counter for support, Mina flooded a glass with tap water and drank until she was left gasping. All the while the laptop was luring her groggy eyes over to the couch. What she wouldn’t have given to pan out on a soft pudding of blankets and scour the internet for some information on Kilmartin Junior’s excavation. The man was an enigma online, a ghost who’d done no more than haunt a single oily interview. There was no way to contact him or any of those he’d hired to dig their own graves. And whatever Mina had read in the wee hours before passing out obviously didn’t merit remembering.
‘Did I finish that bottle last night?’ she muttered to the yellow one as she scratched around her neck. ‘No, wait, don’t tell me. I think I know the answer to that.’
The sky was a sombre slate and black as rubbed charcoal where the clouds floated fat with rain over the ocean. Mina hung back a moment to adjust, letting the fresh air fill her nostrils and rise like an icy flood behind her eyes. Never had a dull day seemed so obnoxiously bright.
Peadar was stood at the edge of the embankment, facing the beach, and only turned when he heard her approach.
‘Did I wake you?’
Mina wiped some sleep from the corner of her eye. ‘What time is it?’
‘Not long after midday,’ he replied, unable to contain his smile as he considered the state of her.
Peadar had dark curly hair, greying like grass in a light frost. His face was unkempt – with a beard thick and wiry as a steel scouring pad – and the underbite made his chin the heaviest part of it. There was a wonderful warmth to his eyes that flashed amber whenever he leaned in his ear to listen. The man had that rare ability to make people feel special, even if they weren’t.
‘Are they friends of yours?’ he asked, nodding to where the sea met the sand and two women stood fronting the ocean and that saddest of skies.
Mina crept cautiously over to his side. This was unheard of. She’d never known anyone to intrude on her beach before. They’d walked down as far as the waves, their long hair trailing back in the wind. Neither were seen to move as Mina eyed them at a distance too great to discern much beyond their coats. Sisters, possibly, judging by the similarities in height and build. Whoever they were, they certainly weren’t Mina’s friends. She never did have many of those.
‘I haven’t seen them before,’ she said. ‘You don’t recognise them?’
‘Can’t say that I do. It’s hardly a day for the beach, but sure each to their own.’
Whenever Mina stepped outside in the daylight – especially after another of June’s loaves had gone stale – the gulls were always so quick to descend on her, cackling and cawing and filling the sky like an air raid. But now they were eerily absent, as though they’d all slept in like Mina would have liked to do, nestled in their seafront caves, wings folded against the cold, uninterested in a day denied the sun.
‘June tells me she’s making a dish for your parrot tonight,’ Peadar said, chuckling as he shook his head at the absurdity of it. ‘It’s all she could talk about this morning, so thanks for that.’
Mina had to will her eyes away from the two strangers whose presence alone made the breeze blow that little bit colder. ‘June’s making what?’ she asked, having missed most of what he’d said to her.
‘God knows,’ he replied. ‘But don’t worry, she’ll be serving human food as well, I should imagine.’
As lovely as Peadar and June were, the thought of sitting down for a meal with them was quickly draining what little strength was holding Mina up on her two feet. That whiskey bottle had really done a number on her. But she needed to talk to them, and dinner was as good a time as any to say goodbye.
‘You’re probably asking yourself why I’m here,’ he said, crossing his arms so tightly that she heard his wax jacket creak; sounds were sharpest when the hangover was at its flashpoint.
Mina’s face was beginning to numb in the cold. And without caffeine, any word picked from her cotton mouth ran a high risk of making no sense. So, she chose to simply nod her head.
‘I’ve to pop into the village,’ he explained. ‘Tom – I doubt you know him – his family own the pub. They’re all McGintys. Good sort. Local heads. Well, I need to have a word with him. And when we have a word, we have a drink. I thought it’d be good for you to get out of the house for a while. It won’t be long. Just a scoop or two. And looking at you now, Mina, if you don’t mind me saying, I reckon the hair of the dog would be the best thing for you.’
‘Is it that obvious?’ She grinned, enjoying the old lad’s company even more so in respect of his candour.
‘June might have mentioned to me last night that you were having a sup. She doesn’t drink, as you know. She’s no clue what that headache feels like.’ Here he nodded at her forehead. ‘But trust me, I do. So, come on,’ he said, beginning his trudge up the hill. ‘You’ll feel all the better for it. And sure, looking at that sky, there’s rain on the way, so we might as well settle ourselves down in the pub until it passes.’
Mina followed Peadar’s lead through the tall grasses. A few tufts had wizened to straw but there were sprinklings of colour here and there when her whiskey-glazed eyes lifted long enough to search for them. The wind had exploded dandelions and their ilk, scattering seeds to the air, inviting a few wildflowers to settle like wreaths on a coffin. She looked back to the beach where their two unexpected visitors were still standing, unchanged, as though the water’s swell held them hostage in a trance. Mina was glad for some excuse to be anywhere else until they’d gone.
‘And how have you been keeping these days?’ Peadar asked, turning his head a notch but keeping his course steady.
‘I’m all right,’ Mina lied. ‘Keeping it pretty quiet, you know.’
‘Well, I’m sure June has told you enough times already, but if there’s anything you need, don’t hesitate in asking us for it.’
‘Thanks, Peadar,’ she replied. ‘I think you’ve done more than enough for me already.’
The ground eventually levelled out and they were soon crunching across the gravel driveway toward Peadar’s jeep – a boxy relic with a thick membrane of mud skirting its tyres. The door creaked impossibly loud as she clambered into the passenger seat. Even the slowest movement shook the loose shrapnel around her skull. The upholstery was sprinkled with sand, and every crevice by her feet was chock-full of dirt. But Mina was sitting down. That’s all that mattered. And the soundlessness of the jeep came as a comfort, short-lived as it was.
Peadar turned the key in the ignition, eliciting a haggard, half-hearted cough from the bonnet. ‘That’s not good,’ Mina heard him whisper under his breath.
Another twist evoked an even sicklier croak, over and over, like loose phlegm caught in a throat, until eventually the jeep grumbled to life.
‘There we go,’ Peadar said, patting the dashboard. ‘Never doubted you, girl.’
Mina sank into her seat, sullenly – but secretly – dreading the hours ahead.
Peadar was thoughtful enough not to attempt anything resembling a conversation, leaving Mina to watch the ocean pass them by in peace. The only proof of life came as a scattering of gulls spiralling like windswept rags over the pier. Its concrete was cobwebbed in cracks, with weeds clawing up where the larger shards had fallen apart. Mina saw fishing nets and ropes of blue and green; some in neat coils, others tangled, all frayed and sodden under the misty rain sweeping in from the west.
The sea had vomited up its worst, coating the shoreline in its signature brown scum, and the air stank of rot because of it. Two fishing boats were tied up, bobbing like children’s toys in a bathtub. And there was a hunk of steel further down the coast, washed up and sunken in the sand. It’d probably been a working trawler – somebody’s pride and joy – back when able hands had a use for it; most likely crossed in their caskets by now.
No one cared for this place. And under that brooding sky, holding in rain like pus beneath a wound, the cold west coast of Ireland gave off the sad promise that no one ever would.
‘You haven’t been into the village much, have you?’ Peadar asked, taking care to soften each word, regardful of her silent, self-inflicted suffering.
‘No, not really,’ Mina replied, stifling a yawn. ‘I’m kind of keeping to myself these days.’
She hadn’t been in the village since the taxi discarded her on the day she arrived. And Mina had only explored the cottage’s immediate perimeter, ducking out of sight whenever a car passed, creeping around its crooked lanes with all the confidence of an escaped convict. There were clusters of homes close by whose residents Mina needed to sketch for her wall. The only way to know who to trust was to study them from afar and hope that their behaviour and appearance remained constant as the coast’s cool breeze.
The old man nodded his head. ‘It’s good to keep to yourself sometimes. And sure, you’re in the right place. There’s nothing but peace and quiet to be found here, Mina. No one seems to come around this part of the country anymore.’
If there’d been a question on his mind, he was content to let it live there without an answer to keep it company.
The village had all the charm of an abandoned outpost. It was as though the sands of time had blown in hard on a gale, burying its past and any soul who’d held a lantern to it. A church stood in its centre, probably the beating heart from which all else flowed once upon a time. To any seabird looking down, the village must have resembled a spider’s web with its priest sitting hungry in its centre, catching the wanton and the wicked and cocooning them in God’s good graces.
Some homes looked unlived in, their gardens bulging fat with briars. A glossy ivy had clawed up from the earth and knitted green quilts over their windows. Mina imagined mould breeding in every dank and dismal corner, those stubborn shadows that no light could cleanse. Drawn curtains kept the past imprisoned. Dust settled. Clocks stopped. And once forgotten, in this loneliest of places, there was only silence and darkness, and nothing else.
‘Here we are now,’ Peadar said, snapping Mina out of a particularly dysphoric bout of reverie. ‘It hasn’t exactly been bustling since the post office closed down, I’ll admit, but I’m sure we could do worse.’
This street was the main artery of the village by the looks of it. Narrow shopfronts were crammed in wall to wall; their balding rooftops pocketed with nests where slates had come loose in a storm. There wasn’t a single plant that wasn’t wild or unwanted, and the pavements were thin as planks.
‘Very nice,’ she said as he slowed the car beside a pub with McGinty above its door and not an ember of light burning behind its murky, sea-stained windows.
Peadar chuckled. ‘If this is what you’d call very nice, Mina, then you really need to get out more.’
Had her expectations for the pub been any lower, they’d have crawled in the door by her feet. But there was a giddy excitement behind the old man’s eyes that told Mina these trips down to the pub were a rare treat.
Following a few light slaps upon the door, a voice from within beckoned them to enter.
‘You’ll like Tom,’ Peadar whispered to Mina before drawing it open. ‘Old friend of mine, so you’ve no need to worry.’
She was accosted at once by the musk of sticky, beer-stained floors and cigarette ash – those wonderfully palpable vices that coloured the darkness like a thousand unseen fireworks. They elicited a serendipitous sense of belonging that caught Mina off-guard, like an encounter with a dear friend somewhere utterly unexpected. She had forgotten how much she’d missed it – the creak of stools, the moody brush of shadows on worn mahogany, the absence of time, and that playful indecision over whether to call it a night or call for another.
Tom was behind the bar, leaning cross-armed with a newspaper under his nose, so at home in that space that he was at one with the furniture; as intrinsic as the bricks and mortar holding the roof above his head. He must have been blessed at birth with nocturnal vision because the darkness was broken only by the dimmest lampshade on the shelves to his back, where Mina’s old friend – the whiskey bottle – must have surely been laughing at her. The air was woollen and warm with the charred taste of woodsmoke, imbued like incense into its every inch. There was no television. No music. Just the calm and constant crackling of logs on an open fire and the brush of wind against the pane.
To think that this had been on Mina’s doorstep the entire time. If ever there was a lure to draw her away from the safe comforts of the cottage, then a draught pint was certainly that. But rules were rules. It would just be Mina’s luck to stagger out of McGinty’s on a Friday night and find Madeline standing there, shaking her head of silver hair in disappointment.
Though two had entered, for a prolonged and awkward moment, Tom saw only Mina. Peadar clearly hadn’t told the man that he was bringing company.
‘How are you now?’ Tom said, raising his hand in a languid wave.
It was the blank page of greetings and she didn’t quite know how to interpret it.
‘This is Mina,’ Peadar explained. ‘She’s been staying with us down in Caroline’s place for a month or so. I thought she could do with a day out.’
‘Is that so?’ the barman said, frowning in a manner suggesting disbelief. ‘I can’t say I’ve seen you around. But then, there wouldn’t be a drink poured in this place if I wasn’t here to do it, so I don’t suppose I get out an awful lot myself these days.’
He somehow spoke without pronouncing any consonants, each word blending into one stream of sound. And yet, stranger still, he was understood. Tom was a slight man, thin and balding, with a noticeable twinkle to his eye that danced in the firelight no matter where he looked.
The pub was as dusty as it was dark and small enough to bustle with only a dozen or so beating hearts. Simplicity was key. Anybody with notions of a cocktail would have to settle for a no-nonsense gin and tonic or take their thirst elsewhere. Beer badges glowed across the countertop like coloured candles – crimson, green, and amber. Low tables at the front. Taller stools and upturned barrels at the back. And there were a few stumps clustered around the fireplace, where conversations melted to whispers and everyone huddled that little bit closer on cold nights.
Peadar shed his jacket on the stool and settled in like an owl on its perch.
‘You might pour us out two whiskeys there, Tom?’
‘Whiskey?’ Mina echoed, whispering the word like a forbidden curse.
Peadar chuckled as he planted his heavy arms on the counter. ‘Trust me, it’s the only cure. Isn’t that right?’ he said, looking to Tom for approval.
‘The only cure,’ he confirmed, reaching back for a bottle.
Mina pulled out a stool, surrendering with a short but brave little nod.
Watching Tom pour her out a measure was no different from watching a hangman tie his rope into a noose. The smell alone sometimes made her salivate: a nauseous precursor to that rising bubble in the back of her throat. She held her breath as she drew the glass to her lips, determined to tackle it with the smallest sips, expecting the worst but hoping for the best – anything but more vomit.
The first sup hit her like a shot of petrol to an engine running on fumes. Luckily it stayed down. She’d hardly even tasted it and instantly felt drunk again, as though her internal spirit level was suddenly off by the slightest degree. Alcoholism was effortless really, especially when the cure and the poison were one and the same.
‘First things first,’ Peadar said as he slipped a tight roll of notes from his pocket and passed it over the bar.
Tom’s tongue squirmed behind his lips as he counted them in front of him.
‘All there?’ Peadar asked with the subtlest smirk, clearly enjoying the barman’s habit of rolling out each note like a child winning at a game of Monopoly.
Tom nodded greedily as the cash was buried like treasure in his deepest pocket. ‘That’ll do nicely, Peadar.’
Mina knew better than to ask.
‘And what brings you to this part of the world?’ Tom asked her, pouring a drop for himself.
Peadar’s eyes lifted to him in a frown that was artfully ignored. He and June had been careful to tiptoe around Mina’s past like the thinnest of ice, but it was a barman’s prerogative to farm gossip when the opportunity arose.
‘I had to get out of the city for a while,’ she replied, wrapping both hands around her glass. ‘Some people aren’t who I thought they were.’
‘Isn’t that the sad truth of it,’ Tom agreed.
The rain came as Peadar had promised, dripping like sweat down both panes as the two men went about discussing names that Mina had never heard spoken before. The lad knew what he was at by twisting her arm into being there. Company without the pressure to contribute, like the old days when she’d flit across a bar without disrupting the dust.
Mina wasn’t necessarily precluded from the conversation, nor was she entirely mute as she struggled to lower the line of whiskey in her glass. They’d convened in a tidy triangle and the men looked to her as they’d spoken, inviting her with every parry of thought and opinion to join in.
‘Any word from Caroline these days?’ Tom asked.
‘She’s good,’ Peadar replied. ‘Enjoying the work. The same can’t be said for the backward seasons but sure she knew what she was flying into.’
‘Sounds awful to me,’ Mina put in, to which their heads turned to her in unison. ‘Christmas on the beach? Jesus, I can’t think of anything worse.’
Tom chuckled and gave his tumbler a gentle swirl. ‘I suppose it makes those songs about white Christmases a bit redundant, doesn’t it?’ He looked to Peadar. ‘But Caroline will be well back before then, won’t—’
The door to the pub swung open, nearly toppling Mina’s glass as she shirked back on her stool. So taut were her nerves in any given second that sudden surprises made them snap. A cold gust rushed inside like a wet dog who’d been waiting for its chance all morning, dragging a flurry of raindrops across the floor. Judging by the abrupt absence of Tom and Peadar’s smiles, their little get-together was a private one. A man stood on the threshold, a black silhouette framed in the grey, eyeing up the room and all those inside it. His height alone sprang the words leaner and longer into Mina’s whiskey-addled mind, raising those same alarms that told her she should already be running.
‘We’re closed,’ Tom said, straightening his shoulders as a show of standing.
His words were ignored as the man stepped out of the rain. The face didn’t count amongst Mina’s sketches, and she kept that catalogue within her mind’s reach at all times. Her artist’s eye had sharpened – not for creativity’s sake but for the nobler cause of survival – and she now drew it over the man with a microscopic lens, scanning for the tell-tale tokens that marked the monsters out from the men.
The most striking aspect in the dim light of the doorway was his pallor, and how it blanched bone-white atop his chin and cheekbones. Long sable hair was slicked back behind the man’s ears and his face was one shorn of softness. With such scant flesh to fill in between the bones, his thinness bordered on the skeletal. And yet despite this lucid air of sickliness, he stood as one of strength with no stoop to his broad shoulders.
To the undiscerning eye, the sum of his features was masculine at a glance. But Mina had learned to isolate the elements. The man’s bright blue eyes bore heavy, coarse lids that weighed them down into the narrowest slits. They appeared much older than the otherwise pristine paleness that stretched so smoothly around his skull. The nose was distinctly incongruous; short and narrow, and almost feminine in its form. Whilst his lips were dark and thin, and shared the same perfect symmetry that ran throughout. He was astoundingly ugly, yes, but it wouldn’t be like a watcher to seek out a pint, no matter its thirst. The man’s coat was sewn from dirty brown leather and reached down to a pair of boots socked in mud, as though he’d walked the length of the country to drink from Tom’s bottle.
He looked to each of them directly, tarrying his attention on Mina a second or so longer than the others. But then, given her society and surroundings, she was quite obviously the odd one out.
‘I said we’re closed,’ Tom repeated calmly, though his rigid stance betrayed his irritation. ‘I’m not pouring any drinks here until five o’clock.’
He considered the stranger as though the living, breathing embodiment of a complication now stood in his doorway. Peadar swivelled around on his stool to face him in a show of solidarity.
Their uninvited guest let his unblinking gaze linger on the barman. ‘Yes, I heard you.’
He spoke in an accent Mina couldn’t place, contrived and born of no particular county. She instinctively searched the room for some other way out, as any prey – having realised their tier in the grander scheme of things – has wont to do. There was no back door and no window large enough to climb through should it come to that. Stomping out the fire and scuttling up the narrow chimney wasn’t an option. All she had standing between her and this unknown entity were two old men who’d already polished off half a bottle between them.
‘I am terribly sorry to intrude on you all,’ the man said in a manner that was far from apologetic. ‘When I heard voices inside, I presumed you were open. This is a public house after all, is it not?’
With walls that thick and a door just as hefty, it was unlikely that he could have picked up on their presence in passing. The smoky air was becoming too hot to breathe. A nervous twitch attacked the corner of Mina’s eye, like an insect trapped beneath the skin, frantically trying to flap its way out, to escape the dead gaze of the one now guarding the only exit.
‘It’s no problem,’ Tom replied, cocking a fuzzy eyebrow, ‘but we are closed. What you heard was some private chatter amongst friends. I’m afraid it wasn’t an invitation to join us.’
The stranger responded with a smile, or rather an attempt at one. With his lips pursed into nonexistence, their corners limply lifted, though the strain was such that they were seen to quiver. The eyes remained, all the while, glazed and void of the slightest spark. This pained expression was held until Peadar’s patience could suffer it no longer.
‘Best you be on your way now,’ he said firmly, as an order. ‘Tom here will be opening at five o’clock. If you’re still around come then. Though perhaps you’d be as well to take yourself elsewhere.’
The man slowly nodded his understanding as his smile dissolved, like a quenched flame in a lightless room, leaving only darkness. A gloved hand was drawn to his cheek as if awaiting to catch a tear. There it lingered, pressed to the skin. Again, he looked to Mina, tilting his head ever so slightly, as though he could hear the hastening beat of her heart. The hand was lowered. There was something funereal about the silence and the slow, deliberate movements that filled it. All the while, the rain tapped the window like a thousand thoughtful fingers and the fire crackled on.
‘I’m just passing through,’ he said eventually. ‘You must forgive me for seeking out some companionship. Because, you see, I have travelled far to be here.’
His every motion and phrasing was endued with that same serpentine styling that could make the calmest ocean unsteady.
‘Such a quaint place,’ he added, almost as an afterthought, sharpening each consonant with that whetstone that was his voice. ‘Do many live here?’
‘Not many,’ Peadar replied sternly. ‘And there certainly isn’t much to stay around for, quaint as it is.’
Here the stranger cast his eyes around the darkness that draped thick as black velvet from every corner. ‘But there is something beautiful in its isolation. Believe it or not, it’s just what I’ve been looking for.’
There was a decadence to the man’s good humour that Mina knew better than to trust. He turned and stepped back outside, leaving a trail of muck where’d he stood, now mingled with the rainwater into a brown pool.
‘I’ll be seeing you later,’ he said before closing the door behind him, flashing one final glance towards Mina, flaring his thin nostrils as he did so.
Peadar didn’t hesitate in striding from his chair to turn the key.
‘Have you seen that lad around here before?’ he asked Tom.
The barman shook his head. ‘Never in my life. But sure, Peadar, we still get the odd tourist in these parts.’
‘He didn’t strike me as being much of a tourist,’ he said, visibly angry for the first time since Mina had met him.
‘I don’t know,’ Tom mumbled. ‘I saw two or three unfamiliar faces floating around yesterday. Maybe they were lost.’
‘How’d he even get here?’ Peadar asked him. ‘Sure there hasn’t been a bus yet today, has there?’
‘Looks like he walked,’ Tom replied, ‘judging by the state of his boots. Bastard, dragging that mess inside after I’d only just swept the floor.’
Peadar repositioned himself on his stool, angsty now, beard balled up into a pout. He was about to raise his whiskey to his mouth when he noticed Mina’s hands; even when gripped around her glass, they wouldn’t steady themselves.
‘What’s wrong?’ he asked, at which Tom also examined her more closely.
There were too many eyes on her. Lost for an answer, she downed her drink in one swift gulp and lowered her head to hide whatever gnarled expression it’d coaxed out of her. Keeping the whiskey from exploding back up her throat held her full attention for a moment, until it returned by fearful instinct to the door, projecting that same stranger standing on the other side of it, his eyes mystically locked with her own.
‘Can we go home, please, Peadar?’ she whispered, glancing embarrassedly to Tom.
The old man’s stool scraped back as means of an answer. ‘It was about my time to get back to June anyway,’ he replied, offering the barman a short nod before taking those first steps towards the door. ‘And Tom,’ he added, ‘let me know if that lad comes back this evening. We might want to have a word with him if he’s here to stir up any trouble.’
The barman looked to Mina, suspecting perhaps that she was the reason for the stranger’s intrusion; that their histories were in some shameful way connected – an old flame whose embers time hadn’t stamped out or a debt collector looking to fill a long-suffering empty space in his wallet.
‘Let’s get you home,’ Peadar said, holding the door open.
Mina quit at the threshold, taking a cautious moment to peer around the street. The man was nowhere to be seen, and the rain’s steady static on the pavement had washed away any trace that he was ever there.
Then why did she suffer that recurring shiver as the gooseflesh rose across her neck – that instinctive alarm triggered by another’s gaze, as the hare’s ears perk in the stillness of a glen, sensing something elusive and sinister, and not of its own kind.