SHE SAT QUIETLY and watched the twins. “He’s the one, I know he is,” Denny said, slapping his hand on the tabletop. “Ah, come on, Denny,” his brother said, “you don’t know anything for sure. It’s been a couple of years.”
“I remember. I remember the name. I think I remember his picture in the paper, in a Dublin paper.”
“So what if he is the one?” Donal asked, reasonably. What are you proposing to do about it?”
“I’d be for doing him, that’s what.”
“Oh, come on, mate,” Donal said, forcing a chuckle. “We’re not set up for that. We’ve not the authorization. You couldn’t do that without the authorization. You’d be in it from all sides then.”
She smiled to herself. They remained forever in character, these two, the hothead and the peacemaker. Donal was too smart to seem to be backing away from a fight; he’d invoked procedure instead. She liked that. “Just a minute,” she said. It was the first time she’d spoken. “You’ve both a point. If he’s the same one, something would need to be done; we couldn’t just let it pass.”
“Bloody right, we couldn’t,” Denny growled.
“But we don’t know, do we?” she continued, ignoring him. “We need to know for sure.”
“If he is the one,” Donal put in, “then do you think we might get the authority?”
“I think we might,” she said. “But before we even ask, we have to know for sure.”
“So how do we find out?” Denny asked. “Go to Dublin and paw through a great bloody lot of old newspapers?”
She shook her head. “Leave it to me,” she said, quietly, gazing out the window across Kinsale Harbour. “I’ll find out.”