“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.