KATE THOMPSON

That Gallagher Girl

Copyright

This novel is entirely a work of fiction.

The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

Harper Press

An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 1 London Bridge Street London SE1 9GF

www.harpercollins.co.uk

Copyright © Kate Thompson 2010

Kate Thompson asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.

HarperCollinsPublishers has made every reasonable effort to ensure that any picture content and written content in this ebook has been included or removed in accordance with the contractual and technological constraints in operation at the time of publication

Source ISBN: 9781847561015

Ebook Edition © 2011 ISBN: 9780007431083

Version: 2018-07-09

For Malcolm and Clara

I am not a friend, and I am not a servant. I am the Cat who walks by herself, and I wish to come into your house.

After Rudyard Kipling

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Epigraph

Prologue

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fifteen

Chapter Sixteen

Chapter Seventeen

Chapter Eighteen

Chapter Nineteen

Chapter Twenty

Chapter Twenty-One

Chapter Twenty-Two

Chapter Twenty-Three

Chapter Twenty-Four

Chapter Twenty-Five

Acknowledgements

Read on for A Reader’s Guide to Lissamore

A Reader’s Guide to Lissamore

Prologue - Summer 2001

About the Author

By the same author

Copyright

About the Publisher

Prologue

On the morning of her seventeenth birthday, Cat Gallagher learned how to break into a house. It was fourth on the list of ten things she wanted to accomplish before she was twenty-one. The first three things she had already achieved. She had learned how to sail single-handed, how to play a winning hand at poker, and how to paint with a seagull’s feather. She had also learned to conquer fear – although that particular lesson wasn’t itemised on Cat’s list of things to learn, for she had always been fearless. Apart, that is, from her fear of needles.

The house in question was a showcase that had never been lived in. It was the product of a former economy, a ghost house boasting brickwork so symmetrical and a roof so streamlined it appeared incongruous next to the un finished structures that surrounded it, their foundations mapping what was to have been an exclusive development of half-a-dozen luxury dwellings. Those houses would never be finished now. The showhouse stood alone and resplendent on a building site that was being reclaimed by bindweed, buddleia and feral cats.

Cat and her half-brother Raoul were sitting on a low wall, sharing a bottle of wine. It had a posh French name and a picture of a French château on the label, but Cat hadn’t paid for it. She’d nicked it from her dad’s collection of vintage Burgundy, along with a second bottle from his collection of vintage Bordeaux.

‘Cheers,’ said Raoul, touching his paper cup to hers. ‘Happy birthday, Cat.’

‘Cheers.’

‘I hope you didn’t expect a present.’

‘Are you mad? You’re as broke as I am,’ said Cat. ‘Anyway, isn’t teaching me the art of breaking and entering more valuable than any old giftwrapped crap? Passing on skills is the new birthday present.’

Raoul was ten years older than Cat. He was a student of architecture at Galway University, and had always indulged his little sister. He had been responsible for teaching her to row a boat and fix a bike chain and skip stones, and now he was mentoring her in the art of housebreaking. Their father, Hugo, had never mentored her in anything much, apart from how to tell the difference between a Burgundy and a Bordeaux.

Cat and Raoul both took after their father in looks. It was said that the Gallaghers were descended from shipwrecked survivors of the Armada, and that they had Spanish blood. Both Cat and Raoul were dark-haired and olive-skinned, with patrician noses and cheekbones like razor shells. Today, Cat’s vaguely piratical appearance was enhanced by the fact that she sported a bandana, and a small gold hoop in one ear. Her eyes were heavily rimmed with black kohl, but that was her only concession to cosmetics. Cat had never used lipstick in her life, nor had she ever painted her nails or GHD’d her mane of black hair.

‘I wonder what Hugo would say if he knew you were teaching me how to break into houses,’ Cat remarked as Raoul upended the bottle into their paper cups before sticking it in his backpack.

‘Being a champagne socialist, he’d applaud the fact that I’m encouraging you in the redistribution of wealth.’

‘I told you, Raoul – I’m not doing this to steal stuff. I just need to know how to get into places.’

‘Why, exactly?’

‘I have a feeling in my bones that it’s going to be useful some time. My bones tell me loads of things, and they’re usually right.’

‘When you become a fugitive from justice, you mean?’

‘When I become a fugitive from our father, more like.’

‘You’ll let me know, won’t you, when you decide to run away? I’ll worry if you don’t keep in touch.’

‘You’ll be the only person I’ll tell,’ she told him, kissing his cheek. ‘You’ll be the only person who’ll worry.’

Cat drained her cup, then got up from the wall and stumbled sideways as her foot clipped the edge of a pothole and the earth crumbled beneath her boot. ‘Yikes! Look at the size of that pothole. I wouldn’t like to be negotiating this place at night.’

‘Better get used to it. Good cat burglars – excuse the pun – need extrasensory night vision.’

‘Let me say it again – I ain’t in the business of burgling, Raoul.’

‘Never say never.’ Raoul took Cat’s cup and drained his own before stowing them and the bottle in his backpack. ‘Let’s go recce,’ he said.

Together they made their way along the path that led to the front door of the unoccupied house. It was fashioned from solid oak, and had an impenetrable air.

‘Open, Sesame!’ cried Cat. ‘Bring on the breaking-and-entering master class, Raoul.’

Raoul gave the façade of the house the once-over. ‘Okay. Your first challenge is to find out if a joint is wired for alarm. You’re safe with a place like this, because the security system has never been activated. You’d be amazed at how few holiday home owners on the west coast bother to set alarms while they’re away.’

‘Why don’t they bother?’

‘Too much hassle if they’re activated by stormy weather. There are only so many times you can prevail upon your local neighbouring farmer to reset your alarm. A lot of those boxes are dummies, by the way.’

‘So which houses are the most likely candidates?’

‘Ones that haven’t been lived in for a while.’

‘How can you tell if they haven’t been lived in?’

‘Jemmy the mail box and have a look at the postmarks on the envelopes. The dates will tell you. If you find bills it’s a bonus, because they’re unlikely to have been paid. Unpaid Eircom Phone Watch bills mean that the joint’s no longer being monitored.’

‘Isn’t there a battery backup on those systems?’

‘If the bills haven’t been paid, the Phone Watch people are under no obligation to let the home owner know that their batteries need replacing.’

Cat moved along the side of the house, and set her palms against a picture window, pressing her face close so that she could peer through. With the sun bouncing off the glass, it proved difficult, but she could make out an expanse of timber floor and walls painted in a bland shade of cappuccino.

‘Why are people so careless about protecting their properties, Raoul?’

‘It’s a sign of the times. A decade ago people were reckless when they bought their second homes. All that money being thrown at them by the banks made them buy into an unsustainable lifestyle, and now they can’t sell it on.’ Raoul shaded his eyes with a hand, and squinted up at the roof, where a seagull was eyeing him suspiciously. ‘The tax on second homes was a disaster for the property market on the west coast. The owners resent every penny they’re obliged to spend on a place they can’t afford to maintain, so they just don’t bother their arses. They’re not going to throw good money after bad – look at the state of this place.’ He indicated the garden with an expansive gesture. ‘Once upon a time the lawn would have been mowed every month to keep up the showhouse façade. It hasn’t been done for a year, by the look of it.’

Cat turned and surveyed the quarter acre of garden. The grass was thigh-high, the flowerbeds thick with weeds. Dandelions were pushing their way up through the golden gravel that covered the path to the front door, and to judge by the wasp activity immediately overhead, a nest was being constructed in the eaves.

‘Keep an eye out for unkempt gardens and “For Sale” signs,’ Raoul told her. ‘The properties that have been on the market for more than a year are the ones you want to target.’

‘How can I tell how long they’ve been on the market?’

‘Go to Daft.ie and see how much the price has dropped. The bigger the bargain, the more desperate the seller, and the further down the listing, the more obvious it is that nobody’s been interested enough to view. These are generally the babies that have been languishing with no TLC.’ Raoul gave her a shrewd look. ‘Now, tell me. How do you think you’re going to get in here?’

‘Not through the front door, that’s for sure.’

‘Top marks. And not through the front window, neither. Let’s have a look around the back.’

They made their way to the rear of the house, where the door to a utility room was located. A look through a small window to the left of the door told Cat that there was access to the kitchen from there. Pulling a pair of latex gloves from her pocket, she slid them on. ‘Do I smash it?’ she asked Raoul.

‘Tch tch, Cat! How inelegant. Think again.’

‘Cut the pane with a glass cutter?’

‘No, darling. You’d need suction pads, you could cut yourself, and you don’t want to leave samples of your DNA splashed around. Take a closer look.’

Cat ran a finger over the edge of the window. It was beaded with varnished teak, in which plugs of matching hardwood were dotted at regular intervals.

‘What’s underneath those?’ she asked. ‘They’re camouflaging something, aren’t they?’

‘You could be right, Kitty Cat,’ said Raoul. ‘What do you think they might be camouflaging?’

Cat turned and gave him a speculative look. ‘Nails?’

‘Have a gander.’

Raoul reached into his backpack and handed her a narrow-bladed chisel. Inserting it into the fissure between the plug and the main body of the wood, Cat found purchase and prised out the fragment of teak. Underneath was the slotted crosshead of a screw. Setting to, she methodically removed each knot of wood, then set down the chisel.

‘I guess I need a screwdriver now,’ she said, pushing an unruly strand of hair behind her ear. ‘But a regular one won’t do the job. The screws are too close to the glass.’

‘That,’ said Raoul, ‘is why I have one of these.’ Reaching into his backpack again, he produced a Z-shaped tool and handed it to Cat.

‘A right-angled screwdriver?’

‘Go to the top of the class. I’m not going to help you, by the way. You’re going to have to learn how to do this on your own.’

‘Why did they fit the screws on the outside of the window?’ she asked, taking the screwdriver from Raoul and inserting the bit in the crosshead of the first screw. ‘It would make a lot more sense to fit them inside.’

‘You’re inviting serious problems if you fit them on the inside. The rain streams in.’

Cat smiled. ‘This is so simple, it’s stupid.’ She started to unscrew the beading from the glass panel, frowning a little in concentration as she manipulated the bit. Once she got to the final couple of screws, she held the window in place by leaning her shoulder against it. Then she prised away the strip of wood, dropped the screwdriver, and went to lift the glass from its frame.

‘Wait,’ said Raoul. ‘You’ll need proper gloves for this. Here.’

Taking care not to let the glass fall, Cat slipped her hands into first the right, then the left glove, and turned back to her task.

‘Voilà!’ she said, as the double-glazed panel came away. ‘Access all areas!’

With great care, she leaned the pane against the exterior wall before setting her palms on the sill and hoisting herself up.

‘Wait!’ said Raoul. ‘Take your boots off. You don’t want to leave footprints.’

Cat undid the laces on her boots, pulled them off and dropped them on the muddy ground below the window. Then she twisted around, slid her legs through the empty frame, and eeled herself into the house.

‘How easy was that!’ she crowed, and her words came back to her, bouncing off the smooth plaster walls of the house that would never be sold, never be lived in. ‘Come and have a look, Raoul.’

He followed her through.

Both utility room and kitchen were equipped with state-of-the-art white goods. The kitchen floor was marble, the work surfaces polished granite. The adjacent sitting room boasted a gas fire and a panelled alcove in which to house a plasma screen. Beyond the sitting room, beyond doorways that accessed study, den and conservatory, carpeted stairs led from the light-filled lobby to bedrooms and bathrooms above. Upstairs, the walk-in wardrobe in the master bedroom was nearly as big as Cat’s room in Hugo’s house.

She wondered what it must be like to live in a house like this. Would you live a life here, or a lifestyle? Would you curl your feet up on a suede upholstered sofa while aiming a remote at your entertainment suite? Would you microwave a ready meal from a top end outlet while uncorking a chilled bottle of Sauvignon Blanc? Would you cuff an infant lovingly when he or she trotted mud onto your marble tiles before reaching for your eco-friendly floor wipes?

Hugo’s house was so very different. Hugo’s house stood all alone in the middle of a forest, and was like something out of a Grimm’s fairytale. It was dark and tumbledown with a cruck frame and exposed beams and a roof that slumped in the middle. Having settled comfortably into its foundations over the course of three hundred years, Hugo’s house listed to starboard, and had crooked windows and wonky stairs and worn flagstones. Hugo had refused to compromise the character of his house by introducing twenty-first century fixtures and fittings: his fridge was clad in elm planks, he cooked (when he could be bothered to) on an ancient Rayburn. There was no television, no broadband and no power shower. People described Hugo’s house as ‘quaint’. But they didn’t have to live there. Cat had never been able to call Hugo’s house home.

She had returned there when she was fourteen, after her mother – Hugo’s second wife – had died of uterine cancer. Paloma had left Hugo and the Crooked House some years previously, taking Cat with her to Dublin, where they had lived until Paloma’s untimely death. Back on the west coast, the teenage Cat, bereaved and isolated, had found it impossible to make friends. Her accent singled her out as being different – that and the fact that her eccentric father was now living with his third wife.

Cat hated school. Hugo had tried the boarding option, but she just kept absconding, and running away to Raoul’s bedsit in Galway. When she was expelled from boarding school, she mitched from the local secondary so often that Hugo made a pledge to the authorities to home-school his daughter. But Cat shrugged off his half-hearted attempts. How could you have faith in a teacher who sloshed brandy into his morning coffee and smoked roll-ups while he recited Shakespeare and Seamus Heaney in maudlin tones? The answer was – in Cat’s case – you didn’t. You gave him the finger, and went off in search of boats to sail, or cloudscapes to paint, or – the very activity she was presently engaged in – houses to break into.

And neither the authorities nor her father seemed to give a shit.

Cat strolled across the pristine oatmeal carpet of the showhome’s master bedroom to a big dormer window that looked out over the building site. How many houses like this might there be all over Ireland languishing unfinished, waiting for someone to occupy them? She reckoned she could have her pick of thousands. To the east, inland, ribbon developments straggled Dublin-ward along the sides of the roads. To the south, the landscape was dotted with un occupied holiday homes. To the west, an expanse of ocean glittered diamantine.

‘Look, Raoul!’ she said, turning to him as he followed her through the door. ‘You can see the cemetery on Inishcaillín from here.’

Inishcaillín was where Cat’s mother, Paloma, had been buried. The cemetry was on the summit of a drowned drumlin, and Cat would occasionally take a boat out to spend a day on the island, talking to her mother, undisturbed by anyone since the island was uninhabited now. Paloma’s grave was surrounded by dozens of graves of victims of the Irish famine, all with their headstones facing west towards the Atlantic, that they might see in the setting sun the ghosts of all those loved ones who had fled Ireland for America a century and a half ago. It was a desolate place, whipped by raging gales that came in from the ocean, but it had been a place that Paloma had loved like no other, and that was why Cat had insisted she be buried there. When she was a little girl, she and her mother used to take picnics over to the island, and swim in the more sheltered of the easterly coves. They’d explored the abandoned village, too, making up stories about the people who used to live there, and had once even pitched a tent and stayed overnight in one of the roofless cottages.

‘Do you miss her still?’ asked Raoul.

Cat turned to him. ‘Of course I do. But I hate her too, in a way, for leaving me alone with that bastard and his whore.’ She saw Raoul raise an eyebrow. ‘What’s up?’ she demanded. ‘You know how I feel about them.’

‘Cat, Cat, you drama queen,’ he chided. ‘Sometimes you talk like something out of Shakespeare.’

‘That bastard and his ho, then,’ she returned, pettishly. ‘Let’s open the other bottle. I feel like getting drunk.’

Cat had never been able to call her stepmother by her given name. Although Ophelia had been Mrs Gallagher for five years, Cat refused to acknowledge her and had gleefully shortened her name to ‘Oaf’. Stepmother and stepdaughter were barely civil to each other now.

Raoul took the second bottle of wine from his backpack, and started to strip away the foil from the neck. ‘You’re seventeen now, Cat,’ he pointed out. ‘Legally speaking, you could leave home, with our father’s permission.’

‘Sure, he’d give it in a heartbeat.’ Cat leaned against the wall, and slid down until she was sitting on the carpet.

‘Well, then?’

‘Don’t think I haven’t thought about it. But where would I go – and don’t tell me I can move in with you because there’s no way I’m gonna cramp your style with the ladies.’ Raoul inserted the corkscrew and pulled the cork, and Cat smiled up at him. ‘I’ll never forget how pissed off your girlfriends used to look every time I escaped from the boarding school of doom and landed on your doorstep.’

Raoul laughed. ‘It was a little bizarre. Remember the night you sleepwalked your way into bed with me and . . . what was her name? It was some hippy-dippy thing.’

‘Windsong. I could never keep my face straight when I talked to her. Windsong hated me.’

Raoul poured wine, then handed Cat a cup and sat down beside her. ‘So let’s have a serious think about this. You can’t move in with me, and you can’t afford to rent anywhere.’

‘You’re right. There’s no way I could afford to live on my allowance. And I can’t live without it. It’s a catch-22. I may despise our dad, but he doles out the dosh.’

‘And he’s not going to cut you off, kid. If you do move out, get him to lodge money in your bank account.’

‘I don’t have a bank account’.

‘Not even a savings account?’

‘No, and I can’t open a current account until I’m eighteen.’

‘Get him to send you postal orders.’

Cat gave him a sceptical look. ‘To where? Cat Gallagher, no fixed abode?’

‘It’s dead simple. I used to do it all the time when I was travelling. You set up a poste restante in the local post office, and pick up your mail there.’

Cat made a face. ‘Maybe I should get a job.’

‘Maybe you should.’

‘Ha! Let’s face it, Raoul – I’m unemployable.’

‘Don’t be defeatist, sweetheart. And, hang on . . . I think . . . I think . . .’

‘Share. I hate enigmatic pauses.’ Cat took a hit of her wine.

‘I think I might be having a very good idea.’ Raoul gave her a speculative look. ‘How would you feel about living on a houseboat, Kitty Cat?’

‘A houseboat! Wicked! Tell me about it.’

‘I have a friend who has one in Coolnamara. He could do with someone to caretake it for him.’

‘Are you serious?’

‘Yes. His wife’s in a wheelchair, and they can’t live on a boat any more. Can’t sell it, either. And he doesn’t want it to rot away on the water.’

‘Where is it?’

‘It’s on a stretch of canal near Lissamore, the one that goes from nowhere to nowhere.’

‘Nowhere to nowhere?’

‘It was one of those pointless famine relief projects, designed to give the starving locals the wherewithal to buy a few grains of Indian corn back in the 1840s. As far as I know, it was never used for anything. But my mate Aidan had his houseboat transported and plonked down in a safe berth. He hasn’t visited it for over a year now, and he’d love it to be given some TLC. He couldn’t pay you, but I’m pretty sure he’d let you live there rent-free.’

‘Oh, Raoul! I’d love to live on a houseboat!’

‘I’ll see what I can do.’ Raoul picked up the wine bottle. ‘Here. Have some more Château Whatever.’

Raoul was as good as his word. Straightaway, he put in a call to his mate Aidan, and sorted Cat out with her brand new home from the place she couldn’t call home. And by the time they’d finished the bottle and left the house the way they’d come in and hit the main road, Cat was feeling buoyant and full of hope.

‘Bye, Raoul,’ she said, as the twice-weekly bus to Galway appeared over the brow of the hill, and drew up by the turn-off to Hugo’s house. ‘You are my fairy half-brother.’

‘Less of the fairy, thanks. I’ll be in touch.’

Cat hugged Raoul the way she never hugged anybody else, and watched him board the bus.

‘Here,’ he said, taking something from his backpack and tossing it to her. ‘You may need this.’ He gave her a final salute, then the bus door slid shut and he was gone.

In her hand, Cat was clutching the screwdriver she’d used to gain access to the showhouse. She smiled, and turned towards the path that would take her to the house in the forest, the house that she hoped soon to leave. As she passed through the gate and rounded the first bend, a voice from behind her hissed: ‘Cat! Cat! Here, Kitty Cat!’

She swung round as they emerged from the trees. There were three of them. They were wearing stocking masks and stupid grins. One said, ‘A little bird told me it was your birthday, Kitty Cat. Come here to us now, like a good girl, and let us give you your birthday present.’

Without pausing for thought, Cat aimed the first kick.

Chapter One

Río Kinsella thought that she had never seen an uglier building. Constructed from precast concrete, it was veined with fissures and topped with a corrugated roof of some leprous-looking material. The grey steel shutters clamped over the doors and windows lent it a hostile expression. On the forecourt, dandelions clumped, and amorphous masses of machinery lay rusting. The place would make an ideal location for one of those murky Scandinavian thrillers.

Reaching into the pocket of her jacket, she extracted an email printout.

Río – finally found what I’ve been looking for! It’s a working oyster farm – OK, I know that hardly fits my boyhood dream of becoming a fisherman, but it’s the next best thing! Might you have a gander at it for me? It’s a mile or so along the beach from the Villa Felicity – or whatever the place is called now – you probably know it? The guy who sold it to me is from Kerry, and inherited it from his uncle. There’s a cottage with it – he said he’d leave the key in O’Toole’s so you could check it out. (I’ve a feeling it might be in need of your interior design skills!) I’m very excited by this – it’s come up at just the right time!

Your friend, Adair.

PS: Will be bringing you back a present from Dubai – can’t say I’ll be sorry to leave!

Oh, God. There was something so boyish, so affecting about all those exclamation marks!

Río folded the printout and slid it back into her pocket, then turned in the direction of the path that would take her from the packing shed to the cottage. It wasn’t a cottage by definition, she knew – more a bog-standard bungalow. But hey – any single-storey dwelling on the west coast of Ireland called itself a cottage these days. The word ‘cottage’ had cosier connotations than ‘bungalow’, and stood a better chance of attracting the attention of potential buyers. The fact that this property came with an oyster farm attached, however, meant that offers were unlikely to be forthcoming. Who would be crazy enough to buy an oyster farm in the current economic climate? She wondered how much Adair had paid for it. She wondered if he had been suckered.

Adair Bolger was a shrewd businessman – there was no doubt about that. Or he had been. During the reign of the rampant Celtic Tiger he had bought and sold and prospered with the most pugnacious of Ireland’s property barons. He had made headlines in the finance sections of the broad-sheets, and in the gossip columns of the glossies. But when it came to his personal affairs, Adair was purblind. He had spent millions building a holiday home for his (now ex-) wife Felicity during the boom years, but sold it for a bargain-basement price when the market imploded. He had acquired a pair of penthouses in Dublin’s docklands as pieds-à-terre for himself and his daughter (plus a couple more as investments), but these castles in the air were now languishing unoccupied and unsellable. He had escaped to Dubai to regroup just as the tentacles of economic malaise had started to besmirch the gleaming canopy of the world’s construction capital. Like hundreds of other Irish Icaruses, Adair Bolger had flown too high, had his wings scorched, and plummeted back down to earth. As he would put it himself, he was bollixed.

And now Adair wanted Río to help him realise his dream of downshifting, and living off the fat of the land or – to be more accurate – the fruits of the sea. An oyster farm, for feck’s sake! Did he have a clue what oyster farming involved? Did he know that it was backbreaking, knucklegrazing work, work that had to be carried out in all seasons and in all weather conditions – mostly inclement because of the ‘R’ in the month thing? Did he know that demand for oysters had plummeted since recession had struck? Or that oyster farms on the coasts of all four provinces of Ireland were foreclosing, their owners emigrating? Río pictured the lucky Kerryman who’d sold Adair the property chortling up his sleeve like a pantomime villain, and rubbing his hands with glee as he cashed Adair’s cheque.

The cottage and its outbuildings were hidden away in a quiet estuary of Coolnamara Bay. The man who had owned the farm had been a loner known as Madser, who had stockpiled junk and bred fighting dogs. On the rare occasions he sallied forth into Lissamore village, it was astride the ancient Massey Ferguson that he used to tow his shellfish to his packing shed, exhaust fumes spewing into the clean Coolnamara air and settling on the produce heaped on the trailer behind him. Locals used to joke that Madser’s were the only diesel-smoked oysters in the world.

Today was the first time that Río had ventured beyond the sign that read ‘Trespasers Prosecuted’ since the days when, as a child, she had routinely flouted Madser’s misspelt warning. In those days, the local kids scored points for bravado every time they crawled under the barbed-wire fence that surrounded the property, daring one another to venture further and further up the lane until the barking of Madser’s dogs became so frenzied that even the bravest of them had turned tail and fled. The dogs – or the descendants of those dogs – had been put down, Río had learned, when their master died.

Their legacy lived on in the form of the denuded meat bones that strewed the backyard of the house. Sweet Jesus, this was a cheerless place! Surely Adair had seen photographs of it online and read the implausible sales blurb? No amount of Photoshopping could disguise its intrinsic ugliness, no estate agent’s spiel convince that this property didn’t come with a big ‘BUYER BEWARE!’ sticker on it. Río wondered for the umpteenth time what had possessed him to buy it.

Skirting a pile of rusty bicycle parts, she negotiated the mud track that led to the back door, glad that she was wearing her wellies. She didn’t need the key, she realised, as she went to insert it in the lock: the door was ajar. Oh, God. This was the bit in the horror film, the bit where you peek through your fingers and tell the stupid girl not to go in there, the bit where you get ready to jump.

Río nudged the door with her foot. It swung open with a spooky sound-effect creak.

But once she stepped through the porch into the living space, she breathed easy. There were no Silence of the Lambs sewing machines lined up to greet her, no Texas chainsaws caked in gore. Instead, she found herself in a room with a view.

Adair had told her once that, in his fantasy life as a fisherman, he didn’t care where he lived as long as the house in question had a view. Beyond the grimy picture window that stretched the length of the ground floor, this place had a vista to die for. The sea was just yards away from the front doorstep: all that separated the house from the wavelets lapping against the shingle was a swatch of overgrown lawn. Beyond the grassy incline, a jetty projected into the estuary, a red and blue rowing boat hitched to one of its stone bollards. As Río watched, a gull perched on the furthermost bollard lifted itself into the air and wheeled away towards Inishclare island, over which the vestiges of a double rainbow glimmered. Squalling seagulls and turbulence in the water to the west spoke of mackerel activity; a trail of bubbles told her an otter was on its way. Presiding over all, like a beneficent deity enthroned upon the horizon, a purple mountain slumbered, swathed in a shawl of cobwebby cloud.

Río drew her phone from the pocket of her jacket and accessed her list of contacts. Looks like you got yourself a crib with a view – but not a lot else, mr bolger, she texted, then paused as, from somewhere further along the estuary, came the aggrieved squawk of a heron. She turned and saw it flap past the east-facing window on the far side of the room – a bog-standard timber-framed casement. The glass was broken, Río noticed as she moved towards it, and the sill littered with dead bluebottles. Brushing them to the floor with the corner of a filthy net half-curtain, she leaned her elbows on the ledge. No wonder this window had been obscured with net, she thought, as she surveyed the dismal aspect. If the view were a drawing and she had an eraser handy, she’d have rubbed it out, for Madser’s junkyard was emphatically not the stuff of picture postcards – unless you were a Britart aficionado.

Turning back towards the main room, Rio decided that the junkyard inside the house was nearly as bad. The floor was littered with detritus: bottles, cans, cigarette butts, plastic bags, cardboard cartons, old newspapers. The headline of a yellowed National Enquirer screamed up at her, and she remembered with a smile how she had once made it into the pages of the Enquirer, whose gushing prose had described her as a ‘flame-haired Irish colleen and erstwhile lover of Hollywood heart-throb Shane Byrne’. Her relationship with Shane had been bigged up as a ‘tempestuous affair’; their son, Finn, had become a ‘love child’, and it was hinted that the only reason Shane had never married was because he was still ‘smitten’ with the ‘first and only true love of his life.’

How funny to think that people reading it may have imagined some uber-romantic Wuthering Heights scenario with the pair of them pining in perpetuity for each other, when in reality Shane and Río Skyped at least once a week, swapped photographs of Finn on a regular basis, and were forever sending each other links to daft stuff on YouTube.

She was on her way across the room towards the staircase when her phone sounded. Adair.

‘Hey, Río!’ came his cheerful voice through her earpiece. ‘What do you think?’

‘I think you’re mad,’ said Río. ‘It’s like something out of Slumdog Millionaire, except you’re not even a millionaire any more. Are you seriously thinking of living here?’

‘I’m not thinking, Río. It’s a done deal.’

‘Jesus, Adair. The place is a mess.’

‘What do I care? I’ve got my view, I’ve got my oyster beds.’

‘You’ve got rats.’ In her peripheral vision, Río registered a furry something scurrying along the skirting board.

‘I’ll get a cat.’

‘You’ve got birds, too,’ she said, looking up. ‘There’s a swallows’ nest in the stairwell. That’s meant to be lucky.’

‘Then I won’t get a cat.’

‘You’ll have to get used to living with bird shit, so.’

‘Beats living with bullshit. There’s been too much of that in my life lately.’

As Río laid a hand on the white-spattered banister, a feather spiralled from the ceiling. She guessed the birds had found a way in under the eaves. Gaping eaves, broken windows, unlocked doors – the place might as well have been flying a welcome banner for a come-all-ye. ‘Shall I give you a guided tour, Mr Bolger?’ she asked.

‘You’re there now?’

‘Yes.’

‘Thanks, Río. It’s good of you to check the joint out for me.’

‘I’m curious. This was the bogeyman’s house when I was a kid. I’ve never been down this way before.’

‘You might send me some pictures. I’m not sure the ones on the internet do it justice. What’s that noise?’

‘A cider can. I just kicked it out of the way.’

Río felt another flash of unease as the can clattered down the staircase. Who might have been here before her? Might she have company, apart from Ratty and his feathered friends? She was glad that Adair had phoned, glad his voice was in her ear. She tightened her grip on her Nokia as she climbed up to the first floor, avoiding any dodgy-looking steps. She didn’t want to end up stuck here on her own with a broken ankle.

‘I’m upstairs, now,’ she told him, looking around. Above her, a mouldering raffia lampshade dangled from an empty Bakelite socket, to her right a beaded curtain obscured the entrance to what she guessed was the bathroom. Across the landing, a door hung off its hinges. She passed through into a long, low-ceilinged room that smelled of damp. ‘I suppose this is the master bedroom.’

‘It’s the only bedroom.’

‘The only one, Adair? What’ll you do when Izzy comes to stay?’

‘I’ll put her in the mobile home.’

‘What mobile home?’

‘I’m not hanging around waiting for the boys in the planning department to sneer at any ideas I might come up with for a refurbishment project, Río. I’m not going to give them the satisfaction of binning my applications, or giving me the runaround. I don’t need planning permission for a mobile, so I’m going to put one out back, and live there while I work on the place.’

‘You’re going to do the graft yourself?’

‘I am. Didn’t I start my career as a builder? A bloody crack one, too. I’m the only person I could trust to get the job done properly.’

Río guessed he was right. She had no problem picturing Adair getting his hands dirty, navvying by day and dossing down in a mobile home by night. But the notion of Princess Isabella – his beloved only child – slumming it in a caravan made her want to laugh out loud.

‘Won’t you feel claustrophobic, Adair, cooped up in a mobile home after all those years living in villas and penthouses and hotel suites and what-have-yous?’

‘Sure, it’ll only be for a short time. Tell us, what’s the view from the bedroom window like?’

‘Um. There isn’t one.’

‘What do you mean? The blurb said there was a view from upstairs, too.’

‘The roof slopes down too far. There’s no space for a picture window to the front.’

‘There’s no window at all?’

‘Well, yeah. There’s a kind of dwarf-sized dormer . . .’

‘And that’s it?’ Adair sounded incandescent with indignation.

‘Well, no. There’s a bigger one in the gable end wall. Hang on a sec.’

Río moved to the other side of the room. Like its counterpart downstairs, this casement would overlook the junkyard: the view would be crap. Unless, that is, her eyes were deceiving her . . .

Instead of a junkyard, what she saw was a marine-blue inlet all a-glimmer in the low-slung sun. Fringed by a stretch of footprint-free sand, this was Coolnamara Bay au naturel, before man had left his mark on the shoreline. But it wasn’t real. The view that lay before her was an imaginary one. It had been painted by a visionary’s hand directly on to a canvas nailed to the window frame.

She let out a low whistle. ‘Well. I didn’t know that Madser had talent in the art department.’ Taking a step forward, Río narrowed her eyes and gave the painting the once-over. In the bottom left-hand corner, a girl was depicted crouching by a rock pool, gazing intently at a red-spotted flatfish that lay half-buried in the sand. The girl was naked, striped all over like a brindled cat, and her lips were pulled back to show feral, pointed teeth. In the bottom right-hand corner was a tiny, barely recognisable signature. She made out just three letters: ‘C A T’.

‘No,’ she murmured. ‘Not Madser. Not a man. A woman was responsible for this.’

‘What are you on about, Río?’ asked Adair.

‘Someone’s left you a painting.’

‘A painting?’

‘Yeah. It’s not bad. In fact, I think I might be jealous.’ Río took another squint. ‘It’s better than any of the stuff I’ve done recently.’

‘Nonsense. Your paintings are wonderful,’ returned Adair, loyally.

‘I’ll take a picture of it, shall I? Send you the evidence.’ Río checked the battery level on her phone.

‘Is there a signature?’

‘Yeah. Banksy. Joke.’ Río leaned a little closer, wishing the light was better: the texture of the paint told her it was acrylic. ‘Talking of paintings, did I see that your Paul Henry seascape was up for sale?’

‘How did you know that?’

‘There was a description of a Paul Henry in the Irish Times auction preview a couple of weeks ago: it sounded a lot like yours.’

‘It is – was – mine.’

‘D’you mind me asking what you got for it?’ Río traced the raw edge of the canvas with a forefinger. It came away dust-free.

‘I got many thousand euros less than it was worth, Río a grá.’

‘Why did you sell it?’

‘Why do you think? I need a roof over my head more than I need a picture by a famous dead bloke.’

‘Did it cover the cost of your mobile home?’ she asked, taking a step backward, and putting her head on one side. How long had this painting been here?

‘No. The le Brocquy portrait did that. The Paul Henry went towards Izzy’s wedding fund.’

‘Izzy’s getting married?’ Río was astonished.

‘No, no. She’s no plans to get married. But she will one day, and I’m damned if my girl won’t get the most lavish wedding money can buy. The fact that her dad’s on his uppers isn’t going to get in the way of that. Oh – hang on a sec, Río – I just gotta sign something here . . .’

A deferential murmuring could be heard in the background. Río turned away from the painting and strolled across the room to where the minuscule dormer window afforded a peek of the butt-end of Inishclare island. She imagined Adair in Dubai surrounded by flunkeys, signing documents with a Montblanc pen. Hunkering down, she thought about what he had just said. On his uppers . . . How weird! Just a couple of years ago Río would never have dreamed that Adair Bolger would wind up broke. He’d been a ringmaster at the Celtic Tiger circus, a major beneficiary of the boom. Back in those days his weekend retreat, the Villa Felicity, had been an ostentatious pleasure palace for his gold-plated trophy wife, who had swanned about the joint as if it were her very own Petit Trianon. She remembered the guided tour Adair had given her of the swimming pool and the entertainment suite and the hideous yoga pavilion, and how she had curled her lip at the unseemly extravagance of it all. She remembered how he had hoped to indulge his daughter’s dreams of renaming the joint An Ghorm Mhór – The Big Blue – and turning it into a five-star PADI scuba-dive resort; how he had held on tight to that dream for Izzy’s sake, even when he could no longer afford to. But he hadn’t been able to hold on for long. Now this monument to the excesses of the Celtic Tiger era was lying empty a mile down the shoreline, waiting for its new owner to claim it. The new owner – whoever he or she might be – was clearly in no hurry. The shutters of the Villa Felicity had not been raised in over two years.

Río got to her feet and stretched. Then she reached into her backpack and rummaged for her cosmetics purse. Her nose had got sunburned yesterday and was peeling. Peering into the cracked mirror on the flap of the purse, she rubbed a little Vitamin E cream on her nose, and then on her lips. Her freckles were worse than ever this year – although you couldn’t really see them in the fractured glass. Maybe she should use this mirror more often? If she couldn’t see her freckles, that meant that she wouldn’t be able to see the fine lines around her eyes, the strands of silver creeping into her mass of tawny hair, the brows that needed shaping, the occasional blemish that needed concealing, the . . .

‘There, done and dusted,’ said Adair, back on the phone to her. ‘I’ve just signed away my condo in the Burj Khalifa.’

Something told Río that, despite the jocularity of his tone, he wasn’t being facetious. ‘Are you really on your uppers, Adair?’ she asked.

‘Pretty well,’ he acknowledged, cheerfully. ‘You don’t sound too put out about it.’

‘You know me, Río. As long as my girl’s happy, I’m happy. And she’s doing OK.’

‘What’s Izzy up to?’

‘She’s got herself a grand job in marketing. How’s Finn?’

‘His father got him work as a stunt double on his latest blockbuster.’

‘Cool.’

‘I guess. But LA doesn’t suit him. He’s making noises about going travelling again.’

Travelling solo, Río supposed, since – as far as she knew – her son had not had a significant other in his life since he and Adair’s daughter had gone their separate ways. When Finn and Izzy had first become an item, their Facebook albums had featured the kind of pictures that had made Río smile every time she browsed through them. Most of them showed the dynamic duo at work and at play as they backpacked around the world: Finn at the helm of a RIB, Izzy hosing down scuba gear; Finn signing logbooks, Izzy poring over dive plans. The pair of them together, swimming with manta rays, dancing on beaches, perched on barstools and swinging off bungee cords. The loveliest one of all (Río had printed it out) showed them lounging in a hammock, wrapped in each other’s arms.

And then, once Izzy had made the decision to embark upon a real-life career, her Facebook albums had reflected this U-turn. The backgrounds of sand, sea and sky had been replaced by vistas of gleaming steel and glass edifices in front of which a well-heeled Izzy posed with the élan of Condoleezza Rice, briefcase in one hand, iPhone in the other. Finn’s pictures, by contrast, continued to show him coasting in his own groove – surfing the shallows, skimming the reefs and diving the depths off islands from Bali to Bora Bora.

There was a silence, during which, Río knew, Adair did not want to talk about Izzy and Finn any more than she did. It was like a bittersweet romcom, she guessed, or an Alan Ayckbourn play. It was – well . . . complicated.

‘How’s my old gaff doing?’ Adair asked, finally. ‘Is there anyone living there?’

‘No.’

‘Still no idea who bought it?’

‘Not a clue. If somebody doesn’t lay claim to it soon it’ll go feral, like this place. It’s already overgrown with creeper.’

‘You once told me that if you trained creeper up the walls of a house it gave it a loved look.’

‘There’s a difference between cultivating creeper and allowing weed to grow rampant, Adair.’

Adair sighed, then gave an unexpected, robust laugh. ‘What a fucking colossal waste of money that house was! It’s funny to think that I’ll be living just a mile down the shore from that great white elephant, Río, isn’t it? That stupid feckin’ albatross of a Taj Mahal that—’ A blip came over the line, and, before Río could remark on his mixed metaphors: ‘Shite and onions!’ he growled. ‘Incoming call, Río, from a man I have to see about a dog. Thanks for the recce.’

‘I’ll send pictures. I hope they put you off.’

‘Nothing’s going to put me off, Ms Kinsella. Bring on that wheelbarrow.’

‘Wheelbarrow?’

‘For my cockles and mussels, alive alive-o.’

‘Slán, Adair.’

Río looked thoughtful as she ended the call. Adair was making a huge mistake – sure, didn’t the dogs in the street know that? But there was no talking to him because he simply wouldn’t listen. She had quizzed Seamus Moynihan, a local boatman, about the pros and cons of oyster farming, and asked him to put his thoughts in an email to her so that she could pass them on to Adair. The bulk of the email outlined the cons. As far as Seamus was concerned there were fuck all pros: in his opinion the phrase ‘the world’s your oyster’ was more of a curse than a compliment. Upon forwarding the email, Río had received a typically sanguine response. Adair was like Tom Hanks in Forrest Gump, she decided, fixated on his Bubba Gump Shrimp Company . . . except farming oysters on the wild West coast of Ireland had to be a hell of a lot more challenging than shrimp fishing in the southern United States.

What the hell. Mr Bolger was a grown man – he could do as he pleased and suffer the consequences. Río stuffed her phone back in her pocket, and resumed her inspection of the canvas nailed over the window.

It was a naughty little siren of a painting. It had a naïve, dreamlike quality that reminded her of one of Rousseau’s jungle fantasies – especially when the eye wandered to that small, unexpected feral creature in the bottom left-hand corner. A ray of sun filtering through the glass set it aglow suddenly, lending it the jewel-like appearance of a mosaic. Río wanted it. Picking up a shard of slate from the floor, she used it to prise away the nails fixing the painting to the window frame. Then she rolled up the canvas and tucked it inside her jacket. She wasn’t stealing, she told herself. She was safeguarding the painting for Adair. If she left it where it was, it would soon be destroyed by the damp sea air that seeped in through the bockety casement.

The damp was infiltrating her bones, now – she wanted to get back outside to where the sun was pushing its way through raggedy cloud, dispersing rainbows. She made a last, quick tour of the house upstairs and down, snapping a dozen or so photographs that she could attach to an email and send to Adair as evidence of his idiocy. In the kitchen, she even took a couple of shots of the empty whiskey bottles littering the room – proof of how old Madser had been driven to drink, and a premonition of the fate that might befall the new owner. But as she went to leave by the back door, she looked over her shoulder at the picture window beyond which the light bounced straight off the sea into the living space, and she knew that Adair Bolger – whose glass was always half-full – would somehow find a way to be happy in this house.

Chapter Two

Cat was lying in a sun trap on the flat roof of the house. She’d soaked every single item of clothing she possessed in the oversized bath, she’d soaped herself from head to toe in the blue marble wet room before towelling herself dry with her scrap of microfibre towel, and now – damp hair spread out around her like a nimbus – she was allowing the midday sun to do the rest of the work. Above her, gulls were wheeling in a hypnotic spiral, reminding her of the whirligig seeds that used to drop from the branches of the sycamore tree her mother had planted in the garden of the Crooked House, her childhood home. How different two houses could be! This house was all steel and glass and acute angles: the Crooked House was all ramshackle and bockety and – well – crooked.

Slap-bang in the middle of a forest, overlooking a lake, the Crooked House could have been a magical place for a child to grow up. Cat remembered children coming to visit, the sons and daughters of her parents’ friends all bubbling with excitement as they explored the secret rooms and winding passageways within its walls, the bosky tunnels and hidey-holes without. The jewel in the crown – the treat that Cat liked to delay showing off to new friends until the very end of her guided tour – was the treehouse.

Cat’s mum Paloma had built the house in an ancient cypress tree, when Cat was seven. It had been a surprise for her birthday that year, and Cat had never had a better birthday present, before or since. The flat-pack playhouses and designer dens of other children seemed mundane in comparison.

The floor of Cat’s eyrie was a wooden platform, the walls constructed from something her mother told her was called ‘osier’, a type of bendy willow used in wickerwork. With the help of Raoul, Paloma had woven the osier into a beehive shape, then covered it in waterproof camouflage material and tacked on masses of branches and foliage. There was a rope ladder that could be drawn up against intruders, and a basket on a pulley that could be lowered and filled with provisions. There was a window with a raffia blind from which vantage point Cat could spy on the coming and goings of foxes and badgers, and a cupboard for her books and art materials. The house was practically invisible, especially when the tree was in leaf: she and her mum had christened it the Heron’s Nest because, if you spotted it from below, you really might think it was one.

The Heron’s Nest was Cat’s refuge from the real world, her cocoon for dreaming, her very own private property. She had hung ‘Keep Out’ signs at the entrance, but of course she hadn’t been able to resist showing off the place to all comers because she was so proud of it. She was even more proud of the fact that her beyond-brilliant mum had made it. Sometimes they had slept there, Paloma and Cat, snug and cosied up in duvets. Sometimes Cat’s dad would come looking for them, blundering through the under-growth and muttering and cursing when he fell, which was frequently. Paloma would plug them both into headphones then, and Cat would fall asleep to the sound of her mother’s recorded voice telling her stories, and wake to boisterous birdsong.

Cat no longer enjoyed the luxury of falling asleep to stories or music. She kept her wits about her now at all times: even while she slept. The last time she’d been stupid enough to let her guard down she’d woken to the shrilling of a smoke alarm, and the greedy sound of flames lapping against canvas. Under cover of night, someone had boarded her houseboat. They’d crapped on the companionway, jemmied the hatch under which she stowed her paintings, slung turpentine over them, and set them alight before scarpering. That had been a month ago. The following day Cat had posted the keys of the houseboat back to the guy who owned it. After two years of living on the canal, after two years of enduring the kind of persecution that mavericks and vagabonds the world over are subject to, she had decided it was time to move on.

She’d hitched a ride on a rig, and ended up here in Lissamore. She knew the village – she’d worked as a scenic artist on a film, The O’Hara Affair, that had been made in the vicinity, when she’d been put up in one of the numerous B&Bs requisitioned by the film makers. But Cat couldn’t afford a B&B now. Nor would she want to stay in one. Landladies were inquisitive sorts, prone to asking questions and making the kind of observations that Cat would not care to elucidate on. Is it a Donegal Gallagher you are? It’s hard to place you by your accent. Are you travelling on your own? You want to be careful, so. You’re paying by cash? That’s unusual, these days. Is that all the luggage you have? You’re sure? Fill in the register, if you’d be so kind. Signature and ID, please.

Cat hated registers, as she hated all manner of form-filling. She couldn’t get her head round the bureaucracy, any more than she could understand why she had to divulge all kinds of personal stuff to the faceless penpushers who processed the info. Who wanted to know this stuff about her? Why did they want to know it? What was in it for them, and why did they have to make life so unnecessarily, so infuriatingly complicated?

Raoul had offered to help her complete an application form once, for a mobile phone contract, but when she got a load of the stuff you’d need to get one – ID, utility bills, bank account details – she had despaired, and opted for a pay-as-you-go instead.

That pay-as-you-go sounded now, alerting her to a text. She knew who the sender was without having to consult the display. Raoul was the only person in the world who knew her number.

Where are you, Catkin? she read.

In a gud place, she texted back.

Be more specific.

On a roof in lisamor.

I should have guessed. Tin?

No but it is hot.

I like it. Keep your phone turned on. I have news for you.

OK.

News. Good. She hoped it had to do with the house-sitting gig he’d told her about.

A couple of academics, friends of Raoul’s in Galway, were taking a year’s sabbatical in New Mexico, and they needed someone to dust their books and water their marijuana plants and play with their dog while they were away. The house in question was near the village of Kilrowan, and came complete with river views and a light-filled conservatory that Cat could use as a studio. It was ideal, Raoul had told her and – more importantly – it was timely, for since Cat had become a person of no fixed abode, money had become a problem.

She had phoned her father to tell him to stop sending her allowance to the houseboat and that she’d alert him to her new address as soon as she knew it herself. She was chancing her arm, she knew: she was nineteen now, and past the age when she could expect any kind of parental support. But, hey: she was Hugo’s only daughter, she’d been motherless from the age of fourteen, and since the only affection she had ever received from her father had been of that maudlin variety that alcoholics bestow capriciously and indiscriminately, the very least he could do was cough up a few bob to keep her off the streets. It wasn’t as if he couldn’t afford it.

Her phone rang.

‘Raoul! You punk! It’s been ages since you called.’

‘I could say the same thing about you, little sister.’

‘I can’t afford to make calls. You know that. How are you? How’s your new lady? Tell me everything.’

Her questions went unanswered. ‘I’ve bad news, Cat.’

‘Shit.’ Cat furled herself into a sitting position and reached for her sarong. ‘What’s up?’

‘Your house-sitting gig’s gone to a more deserving cause.’

‘A more deserving cause! Is that some kind of joke? Whose cause could be more deserving than mine? I’m homeless and broke.’

‘I’m sorry, Cat. Their nephew’s volunteered to do it. He’s just been made redundant.’

Cat looked up at the sky, narrowing her eyes against the sun, and watched a tern plummet seaward. ‘Bummer,’ she said. ‘I kinda liked the idea of living in a house with a conservatory.’

‘Where are you now?’

‘On a roof in Lissamore. I told you in my text.’

‘Whose roof?’

‘I dunno whose roof it is. It belongs to one of those great big holiday villas that were being built all over the place when we Irish thought we were millionaires.’

‘Posh?’

‘Yeah. But it looks like no one’s been near it for yonks, so I decided to breathe a little life into the joint.’

‘How long have you been there?’

Cat considered. ‘A week. Maybe longer. What day is it?’

‘Friday. How did you get in?’

‘How do you think? That right-angled screwdriver you gave me has proved mighty handy, Raoul.’

She heard him sigh in her ear. ‘OK, sweetheart. You’ve had your fun. Don’t you think it’s time you went home and did some thinking about your future?’

‘Home? Where’s that?’

‘The Crooked House.’

‘Don’t make me laugh, Raoul. That ain’t my home any more than it’s yours.’

‘Then come to Galway.’

‘I’m not moving in with you, bro.’

‘Then what the hell are you going to do? You said it yourself – you’re homeless and broke.’

Cat got to her feet, yawned and stretched. ‘I guess I’ll have to do that poste restante thing,’ she said, strolling to the parapet and looking down, ‘and get Dad to send cash to the post office here until I find myself some kind of fixed abode.’

‘Cash? Hugo sends you cash? I thought it was cheques?’

‘No. It’s always been cash. Sure, what would I do with a cheque when I’ve no bank account?’

‘Nobody deals in cash nowadays, Cat! How does he send it?’

‘Like the way you would to a kid on their birthday. In a card. He even managed to find a Hallmark one once that had “To a Special Daughter” on it. That made me fall about.’

On the other end of the phone, she heard Raoul sigh again. He must be thinking – he always sighed when he was thinking hard.

‘Has he upped it?’

‘Upped what?’

‘The money he sends you?’

‘No. It’s still a hundred a week.’

‘And that’s all you’ve been living off?’

Cat shrugged. ‘It’s plenty. Sure, I had no rent to pay on the houseboat, and what would I spend money on apart from food and art materials?’

‘Most nineteen-year-olds would have an answer to that.’

‘Maybe. I don’t know any nineteen-year-olds, so I don’t know how they spend their money.’

‘They spend it on clothes. Music. Games.’

‘Clothes.’ Cat looked down at the sarong wrapped around her nakedness. ‘Hm. Maybe I could use a few new clothes. My boots are in bits, and some fucker stole my jacket.’

‘What fucker?’

‘The fucker who set fire to my paintings. He probably thought there was stuff in the pockets.’

‘Did he get anything?’

‘A little cash. Twenty euro, maybe.’

‘No cards? No ID?’

‘I don’t have any cards. Or ID. Apart from that fake student one.’

‘You’ve still no passport?’

‘I’ve never needed one, Raoul.’

‘We’ll have to remedy that, Catkin. You gotta see some of the world.’

‘Right now, this corner of the world suits me fine.’

Beyond the parapet, the dark blue line of the horizon stretched from east to west, dividing sea from sky and trailing a cluster of cabochon emerald islands in its wake. Cat had been painting variations on this view for the past six days, including, as she always did, a little self-portrait. Her minxy self – Catgirl – diving off a pier, or dancing down a sand dune, or shimmying up a drumlin. Having run out of canvas, and with no money to buy more, she’d taken to cutting old rolls of wallpaper into twelve-by-eighteen-inch rectangles.

‘Anyway, seeing the world costs money, bro,’ she resumed. ‘And that brings us nicely to where we came in. I’m going to have to phone Hugo and beg.’

‘Have you spoken to him recently?’ Raoul asked.

‘Dad? Are you mad? No.’

‘He’s not well, Cat.’

‘Of course he’s not well. He’s a raving alcoholic.’

‘It’s worse than that. He’s not painting.’

‘He’s blocked?’

‘Either that, or he’s burnt out.’

‘Oo-er. That is bad news.’

Cat leaned on the parapet and watched the progress of a tiny spider crawling along a fissure in the concrete. A money spider! Maybe if she turned her hand over, it would cross her palm and bring her luck? She crooked a forefinger, to coax it in the right direction.

‘How’s Ophelia coping?’ she asked.

‘She’s covering up quite well. I have to say I’ve a grudging admiration for her. She even managed to drag Hugo out to some dinner that was being given in his honour last week. The pics were all over the papers.’

‘Well, it’s in her interest to cover things up, isn’t it? What’ll become of her status as muse and keeper of the votive flame when Dad finally burns out? Our Oaf loves the limelight. She won’t like being a nobody.’ The spider emerged from the crack and started to scale Cat’s hand. Yes!

‘She’ll find some way around it. She’s a survivor. And she’s no eejit.’

That was true. When it came to finding her spotlight, Raoul and Cat’s stepmother was exceptionally clever. She’d been an actress in a former life, and – conscious that she was approaching her best before date – she’d been glad to fill the vacancy left when Paloma wearied of her role as Hugo Gallagher’s muse and ran away from the Crooked House, taking their only daughter with her. There was a lot of artyfarty crap talked about being a muse, Cat had learned. It was a thankless job really – a bit like being an unpaid minder to a grown-up baby. It wasn’t about lolling around on divans eating grapes and quaffing champagne: it was about cooking and cleaning and nagging and making sure that money was coming in to pay the bills. Cat remembered her mother locking Hugo into his studio for hours on end, not letting him out until he had something concrete to send to his gallery. Then, when payment finally came through, Paloma would spend a day feverishly scribbling cheques to all their creditors and writing thank-you letters to those local tradesmen who had been patient with her – the butcher and the plumber and the market gardener (all of whom were, Cat suspected, a little in love with her mother). She remembered how, on the day electricity was reconnected after three weeks of suppers cooked on a Primus stove and homework done by candlelight, she and her mother had celebrated by making buckets of popcorn, turning on lights all over the house and playing Madonna at full blast. Hugo had celebrated by going off on a pub crawl that had lasted three days.

But things had changed since then. In Paloma’s time, Hugo had been on the cusp of success: now he was feted as one of Ireland’s greatest living painters. Paloma’s successor, the lovely Ophelia, could afford to hire someone to do the cooking and cleaning. She could shop till she dropped online (now that broadband had finally infiltrated the Crooked House), have all her bills paid by direct debit, and not be obliged to dream up outlandish excuses for creditors.

‘How did Dad look, in the pictures?’ she asked Raoul.

‘Distinguished as ever, according to the caption. You wouldn’t think he was burnt out.’

‘What about her?’

‘She looked great.’

Cat didn’t want to hear this. She would have loved it if Raoul had told her instead that Ophelia had looked awful, playing up to the camera like the WAG she was at heart. But her stepmother had modified her look since she and Hugo had first met. In the early days, Oaf had traded on an overt sex appeal that turned heads – and pages in the tabloids. Once she had Hugo in her sights she had toned things down, knowing that her wannabe image was inappropriate for a gal who was auditioning for the role of real-life muse to a national treasure. Now she was more country girl than siren – softer, earthier, even a little curvier. The last magazine spread Cat had chanced upon had featured Oaf in full-on bucolic mode, waxing lyrical about life in the Crooked House and her role as homemaker and devoted wife to Hugo Gallagher. Clad in dungarees and wellies, hair artfully dishevelled, she’d been pictured scattering corn for her hens and feeding her pretty little goats.

‘She’s bringing out a book, by the way,’ remarked Raoul.

‘What? Oaf is? But she has the imagination of a flea!’

‘You don’t need to have an imagination to write a book any more. You just need to be a celebrity. And/or photogenic. Ophelia will milk her celebrity for what it’s worth. Like I said, she’s a survivor.’

Cat’s lip curled. ‘It won’t be much longer before she’s unmasked.’

‘What makes you say that?’

‘She’s a liar, and not a very good one. It takes one to know one, Raoul, and I’ve had her number for ages.’

‘I’m sorry to say that I quite like her.’

‘Ah, but you’re not a liar, Raoul. You don’t understand the way our minds work. She knows how to push your buttons, just like she knows how to push Hugo’s.’

‘But she can’t push yours?’

‘No. And that’s why she hates me.’

‘Aren’t you being just a little OTT, Catkin?’

‘No. My instinct is right on this one. It’s that feeling I told you about – the one I get in my bones. Trust me.’

‘But you’ve just admitted to being a liar. How can I trust you?’

She could hear the smile in his voice, and she smiled back. ‘Blood ties, Raoul. We’re family.’

The spider that had been travelling across Cat’s palm began to lower itself effortlessly over the parapet on a lanyard of silk.

‘Oh!’ she said, gazing downward. ‘Whaddayaknow! I got company.’

‘What?’ Raoul’s voice on the phone sounded alarmed. ‘No worries. It’s just some local ICA types. They’ve descended on the next-door allotment.’

‘ICA?’

‘Irish Countrywomen’s Association. There’s a market-garden-type place right next to this house – very convenient, I have to say, for poor starving me. I’ve been feasting on organic produce all week.’

‘You’ve been robbing an allotment, Cat? You’re going to get yourself into trouble.’

Cat affected an injured tone. ‘What else is a gal to do, bro, when her daddy done gone and left her broke?’ From below came the sound of women’s laughter. They were unpacking a picnic hamper, Cat saw, and laying out rugs and cushions under the apple trees. They were clearly going to be there for some time. ‘They’d make a great subject for a painting,’ she remarked. ‘I could put one of them in the nude, like Manet’s Déjeuner sur l’Herbe.’

‘Cat?’

‘Yes.’

There was a pause. ‘Nothing.’

‘Nothing will come of nothing. That’s Shakespeare, ain’t it? Better go, bro.’

Cat pressed ‘end call’, and stood staring at the display on her phone for some moments. She knew what Raoul had been going to say. He was going to tell her to get her ass back to school, get some qualifications, and get a job. He was going to tell her that she couldn’t carry on living the way she had for the past couple of years, and that it was time for her to wise up. He was going to tell her to get real, to get a life. But Cat had a life. She had a life that suited her. And she didn’t want to get real. Not just yet.

Another laugh drifted up from the allotment. It really would make a great subject for a painting. Fête Champêtre, Irish style. A bunch of middle-aged country women gossiping over ham sandwiches and flasks of tea, swapping recipes and showing off pictures of their grandchildren. Very petit genre, as her art teacher would have said! Cat pulled a scrunchy off her wrist, scraped up her mass of damp hair and wound it into a knot on the top of her head. Then she flexed her fingers. It was time to go cut some wallpaper.

Río emerged from the water and shook salt droplets from her hair. A swim was the only surefire way to clear a gal’s head after knocking back quantities of iced Cointreau and gin in the afternoon. Above her on the terraced slopes her sister Dervla was strolling between raspberry canes and strawberry beds, sampling produce; while under the shade of a parasol, recumbent on cushions, Fleur was leafing through a magazine and murmuring love songs to her baby. The words of some French nursery rhyme came floating down to the shore – Alouette, gentille alouette, alouette, je te plumerai . . .

This was the third picnic they’d enjoyed this summer. The first had been organised by Río, whose orchard it was. She had provided cold Spanish omelette, red wine and Rice Krispie buns. Picnic number two had featured champagne, finger sandwiches and exquisite miniature pastries, courtesy of Fleur. Today, Dervla had brought along a cocktail shaker (she mixed a mean White Lady) and canapés requisitioned from the eightieth birthday celebration she’d hosted the night before.

So far, the picnics had been a great success. They’d been lucky with the weather, they’d been able to synchronise time off work; they’d even solved the drink/drive problem by organising transport. Today, because all his regular drivers were otherwise employed, the owner of the local hackney company had dropped them off at Río’s orchard himself – in a Merc, no less. In an hour’s time he would pick them up and deliver them back to their respective addresses. Dervla would be dropped off at the mews behind the Old Rectory, the state-of-the-art retirement home she ran with her husband Christian; Fleur would return to her duplex above Fleurissima, the bijou boutique that had been her pride and joy until the arrival of baby Marguerite; and Río would climb the stairs to the apartment that boasted a grand view of Lissamore harbour and its fishing boats, where she lived on her own.

The view was what she loved most about her apartment. She had never read E.M. Forster’s A Room With a View, but she didn’t need to. The title said it all. How could anyone live in a room that didn’t have a view? For Río, that was unthinkable.

Río’s balcony presented her with a different picture of the village every day, according to the vagaries of the weather. On a fine day, the village was carnival-coloured: a riot of hanging baskets and brightly painted hulls bobbing on the water and all manner of summer accessories outside the corner shop – beach balls and shrimping nets and sun hats and display stands of pretty postcards. This was the view inhabited by tourists, who wandered the main street of the village, licking ice-cream cones and taking pictures with their camera phones. Río preferred the view in the winter months, when the street was deserted and the mountains on the horizon wore an icing-sugar dusting of snow and the skies were so big and breathtakingly blue that you felt no picture could do them justice.

However, Lissamore and its environs simply begged to be photographed. On occasion, Río had come across tourists who had wandered off the beaten track, and strayed into her orchard with their BlackBerries and iPhones. They would apologise, say that they hoped they were not trespassing, and Río would say ‘Arra, divil a bit’ in her best brogue, and offer them samples of whatever was in season – blueberries or goosegogs or apples. And then she was delighted when these visitors contacted her via Facebook and posted photographs of her orchard on their walls and exhorted all their friends to visit Lissamore and buy Río’s produce from her stall at the weekly Sunday market.

The three women had hit upon the orchard as the rendezv ous for their summer junkets because no one could bother them there. None of them ever had windows for so-called ‘me’ time, so they’d opted for ‘us’ time instead, and the picnics were designated stress-free events. In the orchard, Fleur couldn’t ‘just run downstairs’ to deal with a delivery or a fussy customer, and Dervla couldn’t ‘just nip next door’ to check on how a new resident was settling in. And while they were there, Río wasn’t allowed to fret over greenfly or weevils or mealy bugs. Río’s orchard was their very own Garden of Eden, their private piece of paradise.

Reaching for her towel, Río glanced up at the Villa Felicity, the house that had once belonged to Adair. Since he had sold it, it was rumoured to have changed hands a couple of times, and it now wore the look of an unwanted frock in a second-hand shop. Or that’s how Fleur – with her penchant for sartorial imagery – had put it. Río liked that the place was empty. She liked to be able to skinny-dip here unseen, she liked to be able to work in her garden unobserved, she liked to be able to lounge in the hammock she had strung up between two apple trees, knowing that she had this corner of Coolnamara all to herself. No one in the world could reach her here, except . . .

From above, came the sound of her phone – the ringtone that announced that Finn was calling.

. . . except Finn.

Río was off the starter’s blocks, wrapping her towel around her, and sprinting up the beach towards the orchard gate.

‘Your phone, Río!’ called Fleur. ‘Shall I answer it for you?’

‘Please!’ The ringtone stopped, and Río heard Fleur’s low laugh. ‘No, Finn! It’s your godmother here! Hang on two seconds, she’s on her way. Here she comes, tearing up the path like Roadrunner.’

Breathless, Río joined Fleur on the rug, and held out a hand for the phone. ‘Finn!’ she said into the mouthpiece. ‘What’s up?’

‘Hey, Ma,’ came her son’s laconic greeting.

‘Why are you phoning the mobile? What has you so flathulach? Why not wait to Skype later?’

‘I’m a bit all over the place, today.’

Río did some quick mental arithmetic. ‘It must be eight o’clock in the morning in LA. What has you up so early?’

‘The clock says four p.m. where I am.’

‘So you’re not in LA? What’s going on?’

‘Are you heading home soon, Ma?’

‘In about an hour. Why?’

‘Then I can tell you the good news in person.’

‘What do you mean, in person?’

‘I’ll be in Lissamore in a couple of hours, unless Galway airport’s closed again. I’m in Heathrow now.’

‘You brat! You never told me you were coming home! Holy moly, Finn – that’s fantastic news!’

‘Glad you think so, Ma. But there’s more.’

‘More good news? What?’

There was a smile in Finn’s voice when he replied.

‘It’s a surprise,’ he said.

Chapter Three

From: ed@sundayinsignia.ie

To: Keeley Considine

Subject: Re: Extended break

Hi, Keeley.

So you’ve got yourself a cottage in Lissamore?

Nice. Pity about the tax on second homes though, ain’t it ;b

Enjoy your ‘extended break’, but please note that I’m holding you to your contract, which has a further three weeks to run. (Not having broadband is no excuse. I Googled the joint: there’s an internet café in the village.)

Yours (I mean it),

Leo

PS: Click here. You interviewed him once, years

ago, didn’t you? How about nailing her?

Keeley allowed herself a reflective moment, then refilled her coffee mug and clicked on the next email in her inbox. It was from her grandmother’s solicitor, to tell her that the keys to the cottage were ready to be picked up from his office, and reminding her that – as well as inheritance tax – she would now be eligible for the new tax on second homes. On the radio, some pundit was talking about property prices. ‘The reality is that prices have plummeted by fifty per cent in the Galway region. This includes holiday residences, which have been flying on to the market since the introduction of the tax on second homes . . .’ Keeley pressed the ‘off’ switch. She didn’t want to be reminded for the third time that morning about the new tax on second homes. The third email she clicked on was from her accountant, alerting her to the fact that she would now be eligible to pay . . .

Click! The email went shooting off back into her mailbox.

There would be more unpalatable stuff, she knew, waiting for her at her work address. She steeled herself before setting sail for mail2web. In keeley.c@sundayinsignia.ie there was the usual assortment of mail to do with the previous Sunday’s interviewee. The subject had been an up-and-coming young model who also happened to be the daughter of a major theatrical agent, and among the acidic responses provoked were: ‘She only got where she is because of who she is.’ ‘My daughter could do a million times better! See attached pic.’ ‘Who did she blow to get her face on the cover?’ Delete, delete, delete. Keeley found the rancour of some of the email feedback she was subjected to truly dispiriting. Since she’d returned to Ireland from the States, she had come to realise that there might be some truth in the old adage about the Irish being a nation of begrudgers.

Keeley Considine’s brief each week was to conduct an in-depth interview with an Irish celebrity-du-jour. So far, she’d included among her interviewees a singer/songwriter suffering from early onset Alzheimer’s; a fashion designer who had been abused as a child; an ex-priest who was now living as a woman; and a gay government minister who had walked out on her husband and children (she was now an ex-government minister). What connected all Keeley’s subjects was a moment of life-changing insight – an epiphany – which was why her Sunday column was called (ta-ra!) ‘Epiphanies’. Since being approached by the Insignia the previous year, she’d conducted fifty-one interviews. Fifty-one weeks as confidante to strangers, and forty-one weeks as mistress to the newspaper’s editor had left Keeley feeling burned out.

She could, she thought ruefully, have been a candidate for one of her own interviews. Attractive Ex-pat Journalist (AEJ) returns to Ireland seeking employment after a decade in New York, during which period she’d served time on a major Sunday newspaper, both as rising star features writer, and as mistress to the editor. Until his wife found out. And whaddayouknow – within three months of arriving back on her home turf, AEJ makes the very same mistake. Except this time, AEJ was in grave danger of falling in love.

Keeley’s epiphany had occurred when she got the news that her grandmother had left her a cottage in the village of Lissamore in the west of Ireland. Her initial reaction had been one of bemusement. What to do with the joint? Her grandmother had moved out years ago (Keeley had childhood memories of pootling around waterlogged beaches in the so-called summer months), and since then the cottage had languished as a holiday rental on the books of a letting agency called Coolnamara Hideaways. Keeley’s dad was always moaning about the fact that it cost more to maintain than it ever brought in, but he had never managed to persuade his mother to sell. She was, for some reason, adamant that the cottage should go to her only granddaughter on her death. And now Gran had died, and Keeley had come into her inheritance, and was liable for the property tax on second homes.

Thanks, Gran, she had thought the day after the funeral, staring morosely at the images of her bequest on the Coolnamara Hideaways website. Curlew Cottage was all whitewashed charm outside, all bog-standard pine inside, and – altogether – most un-Keeley Considine. But then she had looked around at her Ikea-furnished apartment with its Bang & Olufsen HD TV and its Bose sound system and the Nespresso machine she rarely used because she usually bought her coffee from Starbucks, and she’d had the most surprisingly unoriginal thought she’d had in a very long time. She, Keeley Considine, with her BA in creative writing and her diploma in journalism and her award for excellence in celebrity profiles – had thought ‘A change is as good as a rest’. And then she had taken Curlew Cottage off Coolnamara Hideaways’ books and composed the email to Leo, telling him that she wanted a break.

It would come as no surprise to him. Their relationship had taken a hiding since his wife had happened upon them having dinner à deux in the Trocadero. Keeley was convinced she’d been set up. The memory of that evening had the power to make her break into a cold sweat every time she thought about it . . .

‘What are you wearing under that plain – but clearly very chic – little black dress?’ Leo had asked conversationally, as he refilled her wineglass. ‘Anything interesting?’

‘Yes, actually,’ replied Keeley, taking a sip of wine. ‘I’m wearing that very pretty Stella McCartney bra and panties set you bought for me in Agent Provocateur.’

‘The black lace ones?’

‘Yes.’

‘Suspenders or hold-ups?’

‘Hold-ups.’

‘Lace topped?’

‘But of course.’

Leo gave her a debonair smile. ‘I have another present for you, Ms Considine.’

‘How kind! It’s not even my birthday!’

‘It’s your un-birthday, as per Lewis Carroll’s neologism. Many happy returns.’

Leaning down, Leo had produced a small giftwrapped box from his attaché case. Keeley recognised the wrapping paper immediately. The gift was from Coco de Mer in Covent Garden, the sexiest shop in the world.

She looked down at it as he placed it on the table, then looked back at him and raised an eyebrow. ‘Dare I open it in a public place?’ she asked.

‘You may. The box is very discreet.’

Unloosening the ribbon, Keeley peeled away the giftwrap and folded it carefully: Coco de Mer giftwrap was far too pretty to waste. Beneath was an elegant black box, that was – as Keeley saw when she raised the lid – lined with silk. Nestling in the silk were two perfectly smooth egg-shaped stones, one of jade, one of obsidian.

‘Love eggs?’ she said.

‘Well deduced. Concubines used them in ancient China.’

‘What a very, very thoughtful present,’ said Keeley, slanting Leo a smile. ‘My pelvic floor muscles could do with a thorough workout.’

‘Why not give them a go?’

‘Now?’

‘Yes. Isn’t it time you powdered your nose?’

‘You’re absolutely right. I’m all aglow.’

Sending Leo another oblique smile, Keeley unfurled herself from the banquette and slid the box into her handbag.

‘One moment, sweetheart.’ The skin on her forearm where he touched her sang.

‘Yes?’

His voice was so low, she had to stoop a little to hear him.

‘Leave your panties off.’

‘That goes without saying, chéri.’

And Keeley turned and sashayed in the direction of the loo, knowing that Leo’s eyes were following her every step of the way. In the cubicle, she stripped off her panties, slipped them into her handbag, took the love eggs from their satin-lined box, and inserted them. One. Oh! Two. Oh! The jade and obsidian felt delicious, cool and smooth against her warm flesh, and Keeley felt anticipation surge through her when she thought of the treat in store for her later. And for Leo, too. She’d bought him a silver cock ring last time she was in London.

In the boudoir of the ladies room, she reapplied her lipstick and spritzed herself with a little scent. Her reflection regarded her from the mirror, a half smile playing around her lips, the pupils of her eyes dilated, a flush high on her cheeks that was not courtesy of Clinique. Dear God, she was horny! There would be no dessert this evening, that was for sure. Not in the restaurant, anyway. She had Häagen Dazs Dulce de Leche at home, and fresh Egyptian cotton sheets just begging to be laundered again tomorrow. Keeley squirted Neal’s Yard Lime and Lemongrass onto her tongue, tousled her hair a little, and left the ladies room, Chanel No. 5 wafting in her wake, walking tall and working her hips; the way the promise of excellent sex makes a real lady walk.

‘Everything in place?’ asked Leo, as she resumed her seat at the table.

‘You betcha,’ said Keeley, cool as you like. ‘Perhaps you should think about settling up.’

Leo raised a hand to summon the waiter, and Keeley broke a crust of the remains of the baguette on her side plate, just for something to toy with while waiting for the bill to be sorted. And as she did so, a woman whom she recognised as Leo’s wife came into the restaurant, and made straight for the maître d’.

‘I thought you said Rachel was in Cork?’ she said.

‘She is.’

‘No she’s not. She’s behind you, Leo, and she’s headed our way. Oh, fuck, oh, fuck – this is just . . . Oh fuck.’

It was like watching a car crash in slow motion. The maître d’ had indicated their whereabouts, and Rachel was moving towards them now, dazzling Colgate smile fixed in place.

‘Good evening!’ she fluted, as she slid next to Leo on the banquette opposite Keeley. ‘Don’t worry about another place setting. I’ve already asked the maître d’ to sort that out. I know I’m a little late, but I’m sure you won’t mind if I have something? An hors d’oeuvre is all I require, since I had a late lunch. Oh, good. I see they’re still doing Baba Ganoush – I haven’t eaten here in ages, and I thought the menu might have changed. And I’m so sorry, I haven’t introduced myself. We met at an Insignia event some time ago, but you may not remember me, Keeley. I’m Rachel, Leo’s wife. How nice to see you again. You haven’t changed a bit. That’s the same dress you were wearing last time I met you. Zara, yes?’

‘Yes.’

‘How brave!’

It went on, and it went on. Rachel was relentless. She ordered her Baba Ganoush and another bottle of wine, and she sat and chatted about the Insignia and her husband and her children and the fact that she had been obliged to give up her very successful career as a pharmacist in order to rear Leo’s family but she didn’t resent a single minute of the time spent with the children since they were all prodigies just like her mother-in-law told her Leo had been, and wasn’t the weather stunning, and wasn’t it simply wonderful that Keeley had inherited a little cottage in the west of Ireland that she could visit when the stresses and strains of urban living became too hard for her to handle. And good heavens! Was that the time? They really ought to be making tracks – Leo had the school run to contend with in the morning, and Rachel had a parent-teacher meeting and thanks so much, Keeley, for taking care of the bill.

And all the time Keeley had sat there with the jade and obsidian eggs inside her, not feeling loved up at all, but rather like a constipated hen. And after Leo and Rachel had left the restaurant, she had ordered a large brandy and sat nursing it on her own, pretending to do important stuff on her iPhone and all the time flexing her pelvic muscles – two, three, four! – because she was fearful that when she stood up the jade and obsidian eggs might fall to the floor and be pounced upon by the punctilious maître d’ . . .

Yours (I mean it) . . .

Keeley returned to Leo’s email, re-read it, then clicked on the link he had sent. It took her to the website of a publishing trade magazine, and a headline that read ‘Gallagher Muse to Pen Children’s Book’.

Top literary agent Tony Baines has negotiated a high six-figure deal for a first-time author with children’s publishing giant Pandora. ‘Pussy Willow and the Pleasure Palace of Peachy Stuff’, written by Ophelia Gallagher, is aimed at seven- to ten-year-olds. A former actress, Ophelia Gallagher is wife and muse of the internationally renowned Irish painter Hugo Gallagher. Ms Gallagher was inspired to write the book after visiting Sans Souci, the summer palace in Potsdam built by Frederick the Great of Prussia.

Hugo Gallagher. She didn’t know he’d married again. Keeley had conducted one of her very first interviews with Gallagher about ten years earlier, when she was fresh out of college. It had been at the opening of an exhibition of his paintings in the Demeter Gallery in Dublin – his breakthrough exhibition, as it had turned out. At that time Hugo Gallagher’s star had been in the ascendant. After years as a struggling artist, he had emerged from obscurity to take his place centre stage in the Irish art world with a series of astonishing abstracts. She remembered being introduced to a saturnine man, loose-limbed and sexy – a man who exuded a lethal charm. She remembered his then-wife, a woman called . . . Paloma, and a child: a tousle-haired gypsy with angular limbs and intense dark eyes. She remembered how the mother had exuded an anxious air, and how her anxiety had escalated in proportion to the copious amounts of wine consumed by her husband. The child, she recalled, had hunkered on the floor in a corner of the gallery, oblivious to the brouhaha around her, drawing with a leaky biro on the back of a price list.

Keeley wished she could remember the price a Gallagher painting would have fetched back then. Ha’penny place in comparison to today’s reckoning, she suspected, because by the end of that evening’s feeding frenzy, every single canvas on the pristine gallery walls had been sold. Thereafter Hugo Gallagher had been able to double, treble, quadruple and, finally, simply name his price. Was he still coining it in? Keeley was curious as to how the artist’s career had fared in the intervening decade. She’d read somewhere that Paloma had left him several years ago, making way for the current Mrs Gallagher.

Returning her attention to the screen, Keeley studied the photograph that accompanied the blurb. Ophelia was a beautiful woman – petite and peachy-skinned, with huge, limpid, indigo blue eyes and an irresistible smile. She was dressed down in dungarees and bare feet, lustrous hair tumbling artlessly around her shoulders; she had a tiny tattoo of a daisy in the hollow of her collarbone and a fetching gap between her front teeth. She came across as fun, youthful, and with a sense of mischief – yet there was something of the earth mother about her too. Had she used the little Gallagher girl – her stepdaughter – as a sounding board for her book, Keeley wondered. But rudimentary arithmetic told her that Caitlín would have been way too old for children’s stories by the time Ophelia and Hugo finally got married.

Google beckoned.

Wikipedia told her nothing she didn’t already know about Hugo Gallagher’s early life. The poverty, the drinking, the acquisition of the famous Crooked House (which he claimed to have won in an all-night poker game), the failed marriages to his first wife and subsequently to Paloma. Also listed were the offspring of those marriages: the son Raoul, an architect; the daughter Caitlín. Documented, too, was the meteoric rise to fame that followed that sell-out exhibition in the Demeter Gallery, and the stupendous prices his work had fetched in the rampant Celtic Tiger era. Lately, however, information pertaining to the Great Artist seemed a little more hazy. There had been no output for the past couple of years, although he was rumoured to be working on an import ant new series. Reading between the lines, it wasn’t difficult to deduce that drink was to blame. Hugo Gallagher was following in the footsteps of those legendary wild men of art – Pollock, Rothko, Basquiat – destined to burn out and leave a priceless legacy behind him. The problem was that once he died, although his paintings would soar in value, it would be of no benefit to his family because – unless he really was working on a new series – all his paintings had already been sold and were now hanging in public and private collections all over the world.

The Wikipedia link to Gallagher’s current wife – former actress Ophelia Spence – told Keeley that she had appeared in major theatre venues all over the world. Roles undertaken included the maid in Chekhov’s Three Sisters, the maid in Phaedra and the maid in Private Lives. Three little maids in a row hardly constituted an illustrious stage career, concluded Keeley. Ophelia, she learned, had met Hugo Gallagher at a charity fundraiser in Dublin at the height of his fame, and assumed the mantle of his muse and mistress within a month. They had no children. Pussy Willow and the Pleasure Palace of Peachy Stuff was her first book.

Oh, yawn! Keeley had heard, seen and read it all before. The shelves of her local charity shop were groaning with unread copies (many of them hardbacks intended for review and donated by Keeley) of novels, cookbooks and memoirs by former actresses, models, columnists and TV personalities, all desperate to take advantage of their waning celebrity status and make a few bucks before they sank without trace beneath the public radar. Once they dipped below number ten in the search engine’s ranking, they were bollixed. Something told Keeley that, since Ophelia Gallagher’s main claim to fame was her illustrious surname, the former actress’s season in the Google sun was a particularly limited one. Why bother extending the poor creature’s shelf life by wasting a precious ‘Epiphany’ on her and her children’s book, when there were hundreds of more worthy wannabes queuing up to be interviewed?

And yet, and yet . . . something about Ophelia Gallagher intrigued Keeley. Why had she written a children’s book when she had no children? Why hadn’t she written a novel or a cookbook or an autobiography? Why hadn’t she divorced the drunken husband and penned a kiss-and-tell, warts-and-all memoir? Why hadn’t she designed a clothing line, or launched a signature scent?

Keeley picked up her phone and dialled the publishing house. Within minutes she had been put through to the publicity department, and secured an ‘at home’ interview with Ms Gallagher, which she arranged to dovetail neatly into her westward itinerary. The Crooked House was just off the N6, on the way to Lissamore.

‘Wouldn’t it be more convenient for you to meet in a hotel?’ the publicist had asked. ‘No,’ said Keeley. ‘It’s always more interesting to talk to someone on their home ground.’

It was true. Interviewees were always more relaxed in their home surroundings. A relaxed Ophelia would be an Ophelia with her defences down. And that was just how Keeley wanted her.

Chapter Four

Cat sat bolt upright. Since the night of the fire on the houseboat, she had trained herself to be vigilant against the tiniest sound. The brush of a moth’s wing against glass, the plash of an otter in the bay below, the scarcely audible whine of a mosquito was sufficient to wake her now.

Someone was in the house. Staring into the darkness, Cat tried to locate where, exactly. Downstairs. Footsteps were crossing the cavernous expanse of the hall. She listened harder, alert as a leopardess. The creak of that unoiled hinge told her the intruder was in the kitchen; the echoing drumbeat of her heart was signalling fight or flight. Sliding herself from the cocoon of her sleeping bag, Cat reached for her sarong and wound it tightly around her. Then she moved on silent feet to the top of the stairs. A light moved in the darkness below . . . a torch? No. By the greenish tinge to the illumination, Cat could tell that it belonged to a mobile phone.

‘Dad?’ said a male voice. ‘About fucking time. I’ve been trying to get through for ages. Yeah . . . I’m in Lissamore. No – it was too late to call in on her. I’m in Coral Mansion. I can’t tell . . . there’s no electricity: I’ll have to wait until morning to do a recce. But I’ve a feeling you’ve had visitors. Squatters . . . yeah.’

On the landing, Cat froze. Then she lightly retraced her steps back to the room in which she had set up camp and reached for the Swiss Army penknife that she always kept by her while she slept, cursing her stupidity when she realised she’d left it below in the kitchen. Grabbing her phone instead – her lifeline to Raoul – she moved out onto the balcony. A flight of steps took her down to the garden. Here, by the disused pool on the patio, she hunkered behind an overgrown shrub, and sucked in a couple of deep breaths.

Stupid, stupid Cat! Why hadn’t she had her things packed and ready for a quick getaway, the way she usually did? Why had she left her laundry strung up on towel rails in the bathroom? She was normally so careful about being on the ball. Now here she was in a garden at midnight, half dressed and horribly vulnerable. And Cat hated feeling vulnerable! She wished she hadn’t left her Swiss Army knife in the kitchen. Her Swiss Army knife felt good in her hand: even if she had no intention of using it, it lent her an air of bravado she did not necessarily feel.

Through the big picture window overlooking the patio, she saw that the trespasser had moved into the sitting room, and was starting to light candles. He must have found the supply she’d left in the kitchen. The kitchen and the room where she slept were the only rooms in the house in which Cat ever lit candles, since those windows could not be seen from the road. She’d learned to negotiate her way through the house in the dark, like a feral creature. The sitting room, however, was her daytime lair: she used it as a studio, and the paintings she’d made were taped to the walls.

Cat watched as the figure moved around the room, planting candles on mantelpiece and window ledges. She was freezing now: the wind was up, and it had started to rain. Perhaps she could slip back to the bedroom, quickly help herself to some clothes and her sleeping bag and leg it out of there? But leg it where, exactly? To Raoul’s place in Galway? To the Crooked House? To that hellish gaff she’d spent a night in last week – the one with the junkyard out back, and the rats?

She would feel at home in none of these places: there was nowhere in the world that was home for Cat. She felt a rush of helpless rage as she stood there in the chill night air, watching through a window as this . . . this interloper took possession of her space.

But hey! There was something familiar about the inter-loper, now that she saw him by the light of half-a-dozen candles. The last time she’d seen him, hadn’t he been all bathed in the golden glimmer of candlelight? It had been at the wrap party of that film she’d worked on – The O’Hara Affair. He’d had a gig as a stunt double and, that night at the party, Cat had decided on the spur of the moment that she’d wanted to get to know him. His name was Finn, she remembered. They’d shared a dance or two, then a bottle of wine and a laugh and a drunken snog. Later, they’d swapped phone numbers . . . and had never seen each other again because the number Cat had given him was bogus. Cat was careful about letting anyone have her number.

And yet, and yet . . . he was cool, Finn Byrne, wasn’t he? He’d be cool about the fact that she’d been squatting in his house – she knew he would. He was a scuba diver, and divers were laidback individuals. Maybe he’d even allow her to stay on until she got herself sorted with money and somewhere else to live? What the hell – she hadn’t much choice. She had no choice. She looked at the phone in her hand, then scrolled through the menu until she found Finn’s number. Clicking on the cursor in the text message box, she thought for a moment or two, then smiled. Help! she entered in the blank space.

Beyond the glass, she saw Finn take his phone from his pocket, and consult the screen with a perplexed expression. Seconds later, she received the following message.

Who is dis?

I am an orfan of da storm i need ur help luk oot ur windo.

It took ages for her to compose the text, but it was worth the effort. If Cat hadn’t been so cold, the look on Finn’s face might have made her laugh. Approaching the big window that overlooked the bay, he placed the palms of his hands against it and squinted through cautiously.

Rong window, texted Cat. Try da other 1.

He turned and looked over his shoulder, out over the black expanse of the patio and the derelict swimming pool.

Ur gettin warmer but im not its freezin out here.

Finn looked really spooked now. Feeling sorry for him, Cat pressed ‘Call’.

‘Who the hell is this?’ he said, picking up.

‘I am the Cat who walks by herself,’ Cat told him in her growliest voice, ‘and I wish to come into your house.’

‘Look, I don’t know what you’re playing at, but—’

‘Oh, Finn! Let me in!’ she wailed. ‘It’s me – it’s Catty! I’ve come ho-ome. Please let me in.’

‘You are fucking barking, whoever you are.’

‘No, no – I’m mewling, piteously. Come . . . come to the window.’ She watched as Finn moved slowly in the direction of the window through which she was spying on him. ‘That’s right. See? Here I am!’ Cat emerged from the overgrown rose bush behind which she’d been concealing herself, stretched out her arms to him and smiled.

Lunging backwards, Finn let out a yell, and this time she did laugh. ‘Who the fuck are you?’ he demanded.

‘I told you. It’s Cat. Cat Gallagher. Remember me? We met at The O’Hara Affair wrap party. Won’t you please let me come in? I’m awful cold.’

‘What are you doing out there?’

Moving right up against the plate glass, Cat pressed her face against it. ‘Let me in, and I’ll tell you,’ she said.

Finn gave her a wary look, hesitated, then tugged at the handle. ‘I can’t open it. It’s locked. Come round the front, and I’ll let you in there.’

‘No. I can find my own way. Give me a moment.’

Pressing ‘End Call’, Cat danced away from the window, and back up the balcony steps. In the bedroom, she grabbed her sleeping bag, unzipped it, and wrapped it around herself, shawl-fashion. Then she pattered down the staircase, through the massive entrance hall and into the sitting room. Finn had moved into the centre of the floor, and was standing lobbing his phone from hand to hand, looking rattled.

‘How did you manage that?’

Cat gave him a Giaconda smile. ‘I flew in through my bedroom window.’

‘Sorry . . . your bedroom window?’

‘Yes. I’m squatting here.’

‘You . . . but this is my dad’s house!’

‘Maybe. But it’s been lying empty for far too long, and it suits me perfectly.’

‘Is that right? Well, good for you, Catgirl, but your time as house sitter’s up. You can get lost now.’

‘Finn! Don’t be so heartless. You should be glad that it’s me and not some skanky gang of vagrants that’s been living here.’ She pulled her sleeping bag tighter around herself and gave him a look of appraisal. ‘So. Your dad must be the Mystery Buyer?’

‘What?’

‘Word in the village is that this place has been bought by a Mystery Buyer.’

‘A Mystery Buyer?’

‘Yes.’

Finn laughed. ‘That’s a bit cloak and dagger, ain’t it? There’s no mystery about it, really. Dad just wanted to keep it quiet.’

‘Why?’

‘Ever heard of press intrusion? My dad likes to keep his private life exactly that – private. And anyway, what are you doing sticking your nose in? It’s none of your damn business.’

Cat shrugged. ‘Well, it kinda is my business, since I’ve laid claim to the joint.’

‘Don’t be so stupid,’ scoffed Finn. ‘You can’t lay claim to a house just because you’ve been living in it.’

‘All property is theft, squatters have rights, and possession is nine-tenths of the law.’

‘That’s crap. Now go away. I’ve just flown in from LA and I’m jetlagged and not in the mood for Marxist trivia.’

Cat gave him an aggrieved look. ‘You should be grateful to me for taking care of the joint. It badly needed TLC.’

‘And what kind of TLC have you been giving it?’

‘Um . . . I’ve sprayed it with Febreze. Smell!’

Finn sniffed the air tentatively, and Cat laughed. ‘It’s roses. Wild roses.’

‘Febreze wild roses?’

‘No. Real roses. I brought masses of them in – they’re growing like crazy in the garden. You really think I’m the kind of gal who’d go around polluting the atmosphere with air freshener?’

‘I don’t know what you’re capable of. I hardly know you.’

She slanted him a smile. ‘But I intrigue you, don’t I?’

‘It would be hard not to be intrigued by a girl who arrives out of the blue in the middle of the night wearing nothing but a sarong and a sleeping bag.’ Finn started lobbing his phone from hand to hand again. ‘You could be like something out of Wallander. For all I know you’re planning to slit my throat. That Swiss Army knife I saw in the kitchen is yours, isn’t it? Not some nefarious accomplice’s?’

‘Yes, it’s mine.’ Cat looked towards the door. ‘Can I have something to eat? I saw your boxes in the hall, all piled with grub.’

There was a beat, then Finn gave a nod of assent. ‘Sure,’ he said.

‘Thanks. I’m starving. The kitchen’s this way.’

‘I know where the kitchen is. I’ve been here before. How long have you been living here?’

‘A week,’ she threw back at him. ‘You’re very welcome to my abode. It beats the hell out of the last joint I broke into. That was a tip. This is like the Ritz Carlton in comparison.’

Following her through into the hall, Finn paused to pick up one of the boxes, then moved into the kitchen where more candles were burning. ‘How have you managed without electricity?’

‘I have a Primus.’

‘What about water?’

‘I’m a hardy creature. As long as I’m connected to a supply, it doesn’t matter if it’s hot or cold.’

‘You wouldn’t be so complacent if it was winter,’ he remarked, setting the box on a countertop.

Cat shrugged. ‘I managed to get through last winter on a houseboat.’

‘No shit.’ Finn gave her an admiring look.

‘It was no big deal,’ she told him, carelessly.

‘So you really are a vagabond?’

‘Yeah.’

‘Cool!’

Cat’s nonchalance was entirely affected. Privately, she rather liked the idea of Finn thinking she was a vagabond. There was something boho and romantic about it. He didn’t need to know that the houseboat had all mod cons, and that the only reason she was living rough now was because her next house-sitting gig had fallen through. He didn’t need to know that she was, in effect, a Trustafarian, living on an allowance from her daddy. Well, waiting for an allowance from her daddy. Until that came through, she guessed she really was a vagabond.

Humming a little tune, she set about ransacking the box of groceries. ‘Let’s see what you’ve got here. Bread, cheese, salami, tomatoes. Wine! Excellent. A very acceptable Bordeaux. You have good taste.’

‘You know about wine?’

‘I’m spoofing,’ she lied. He didn’t need to know that she knew the difference between Bordeaux and Burgundy. He didn’t need to know anything about her. She could be an enigma! An enigmatic vagabond. She liked the idea of that. Passing him her Swiss Army knife, she watched as he started to uncork the bottle. ‘Tell me about you. What are you doing here?’

‘I’ve come to kick this house into shape.’

‘That’ll take some doing. Bits of it are falling down. What made your dad buy a crumbling mansion like this?’

‘He can afford it. What made you decide to break in?’

‘I was looking for somewhere to live –’ Cat broke off a hunk of bread and helped herself to salami ‘– and I found out about this place from the barman in O’Toole’s. Barmen are the most clued-in blokes in the world. They know everything there is to know about everything.’

Finn leaned up against the counter and gave her a look of assessment. ‘So what did you find out?’

‘I found that it was built by a millionaire who went bust, and that you’d once dated the millionaire’s daughter. I found out that you and the daughter were planning to run a scuba-dive outfit here, before the recession happened and things went pear-shaped. I found out that it used to be called “The Villa Felicity” after the millionaire’s ex-wife, but that everybody around here calls it “Coral Mansion”. So . . . I’m guessing that your dad bought it so you can go ahead and set up your dive business?’

Finn’s face closed over. ‘I dunno why he bought it.’

‘Yes you do. Tell me.’

‘You’re awful nosy, Cat Gallagher.’

She spread her hands. ‘I’m just curious. And being curious hasn’t killed me.’

‘Yet.’ Finn returned his attention to the wine bottle, and drew out the cork. He was clearly not going to be forthcoming. ‘Are there glasses?’ he asked.

‘Yes.’ Cat moved to a cupboard and fetched a couple of glasses from the shelf. There was one more thing she wanted to know. Turning back to him, she said, ‘What happened to the millionaire’s daughter?’

‘Last time I checked she was living in Dubai.’

‘With her millionaire daddy?’

‘Yes.’

‘What’s her name?’

‘Izzy.’

‘Izzy. Were you in love with her?’

That closed look came over Finn’s face again. ‘What’s with the third degree, Cat?’

Cat set down the glasses and hopped up on a high stool. ‘Sorry. I find it hard to shut up once I get started. You should take it as a compliment. I don’t talk much to people I don’t like.’

‘I remember that from working on the film with you. You used to prefer talking to horses.’

‘Horses talk more sense than most people I’ve met.’

Picking up one of the wineglasses, Finn squinted at the ostentatious logo before pouring the wine. ‘Designer glasses! Holy shit. I knew this house was sold fully furnished, but I wonder why they left stuff like this behind?’

‘What else would they do with it? I guess Izzy and her daddy have all the designer crystal they need in Dubai.’ Cat took the glass from Finn and sipped. ‘There’s designer stuff all over the gaff – Philippe Starck fittings in the bathrooms and all. Don’t worry, I’ve taken good care of it. It’s been like playing house living here. I’ll give you a guided tour if you like, once I’ve had something to eat. Cheers.’

‘Cheers.’ They chinked glasses, and then Cat broke off another hunk of bread, prised out the blade from her penknife and cut into the cheese. ‘I guess I’ll have to find somewhere else to live, now that the Mystery Buyer’s son’s showed up.’

‘I guess you will.’

‘Let’s hope I can find somewhere locally. I like Lissamore.’ She let a silence fall, and looked at him expectantly. Stupid Finn! He wasn’t picking up on his cues. ‘When’s your dad due?’

‘Once I’ve got the place up and running. It could take a while. He wants me to fix the pool, paint and decorate – that sort of thing. I’m going to need to hire some help.’

‘I could help you. I wield a mean paintbrush. I used to be a scenic artist, remember?’

‘I remember. But are you any good? Someone told me you got kicked off that film.’

Cat gave him an indignant look. ‘I got kicked off for not being legit, not for being crap at my job. They got all po-faced when they found out I’d no social insurance number.’

‘You really are a floater, then?’

Cat nodded. ‘Will work for food.’

‘And bed?’

‘That depends on where the bed is. As I said, I like Lissamore.’

They looked at each other warily. Then Finn said: ‘All right. You can stay on here.’

‘Thank you. That’s very decent of you.’

‘Just till my dad rolls up. How did you get in, by the way?’

Cat tapped a finger to her nose. ‘Not telling. I can get into most places, if I want to. Did you never read the Just So Stories?’

‘No. What are they?’

‘They’re meant for little children, but they’ve become cult classics. My mother used to read them to me. The one about the cat was the one I loved most. Once a cat decides she wants to come into your house, you can’t keep her out, you know.’

‘I’d noticed.’ He smiled, then turned and went out into the hall.

Cat narrowed her eyes at his retreating back. He had a great smile, she decided, once he let his guard down. She remembered the night at the wrap party, and the kiss they’d shared. How many girls had he kissed since then? Plenty, probably. Plenty of lovely LA girls with lissom golden limbs and luscious golden hair, and pearly American teeth. She must be a complete culture shock after what he was used to. Like something out of Wallander, he’d said. Hell – at least she’d washed today. Her biodegradable travel soap may not have had the sweetest scent in the world, but she guessed that was compensated for by the wild-rose-smelling house.

Back Finn came, lugging another box. He dumped it on the counter, and together they pulled out more provender. Coco Pops, chocolate HobNobs, apples. A bumper pack of popcorn, a six-pack of beer, a copy of Empire magazine, an iPod with a docking station.

‘Oh, look – you have music!’ she said, biting into her bread and cheese and taking a swig from her wineglass. ‘Put something on, and let me show you around.’

‘Any requests?’

‘Surprise me.’ Sliding down from her high stool, Cat helped herself to an apple. Her sleeping bag was starting to come adrift from around her shoulders, so she looped it over her forearms and let the ends trail behind her as she moved towards the door. ‘Will you bring a candle?’

‘I have a torch in here somewhere. You should be careful – you’re a walking fire hazard in that sleeping bag.’

Cat froze, and the sleeping bag slid to the floor as the first strains of Springsteen’s Born to Run oozed through the speakers.

‘What’s up?’ asked Finn.

‘Just what you said. About being a . . . a fire hazard. It gave me the shivers. That’s why I had to leave the houseboat, you see. It was . . . someone tried to burn it down.’ She gave a shaky laugh, retrieved the sleeping bag and reinstated it around her shoulders. ‘Sounds stupid, doesn’t it? Imagine trying to set fire to a house built on water. Anyway, I shouldn’t worry about this sleeping bag. It’s Millets’ finest fireproof stock.’

‘Shit.’ Even by the light of the candles, Cat could make out the concerned furrow between Finn’s brows. ‘You mean, someone tried to burn you out?’

She nodded.

‘What did the Guards have to say?’

‘They said,’ she told him, ‘that I should have been more security conscious.’

‘Did they find out who did it?’

‘No. But I know who did it.’

‘Who?’

‘A bloke who thought I was up for it, and who got cross when he realised I wasn’t.’

‘Did you report him?’

‘No.’

‘Why not?’

‘He was a Guard.’

‘Bastard! It must have been terrifying.’

‘Yes, it was. I don’t scare easily, but that fire was no foolin’ around. I was out of there like a cat out of hell.’

‘Did you lose a lot of stuff?’

‘I don’t really do “stuff”. I grabbed my backpack in time, and my paintbox. I’d have been fit to be tied if my paintbox had gone up in smoke. It’d cost a fortune to replace.’

‘I saw paintings, hanging on the wall in the sitting room. Are they yours?’

‘Yes.’

‘Mind if I take a look?’

‘Sure.’

Finn had fished a torch from the box. ‘Didn’t it freak you out, having to light candles here?’

‘I didn’t have any choice. Candles was all they had in the local store.’

‘I’ll get the electricity reconnected tomorrow. And we’ll take a drive into Galway – stock up on essentials. How do you manage for transport?’

‘I had a bicycle, when I was living on the houseboat. But it’s handy enough to walk into Lissamore from here.’

‘Was the bicycle banjaxed in the fire?’

‘No. Some gobshite threw it in the canal. Probably the same dickhead who was responsible for burning me out.’

‘I guess you can claim everything back on insurance.’

‘Nothing belonging to me was insured. The people who owned the houseboat will put in a hefty claim, but I won’t get anything. I think they’re kind of relieved that the place is gone, if truth were told. Too much responsibility.’

‘It wasn’t yours?’

‘No. I was houseboat-sitting.’

‘Of course. I forgot you held Marxist beliefs about property ownership.’ Finn aimed the beam of his torch at the kitchen door. ‘After you,’ he said.

In the sitting room, dustsheets still shrouded most of the furniture, giving the place a funereal appearance. ‘What’s underneath all that?’ Finn asked.

‘Furniture. Very Terence Conran. Not my style at all.’

‘What is your style?’

‘I’m not sure I have one.’ Cat bit into her apple. ‘I’ve never cared enough about keeping up appearances to develop a sense of style. My stepmother deplored my lack of interest in fashion.’

‘You have a stepmother?’

‘Yes. A wicked one. She’s tried to poison my father’s mind against me.’

‘Has she really?’

‘Well, it was already pretty poisoned with hooch.’

‘You mean he’s an alcoholic?’

‘Yep. That’s why I ran away from home. I could write a misery memoir, except I can’t truthfully say I’ve ever been that miserable.’

‘How do you get by?’

‘Moneywise?’

‘Yes.’

‘I sell my paintings,’ lied Cat. ‘Wanna buy one?’

Finn turned his attention to the paintings that Cat had fixed to the wall with masking tape. They looked better by candlelight, Cat decided. You couldn’t see the mistakes. The disadvantage of working in acrylic was that it dried faster than oil paint, so mistakes were harder to put right. But because acrylics were so much cheaper than oils, using them made sense to Cat.

‘Wow!’ said Finn, aiming the beam of his torch at the wall. ‘These are great! These are really fine. I mean, I don’t know much about art, but I can see that you genuinely have talent. Where did you train?’

‘I didn’t. My dad wanted me to go to the Slade, in London, but the last thing I wanted was to go back to school.’

‘I wouldn’t have thought that art college was much like school. I’d have thought art college might be quite a blast.’

Cat shrugged. ‘I don’t like being taught things. I’d rather learn from my own mistakes. The only good teacher I ever had was my brother.’

‘Yeah? What did you learn from him?’

‘How to skip stones.’

‘Good skill to have.’ Finn resumed his scrutiny of Cat’s paintings. ‘How much do you ask for them?’

‘Five hundred euros each.’ What!? Where had that come from?

‘That’s a lot. My ma gets about two fifty a pop.’

‘Your ma’s an artist?’

‘An amateur. But she sells quite well during the tourist season. Her stuff’s on display in Fleur’s boutique in the village.’

‘Fleurissima? I wouldn’t dare go into that shop! How does she get away with charging those kind of prices?’

He shrugged ‘Women are stupid when it comes to clothes. Izzy used to spend a fortune in there.’

Izzy. Izzy! Why did Cat hate her so? ‘It’s the kind of place my stepmother would love, too,’ she remarked.

Finn returned his attention to Cat’s artwork. ‘Five hundred euros a pop? Seriously?’

‘Three to you. Special price.’

‘Nice try, but no cigar. How much do you charge for your house-painting skills?’

‘I told you – will work for food.’

‘You mean it?’

Cat nodded. She’d be glad to work in return for a roof over her head. Tomorrow she’d put in a call to her father, and see about getting some money from him. She wondered what she’d need to set up the poste restante thingy Raoul had talked about. She reckoned some form of ID would be required, and she doubted that her fake student card would cut any dice. Shit. Maybe she’d have to go legit and get herself a passport, after all. Oh! Just the thought of filling in the forms made her feel dizzy.

‘Tomorrow we’ll head in to Galway and pay a visit to B&Q,’ said Finn. ‘Stock up on DIY stuff. Anywhere else you need to go?’

‘Um. I wouldn’t mind getting to the art suppliers. I’d love to be able to start painting on canvas again.’

‘Is that what you usually paint on?’

‘Yes. But if I can’t get my hands on canvas, I’ll paint on anything. I found a roll of wallpaper in a cupboard here – hope you don’t mind. I even took to painting on old shards of slate once, when I ran out of funds. Most of my money goes on art supplies.’

‘Most of mine goes on dive gear.’ Finn moved toward the window, and turned off the torch. In the plate glass, Cat could see candles reflected and, beyond the glass, the dark hump of Inishclare island. ‘There was a dive outfit on that island once,’ he remarked. ‘That’s where I cut my teeth.’

‘What age were you when you started?’

‘Twelve.’

‘So it’s your lifelong passion?’

‘Yeah.’

‘What about your plans to turn this place into a dive outfit?’

His smile was a little rueful. ‘Setting up a dive school here would mean infringing on Ma’s orchard.’

‘The orchard at the bottom of the garden belongs to your ma, does it?’

‘Yeah.’ He smiled down at her. ‘She has no Marxist scruples about owning property. Those two acres are her pride and joy.’

Cat remembered the three women earlier that day who had enjoyed a fête champêtre in the orchard, and how carefree they’d seemed. It was an eye-opener for Cat to see women revelling in each other’s company: her mother had been the only woman she had ever trusted. And hadn’t she every reason to be mistrustful of her own sex? She’d been bullied at boarding school, set upon (on more than one occasion) by gangs of girl thugs (the ones who wore pink were the worst), and cold-shouldered by her stepmother.

Her stepmother. She hoped to God that Ophelia didn’t pick up the phone tomorrow when she called the Crooked House to petition her father for cash. Even the sound of Oaf’s voice over the telephone line had the power to make Cat want to puke. That sick-making, saccharine, actorish voice that Oaf put on was worse than listening to Burt Bacharach. How had her dad fallen for it? Why had he betrayed the memory of perfect Paloma by marrying that gold-digging has-been?

She suddenly felt very tired. But she didn’t want to go to bed just yet.

‘Let’s finish the wine,’ she said to Finn, ‘and watch the sun come up.’

‘Nice idea,’ said Finn with a smile. ‘I’ll get my camera. I’ve some great shots of the sunrise over Inishclare that I took a couple of years back.’

‘I’d love to see them.’

‘Coming up.’

Finn disappeared into the kitchen, and Cat settled down on one of the Terence Conran chaise longues and tried to make herself comfortable. Bruce Springsteen was bouncing off the walls, warbling about Candy’s room, and Cat wished he wouldn’t, because it was such a sexy song. That iPod was a miniature miracle, she thought, especially when compared to her great clumsy brick of a Sony Walkman. It had belonged to her mother, and before the fire Cat had used to plug herself into it every night before she slept, even though it devoured batteries. Cat could ill afford batteries – but, like art materials, they were her essentials, the way make-up or hair straighteners or gossip magazines were for some women.

‘More grub.’ Finn was back, bearing a tray on which he’d laid out a kind of antipasto. He set it down, and refilled Cat’s wineglass. ‘Izzy and me used to do this, way back,’ he said.

‘Do what?’

‘Crack open a bottle of wine and watch the sun rise. Here, have a look.’ He handed her his camera. ‘See? That was taken at around this time of year. With a bit of luck, we might get something similar today – the weather conditions are about the same.’

Cat looked at the picture displayed on the screen of Finn’s camera. It showed a breathtaking tangerine sun rising over a roseate sea. Silhouetted against the horizon, a figure was holding a fiendishly difficult yoga pose with seeming effortlessness.

‘Who’s the yoga master?’ she asked, knowing full well what the answer would be.

She wasn’t wrong, and there was a smile in his voice when he replied. ‘That’s Izzy,’ said Finn. ‘I’ll never forget that night. I had exams to take, to do with Nitrox diving. She sat and read and read and re-read the dive manual out loud, so that it would stick in my head. It was the most boring stuff in the world, but she made it sound like poetry. Isn’t she gorgeous?’

Chapter Five

Río was looking at pictures of a mobile home on the internet. It was due to be delivered today in two separate sections to Adair’s oyster farm, and Río was to be there to meet it.

The ‘Bentley’ was like no mobile home she had ever seen. Her experience of caravanning had been limited to the Roadmasters of her childhood, when she and Dervla had gone with their parents to spend a fortnight of the summer in a trailer park in Sligo. Those mobile homes had been all Beauty Board and Crimplene curtains and swirly Acrilan carpets, with unreliable water pressure (the shower would peter out just as you were shampooing your hair), and intermittent electricity during storms. She and Dervla had fought over who would get the top bunk in the confined space of the ‘spare’ bedroom, and entertainment had consisted of 479-piece jigsaws (masquerading as 500-piece jigsaws), back copies of the Reader’s Digest, and Cluedo with Mrs White and the lead piping missing.

This Bentley yoke was a revelation. Its galley-style kitchen was bigger than the one in Río’s apartment, it boasted an en-suite shower room as well as a state-of-the-art tiled bathroom, and a ‘bespoke’ flame-effect hole-in-the-wall fire. Not only did the Bentley have an integrated washer/drier and a dishwasher, it also featured a Smeg American fridge-freezer, a kitchen island unit complete with built-in wine cooler, and a home cinema and surround-sound system. There was a study kitted out in tan leather office furniture, ‘beautiful’ bed throws and scatter cushions (Río thought them the most hideous things she’d ever seen), and – ta-ran-ta-ra! to cap it all – there were ‘soft-close’ toilet seats. Río could not help but notice the plural. The single loo in her bathroom had a seat that slid out of place every time you sat on it, due to the fact that she hadn’t got around to replacing a missing bolt.

When he’d asked her to oversee the advent of the Bentley, Adair had made some joke about the fact that he’d gone from being a property baron to being trailer park trash almost overnight. Trailer park trash! This mobile home was fit for a queen: or, at the very least, a princess. And there was, of course, a scratch-resistant quartz vanity unit in the bathroom for HRH Izzy, and a custom-built closet in her boudoir.

Río wondered how much this Bentley yoke had cost Adair. A fraction, she conceded, of what it had cost Shane to buy Coral Mansion; but then, Shane could afford to splash money around now. Back when they’d conceived Finn and lived in a squat, neither of them would ever have dreamed that Shane might one day be in a position to afford as much as a time-share in a crumby bedsit, let alone an apartment in a brownstone overlooking Central Park and a house on Mulholland Drive. She’d had a phone call from Finn first thing that morning to say that, since his flight had landed at one o’clock am (having been held up by mutinous cabin crew on another go-slow), he had decided not to disturb his auld mammy.

‘You should know that I can’t imagine anything lovelier than being disturbed by you!’ she’d told him crossly. ‘You’re a pig, Finn. I need a hug from you more than I need anything right now.’

‘Look on it as delayed gratification, Ma,’ he’d told her. And when she’d asked him about the ‘surprise’ he’d mentioned yesterday, he’d said, ‘Hold on tight. You’re going to fall off your chair.’ He was right. Because she’d been leaning backwards rather precariously when Finn revealed that the Mystery Buyer of Coral Mansion was none other than his dad – Río had done just that.

‘Well, I’ll be doggone,’ she said. ‘Shane must be on Monopoly money.’

‘I think he got it at a knockdown price.’

‘Ha! That’s exactly what should be done with that hideous carbuncle. Just knock the joint down and start again.’

‘Not a chance, Ma. I’m here to oversee the refurbishment. But you’ll be glad to know that the first casualty will be the yoga pavilion. I’m going to demolish it today.’

‘That eyesore? Yes!’

‘I’ll be kipping here, by the way, while I’m working on the joint.’

‘That’s cool.’

The sleeping arrangements suited Río because, while she adored her drop-dead-gorgeous son, he was six foot two, and her apartment overlooking the harbour was tiny. She’d have him round for dinner tonight: he’d be jetlagged, she guessed, and in need of red meat and red wine after knocking down the pavilion that had been built for Felicity all those years ago, when Adair had been rich, and Shane had been poor. How the tables had turned!

She supposed Shane buying Coral Mansion was a bit like that intrepid mountaineer Mallory trying to conquer Everest ‘because it was there’, or Richard Burton buying the Krupp Diamond because it was up for grabs, or Imelda Marcos spending a fortune on shoes she’d never wear. She also supposed that he’d finally given in to Finn’s badgering about converting the joint into a scuba-dive centre. The badgering had been going on for so long now that it had become a family joke.

Río knew as well that it would give Shane no little pleasure to own the biggest, brashest, most ‘fuck-off’ residence in Lissamore, particularly since it had once belonged to the man who had been his rival in love. How would poor Adair Bolger, slogging over his oyster beds and slumming it in a mobile home (even one as deluxe as the Bentley), feel when he found out that Shane Byrne was now the owner of the erstwhile Villa Felicity?

Ping! Outlook Express announced the arrival of an email in her inbox. Oh! As if life wasn’t complicated enough, the email was from Isabella Bolger, ‘Sent from My iPhone’, and the subject matter was the Bentley.

Hi, Río, she read, when she clicked on the envelope icon. I understand that Dad has asked you to meet the Bentley people when they deliver to the site. Thank you so much for helping out. Just to let you know that I shall be arriving in Lissamore this evening. I wanted to check out for myself what Dad’s accommodation for the foreseeable future is going to be like. I had hoped to be staying in Coolnamara Castle Hotel until the plumbing, etc is taken care of in the Bentley, but I’ve just found out that they’re fully booked due to some fly-fishing event. Would you happen to know if there’s anything going in B&Bs in the village?

All best, Izzy

Oh, God. It would be unmannerly of Río to expect Princess Izzy to bed down in a B&B. Should she phone Finn and ask him if he could put her up in Coral Mansion? Um, no. That was so not a good idea. Río didn’t pry too much into her son’s affairs, but she knew enough about his love life to hazard a guess that he might not welcome Izzy back into his life with open arms. Also, it would be disconcerting – to say the least – for Izzy to find out that Finn was now ensconced in her former home, just down the shore from where the Bentley was to be parked. Life was complicated? Life was bonkers!

There was only one thing for it. Hi, Izzy, she typed. How good to hear from you! You’re more than welcome to stay with me, if you don’t mind sleeping on a sofabed. What time will you be here?

The response was immediate. That’s really kind of you. I should be arriving around 7.00. Can I buy you dinner in O’Toole’s?

Oh, well. She’d have to delay Finn’s roast dinner till another time. Río was just about to type ‘Thank you – that would be lovely!’ when her phone went. It was Finn, again.

‘Hi, Ma,’ he said. ‘Fancy dinner in O’Toole’s tonight?’

‘No!’ she said. ‘I’m cooking for . . . Fleur.’

‘Fleur can come, too.’

‘No! She’s bringing the baby.’

‘Oh. Shame. There’s someone I’d love you to meet.’

‘What? Who?’

‘Just a girl.’

‘A girl, Finn? What girl?’

‘A girl I think you’d like. She’s a really talented painter. She’s going to help me out with the refurbishment of this gaff.’

‘With Coral Mansion?’

‘Yeah.’

‘She’s a house painter?’

‘No. She’s like an artist painter. But she needs somewhere to stay, so she’s giving me a hand here, in return for bed and board.’

‘Oh. Is she – um – is she like . . . a girlfriend, Finn?’

‘No.’

‘You said that too fast. That means she could become a girlfriend.’

Ping!

Or I could cook for you! I’ve just passed a fish shop and they’ve fresh langoustines! Shall I stop and get some? Iz. xx

Thank Jesus! Frsh langustins heaven! typed Río, and pressed ‘Send’ without bothering to correct the spelling mistakes.

‘Just because she’s a girl, Ma, doesn’t mean that there has to be a romantic thing going on,’ Finn rebuked her.

‘Of course not, sweetheart,’ said Río abstractedly, wishing that Izzy had chosen another time to descend upon her. She hadn’t even been able to give Finn a hug yet! ‘I’m glad you’ve got someone to help you. Now, forgive me. I have to go. I’m running late. Love you!’

‘Send my love to Fleur and Marguerite.’

‘What?’

‘Your dinner guests.’

‘Oh, yes. Bye.’

Río put her phone down and picked it up again as her ringtone sounded. It was the Bentley delivery man to say that he was having problems getting the state-of-the-art mobile home down the bumpy boreen that led to Adair’s oyster farm, and could she get there ASAP?

Life was bonkers? thought Río, as she grabbed her jacket and her car keys. No, no. Life was certifiable!

Some hours later, Río had seen the Bentley safely moored at the rear of Adair’s horrible rundown bungalow. (The Bentley had received a bit of a bashing on its way down the boreen: some of the feature Western Red Cedar panelling had come a cropper against a drystone wall leaving it scarred for life, all the knocking about meant that the toilet seats weren’t as ‘soft-close’ as they were supposed to be, and Izzy’s custom-built closet had lost some of its bespoke shelving.)

But Río was happy that the thing had arrived reasonably intact. Tomorrow, the two sections would be joined together, and plumbing and electricity would be instated as if by the deft hands of magical elves, and all would be in turn-key condition for Adair. Once he’d wound up his business dealings in Dubai he could come winging his way to the west coast of Ireland, ready to embark upon his ill-advised new career as an oyster farmer.

At seven o’clock precisely, Río’s doorbell rang. Buzzing Izzy in, she turned off her phone. She didn’t want any calls from Finn interrupting their cosy evening. Well, she did want phone calls from Finn – of course she did – but not while Izzy was here.

‘Izzy! Hello! Long time!’ she said, as she watched the girl climb the stairs that led to her eyrie. ‘You look fantastic!’

She could have parroted the words in her sleep, for Izzy always looked fantastic. But this time the words rang hollow as Izzy’s cheeks. The girl looked awful – like a ghost of her former self. The minxy, golden babe that lived in Río’s memory had turned into a wretchedly thin, pasty-faced spectre.

‘Oh, Río! It’s so good of you to have me! I can’t tell you how grateful I am. I was dreading coming back to Lissamore – I was – I was dreading everything! And . . . and . . . here are your langoustines.’

Thrusting a carrier bag at Río, Izzy burst into tears.

‘Come in, come in at once!’ said Río, horrified. To see Isabella Bolger cry – Princess Isabella, who was normally so soignée and so on top of things – was truly disturbing. Bundling her through the door, Río led the girl to the sofa and said ‘Sit!’ Then she did what most women do when confronted by a weeping compadre: she cast around for the corkscrew.

‘Red or white?’ she asked.

‘White, please.’

Río shoved the bag of langoustines into the fridge and pulled out a bottle of white.

On the sofa, Izzy was rummaging in her bag. ‘How stupid! I don’t have a tissue . . .’

‘Here.’ Tearing off a section of kitchen towel, Río handed her a wodge.

‘I’m sorry,’ sobbed Izzy. ‘My car stalled just as I was coming into the village, and a man in a van behind started honking his horn at me.’

What? All those tears because of such a minor upset? Río guessed Izzy must be pre-menstrual.

‘And then he started shouting at me. He told me . . . he told me to take driving lessons!’

Río raised her eyes to heaven. Sweet Jesus! Get over yourself, Isabella! Sloshing South Africa’s finest plonk into a glass, she handed it to Izzy with ill-concealed impatience, resisting the impulse to tell the girl to stop being such a wimp.

‘I’m sorry.’ Izzy managed a wan smile, then raised the glass to her lips and took a sip. ‘I guess I’m just tired after the drive from Dublin. Thanks for the wine.’

‘You’re welcome.’ Río took a seat opposite. ‘You’re back living in Dublin then?’ she asked, glad of a conversational gambit.

‘Yes. I’ve got a position in a marketing company.’

‘What made you decide to come back?’

‘Not the job satisfaction, that’s for sure.’ Izzy blew her nose. ‘I guess it was . . . well, when Dad told me he was coming back to Ireland, I thought I might as well come home too.’

‘What was Dubai like?’

‘Bloody horrible. Some good wreck diving, though.’

Río plucked a piece of lint from her sleeve. She didn’t want to be diverted on to the topic of diving, because if they went there, Finn’s name would be bound to come up. ‘When’s Adair due back?’ she asked, even though she knew perfectly well when he was due.

‘Next week. He’s just tying up some loose ends.’ Izzy took a swig of wine, and then she started crying again. ‘Oh, Río!’ she wailed. ‘Is the cottage really as bad as it looks on the internet? I couldn’t believe it when Dad showed me. I couldn’t believe that he was serious about buying it.’

‘The cottage is pretty bad, all right,’ conceded Río. ‘But the mobile home is more like a mobile palace!’ She invested her voice with gung-ho enthusiasm. ‘You needn’t have any worries that your dad isn’t going to be comfortable, Izzy. It’s the Taj Mahal in miniature.’

‘Is it? Is it really?’

‘Yes. And I’m sure that he can make the cottage into a really lovely home. It’ll take a lot of work, of course, but your dad’s never been afraid of hard work.’ The irony struck her forcibly now, of Adair working like a navvy on a rundown cottage while Río’s son and his father swanned around in Coral Mansion.

‘How . . . how long do you think it’ll take to fix the place up?’

‘Six months, or thereabouts, I’d have thought if he hires some help and works flat out.’ Río looked at Izzy curiously. Her face had gone an ugly, mottled shade of puce.

‘Six months?’ she whispered. ‘Working flat out?’

Río nodded. ‘Are you all right, Izzy? You’re looking—–’

‘My dad can’t work flat out for six months on some crappy little house!’

‘He’s done it before,’ Río pointed out. ‘Sure, didn’t he start his career as a builder?’

Izzy flinched, and tears started to course down her cheeks again.

‘I know he’s come a long way since then,’ said Río. ‘But, hey – there are swings and there are roundabouts, Izzy. You win some, you lose some.’ God, she was even beginning to talk like Adair! Funny the way clichés came so easily when you were trying to console someone.

‘I can’t bear to think of him navvying!’ whimpered Izzy.

Río got to her feet and moved to the window. She was feeling a tad exasperated with the girl now. Wasn’t everybody in Ireland rolling up their sleeves and fielding the flak that life was firing at them? Izzy Bolger’s darling daddy wasn’t the only ex-property tycoon taking a reality check.

‘I think he’s kind of looking forward to putting the place to sorts. He was full of beans the last time I talked to him.’

‘He’s not able for it, Río.’

‘Arra, he’ll be grand.’ Río started to busy herself dead-heading a geranium. She was beginning to regret her invitation to Izzy to stay the night. Maybe she should have sent her in the direction of Coral Mansion after all, where she could be accommodated in the style to which she was accustomed.

‘No. He won’t be grand, Río,’ said Izzy. ‘He’s dying.’

‘What?’ Río turned back to Izzy. The redness had left her face; she was ashen now. ‘What . . . did you say? That . . .’

‘Daddy’s dying.’

The withered geranium blossom dropped to the floor. ‘Adair’s ill?’

Izzy nodded. ‘Cancer.’

‘Oh. Oh, God.’ Río’s hands went to her mouth, and she shut her eyes for a long moment. Then she moved to the sofa and sat down beside Izzy. Putting her arms around her, she gathered the girl against her. ‘Oh, God, Izzy. I am so sorry. I am so, so sorry. Words can’t—’

‘I know. You don’t have to say anything.’

No words were adequate. Not even the one-size-fits-all clichés to which Adair was so partial. She remembered the last time she’d seen him, before he left for Dubai. It had been in Dublin: he’d put her up in a splendid room in the Four Seasons, and treated her to the theatre, and bought her dinner in Patrick Guilbaud. Except he hadn’t called it dinner. He’d called it a ‘slap-up feed’, and when his Charolais beef and foie gras had been set in front of him he’d rubbed his hands together with gusto, the way a cartoon character might. That was what was so endearing about Adair: despite his wealth and his very real business acumen and the power he wielded, he was possibly the most down-to-earth, least affected person Río had ever met. And now this larger-than-life, convivial, generous man was dying.

Izzy disengaged herself from Río’s embrace and blew her nose again.

‘When did you find out?’ Río asked.

But Izzy just shook her head, clearly too distressed to answer. Reaching for her bag, she pulled out an envelope and handed it to Río.

‘Am I to read this?’

Izzy nodded.

Inside the envelope was a folded sheet of A4 paper.

Dear Dr Rashidya, she read. Thank you very much for being honest with me. I appreciate this, because it gives me a chance to get off my arse and spend the last year of my life doing something I’ve always wanted to do. It’ll amuse you to know that I’ve bought that oyster farm I was telling you about, so I’m going to realise my dream of living off the fat of the land (OK – the fat of the sea) back in my native country.

It’s funny how you get your priorities right when the Big C comes calling. I’ve realised that living the good life isn’t about drinking Cristal champagne or having gold-plated taps in your bathroom. For me, the good life will mean a pint of Guinness in my local pub after an honest day’s hard labour, and the sound of the sea on my doorstep. In the best of all possible worlds, the good life might also mean finally marrying the woman I love, if she’ll have me. I’ve always believed that anything is possible, if a man wants it badly enough.

You might write a letter of reference for me to my doctor in Ireland. He can recommend a specialist when the time comes, but until then I just want to truck on as best I can. That medication sure does exactly what it says on the tin, and as long as it keeps kicking in I won’t be telling anyone. No point in raining all over someone else’s parade – especially not Izzy’s. She worries about me enough as it is.

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