A Terrible Beauty

She opened the front door and let him in. 'They don't know yet. Technically he drowned.'

'I'm sorry.'

She hung up her coat and then she went through to the kitchen and let Sergeant out. Sergeant rushed out and did his usual overexcited dance and hurled himself up and down, but John laid the flat of his hand on the top of Sergeant's head, between his ears, and said, 'Sssh, boy. Sssh. Time enough for prancing about in heaven, believe me.'

Sergeant immediately calmed down, and whined in his throat, and slunk off back to the kitchen.

'Well,' said Katie. 'Who are you? The Mongrel-Whisperer?'

'My father taught me. When I was a kid I was terrified of dogs so he trained me to control them. It's an authority thing. If the dog knows that you won't tolerate any kind of stupid behavior, he'll behave himself.'

'Let me take your coat.'

Katie approached him and lifted his raincoat from his shoulders. For a moment they were close enough to kiss, if they had wanted to. He looked into her eyes and she looked back into his. 'Do you know something?' he said. 'The first time I saw you-when we discovered those bones-'

'What? I have to heat the soup up.'

'I don't know. Maybe it's stupid. I felt that I'd met you before someplace.'

'That's not stupid. Our identification experts will tell you that. There are certain facial characteristics that particular types of people have in common. I reminded you of someone else, that's all. I just hope that it was someone you liked.'

'Well?it must have been.'

They went through to the sitting room. 'Do you want a drink?' Katie asked him. 'I can't join you, I'm afraid. But I have some cans of Murphy's in the fridge. Or some wine, if you'd rather.'

'Sure, a Murphy's would be good.'

When she came back from the kitchen, John was standing in the far corner of the room, looking through the books on her bookshelf. 'I wouldn't have had you down as somebody who liked Maeve Binchy,' he said, putting back a well-thumbed copy ofTara Road.

'I'm an escapist,' she admitted.

'Well, I can't say that I blame you, in your line of work. You must get to see some pretty sickening stuff, I'll bet.'

'It's not so much that. It's seeing people at their worst, that's what gets to you, in the end. It's seeing how violent and stupid people can be. Sometimes it isn't easy to keep your faith in humanity.'

John raised his beer glass. 'Ah, well. Here's to faith.'

Katie sat down on the end of the sofa. 'You said you had something you wanted to say to me.'

John nodded. 'I've tried talking to my mother about it but you've seen what she's like, bless her. And Gabriel, well?he's not exactly the sharpest tool in the box. The trouble is, I wonder if I'm losing it. I mean, can youtellwhen you're losing it?'

'I don't exactly know what you mean.'

'It's that farm. It's really grinding me down. Day after day, week after week, month after month. It's milking and plowing and digging and fence mending and getting soaked to the skin and all I can hear in the middle of the night is the rain beating against the windows and my mother snoring like a walrus. You don't know what I'd give to go out in the evening and meet my friends at Salvatore's and fill my face withlinguine pescatora.

Katie couldn't help smiling; but John said, 'I'm sorry, I shouldn't whine. I chose to come here and do it, but I genuinely think that I'm losing my marbles.'

'Sit down,' said Katie. 'Have some more Murphy's, it's good for what you're suffering from.'

John sat on the far end of the sofa, next to the pink-dyed pampas grass. Sergeant came back from the kitchen and stared at him balefully for a while, but then he made a squeaky sound in his throat and trotted to his bed.

John said, 'I saw something.'

He hesitated for so long that Katie said, 'Go on. What was it?'

'I'm not entirely sure. I was putting the tractor back in the shed when I thought I saw somebody standing in the field up by the woods, in the place where I found that young girl's body.'

'Did you call the garda on duty?'

John shook his head. 'He was right down by the front gate. It just seemed easier to go up the field myself. I thought it was probably somebody taking a short cut. Some of the young kids on the estate do that sometimes, to get to the main road.'

'And?'

'I climbed over the fence and walked up the field. The sun was just going down behind the trees and it was shining right in my eyes. But when I got nearer I could see that it was a woman, wearing a long gray coat, with a gray shawl around her shoulders, or a pashmina, something like that.'

He paused again, and then he said, 'I called out to her. Like, 'excuse me, but nobody's allowed in this field at the moment.' And it was then that she disappeared.'

'You mean she walked away?'