over the potholes at an easy lope. Alongside, the shadows of small clouds glide across the brown mountains.
Cal is clear that last night he got warned. The warning, however, was done with such subtlety that—whether by design or not—he’s unsure what, exactly, he was being warned off. He has no idea whether Ardnakelty has worked out that he’s looking into Brendan Reddy’s disappearance and wants him to knock that shit off, or whether he’s just been poking around too much for a stranger and needs instruction in local customs.
One interesting part is where and how the warning was delivered. Mart could have just given him a few quick pointers in private, over the gate some afternoon; instead, he saved it up for the poteen party. Either he wanted Cal to hear the message from a bunch of people at once, to drive it home, or he wanted to make sure everyone else knew Cal had been warned. Cal has come away with the strong impression that it was the second one, and that this was for his protection.
He’s unsure what circumstances might make this necessary. Cal is accustomed to being in the dark at the start of an investigation, which means it’s taken him a while to realize that this is an entirely different thing. He has no idea, not just what the people around him know and what they believe, but also what they might think of it, what they want, why they want it, or how they might go about achieving it. Their decades of familiarity, which seemed like a comfort at the beginning of last night, weave themselves into an impenetrable thicket; its layers obscure every action and every motivation till they’re near indecipherable to an outsider. He understands that this effect is, at least in part, deliberate and practiced. The guys like him blindfolded. It’s not personal; keeping him that way is, to them, an elementary and natural precaution.
Cal is aware that he seems like the kind of placid, amenable guy who would heed that warning. That appearance has come in handy plenty of times. He’d love to let it keep being useful here: let the townland relax into the belief that he’s gone back to minding his own business and painting his house. The trouble is, he has no options that allow for that. Back on the job, he could have stayed accommodatingly away from Brendan’s associates and focused on the behind-the-scenes stuff for a while: hooked up with the techie guys to dump Brendan’s phone and track his locations and go through his emails, got the bank to check whether and where his bank card had been used, run all those associates through the system, talked to Narcotics about the Dublin drug boys. He could have bounced possibilities off his partner, O’Leary, a little cop-bellied cynic with a deceptive air of laziness and a keen sense of the ridiculous, and got O’Leary to do some legwork for him.
Here, all that artillery and all those allies have been stripped away. There is no behind the scenes to take cover in. He’s in this empty-handed and alone, out in the wide open.
Cal’s original plan for today was to track down Donie McGrath, but that’s changed. For one thing, Donie is likely to be a huge pain in the ass to interview, and Cal’s head can’t take it. More importantly, he doesn’t have a good enough handle on what’s going on. Even if people were warning him away from Brendan, all they know so far is that he’s trying to find out where a runaway kid ran to, in order to reassure his worried mama or just out of pure nosiness. But Cal knows they’ll be keeping an eye on him. If he talks to Donie, or anyone else who has connections to the Dublin drug boys, they’ll know what he’s thinking. Cal isn’t inclined to take that step until he’s good and ready.
He does have one thing on his list that won’t show any more of his hand and that needs a weekend. In town, he hands in his clothes to the laundromat and heads for the gift shop.
Caroline Horan is still Facebook friends with Brendan, which makes Cal figure the breakup wasn’t too shitty. Her profile shot shows her and two other girls on a beach with their arms around each other, laughing and windblown. Caroline has disorganized brown curls and a round, freckled face with an engaging smile. She also has “Studies at Athlone