“Well, that’s kind of you,” Cal says, surprised and pleased. “I’d appreciate that. I’ll bring you some rook stew for sure.”
O’Malley laughs, extracts himself from his chair with a few loud creaking noises, and heads back to the office. Cal waits and looks out the window at the sky, where the clouds are thickening, getting darker and more ominous. He can’t imagine ever getting accustomed to the effortless hairpin turns of the weather around here. He’s used to a hot sunny day being a hot sunny day, a cold rainy day being a cold rainy day, and so on. Here, some days the weather seems like it’s just fucking with people on principle.
“Now,” O’Malley says, coming back out, happy with his results. “Like I told you: nothing serious at all, at all. March the sixteenth, a farmer reported signs of intruders on his land and a possible theft of farm equipment, but when the boys got out there, he told them ’twas all a mistake.” He resettles himself in his chair and pops a chunk of cake into his mouth. “I’d say he found out ’twas the local young scallywags messing, like. They do get bored; sometimes the bold ones’ll hide something just for the crack, to see the farmer go mental looking for it. Or maybe it was robbed, but the farmer found out who done it and got the stuff back, so he left it at that. They’re like that, around here. They’d rather keep us out of it, unless they’ve no choice at all.”
“Well, either way,” Cal says, “that sets my mind at ease. I don’t have any farm equipment to get stolen. I got an old wheelbarrow that came with the place, but if anyone wants it that bad, they’re welcome to it.”
“They’re more likely to put it on top of your roof,” O’Malley says tolerantly.
“It’d probably improve the look of the place,” Cal says. “There’s designer guys who charge yuppies thousands of bucks for ideas like that. Who was the farmer?”
“Fella called Patrick Fallon. I don’t know the man. That means he’s not a regular, anyway; there’s no local feud going on, nor nothing like that.”
Patrick Fallon is presumably P.J. “Huh,” Cal says. “That’s my neighbor. I haven’t heard him mention any trouble since I got here. I guess it must’ve been a once-off thing.”
“Lads messing,” O’Malley says, with comfortable finality, breaking off another big hunk of cake.
Looking at that cake has made Cal hungry. He finds a café and gets himself a slice of apple pie and more coffee, to pass the time till his laundry is ready. While he finishes the coffee, he gets his notebook out of his jacket pocket and turns to a fresh page.
He tosses around the possibility that Brendan was setting himself up as a source of stolen farm equipment, boosted P.J.’s stuff, got spooked and gave it back when he found out the cops had been called in, and skipped town to avoid the fallout or was run out, like the cat-killing Mannion kid. It doesn’t sit quite right—anyone with half a brain would have expected police, and Brendan is or was no dummy—but maybe he didn’t think the theft would be noticed so soon. Caroline said he didn’t take people’s reactions into account.
He writes: Farm equipment 3/16. What was stolen? Was it recovered?
The other thing hanging around the edges of his mind is the thought of those dead sheep. Mart isn’t sitting up in those woods on the off chance. He has some reason for thinking P.J.’s sheep are next.
Cal draws himself a quick sketch of Ardnakelty townland, with help from internet maps. He marks in Mart’s land, P.J.’s and Bobby Feeney’s; he doesn’t know where Francie Gannon’s is exactly, but “beside the village” gives him a rough idea. Then he marks in all the other sheep farms he knows about.
Geographically, those four have nothing to single them out from the rest. They’re not the nearest ones to the mountains or a wood where some creature might stay hidden, not all close together, not the nearest to the main road for a quick getaway. There’s no reason, at least none that Cal can see, why they would be an obvious set of targets for either man or beast.
He writes: Francie/Bobby/Mart/P.J. Links? Related? Beef w Brendan? W anyone?
He can think of one person who had beef with Mart, anyway, not long before Mart’s sheep got killed. He writes: W Donie McG?