Behind him, the house door opened and Paddy Cos-tello shouted angrily, ‘Get out of it, you useless lump. Up on the fellside with you and don’t come back without those sheep.’
Young Brendan dodged a kick and ran across the yard, his patched jacket flying behind him. As he passed Rogan, he looked at him quickly, the dark eyes in the thin face like those of some hunted animal and Rogan was aware of an instant sympathy.
The boy ran away along the road and Costello came towards Rogan. His eyes were tinged with yellow, the veins swollen with blood and the pouched and folded skin of his face looked somehow unclean.
‘He’ll be the death of me, that lad, Mr. Rogan. The death of me.’ He pushed the tail of his shirt into his waistband. ‘The early start you’re getting.’
‘I’ve plenty to do,’ Rogan said. ‘Are Morgan and Fletcher still in bed?’
The old man nodded. ‘What else wouldyou expect from a couple of low-lifes like them two, Mr. Rogan.’
In the barn, an engine coughed into life and the shooting brake emerged, Hannah at the wheel. She stopped and Rogan opened the door and got into the
passenger seat beside her. He wound down the window and looked out at her uncle.
‘If you’re thinking of taking a trip in the cattle truck or the Morris, forget it. I’ve taken the keys. Tell Morgan I’ll be back some time this afternoon.’
As the old man’s face slipped, Rogan wound up the window and nodded to Hannah who released the handbrake and took the brake out through the gateway and down the dirt road into the mist.
She was wearing slim-fitting navy-blue ski pants, a heavy sheepskin jacket and a silk scarf was bound around her head, and again, he was conscious of that same restless excitement he had known on the hillside the previous evening.
As if aware that he was watching her she coloured slightly, her eyes never leaving the road as she negotiated a dangerous bend around a shoulder of the mountain.
‘Your uncle chased the boy off up the fellside,’ he said. ‘Something about some sheep.’
She nodded. ‘He’s been selling them off in half dozen lots lately. He has a powerful thirst. They spend most of their time up there on the slopes. Finding them can be difficult.’
‘Shouldn’t the boy have a sheepdog?’
‘He did. A collie named Thrasher, the joy of his life. He fell into one of the old mine shafts last month and broke his back. Some of them are a couple of hundred feet deep.’
Rogan sat there thinking about it. At breakfast, the boy hadn’t had a great deal to say for himself, and when he did speak it was obvious that he stammered badly. Probably only psychological and not surprising with a father like Paddy Costello.
‘You don’t like my uncle, do you?’ she said.
He laughed shortly. ‘The understatement of the age. I’ve met too many of his breed. A big man with the drink taken and words pouring out of him by the hundred. I can see him now in front of a police inspector with a face
like whey, the cap twisting in his hands while he spills out his unclean guts. God knows how Colum O’More could have been taken in by him.’
‘But he wasn’t. My uncle contacted him through an old comrade in Liverpool and Colum simply turned up at the farm a month later. He didn’t like what he found. He squeezed my uncle dry with the help ot a bottle of pot-distilled whiskey that put him on his back in two hours, then turned his attention to me.’
‘Had you ever met before?’
‘Never, but he seemed to take to me. He said that he always liked to work from a distance through a go-between. He offered me the job.’
‘And you accepted.’
‘Remember what you said yesterday about wanting to crash out of something? Well, Colum O’More offered me the chance to do just that. Two thousand pounds and a passage to Ireland with him at the end and he promised to take Brendan with us.’
‘And that was important to you?’