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violent and dangerous. None of them were innocent.”
    A moment of tiredness overcame the priest. He felt as though he were trying to force his way out of a bad dream.
    Devine waited patiently for the priest’s absolution, but instead Father Fee closed his eyes. His parishioners’ hunger for absolution felt like something bottomless he had to feed forever. The priest’s mouth was dry, and his head throbbed. He did not feel able to continue with the usual words of the sacrament. Light trickled under the door. He looked at his hands and was surprised to see they were shaking. Perhaps this ought to be my last confession, he thought. Tomorrow I will ring the diocesan secretary and ask to be allowed to retire.
    At last he spoke. “Usually for penance, I would suggest prayer, but in your case, I will make an exception. You have come here seeking some form of redemption, but forgiveness is not that easy. Before I can absolve you from your sins, you have to make amends for what you did.”
    He had then outlined the unusual task he had in mind for Devine’s penance.
    “After you have done this, you may return to this booth and I will continue with the holy sacrament of confession,” he told him.
    He blessed Devine and closed the metal grille. The confession was over. He could hear Devine splutter and struggle to say something like a puzzled child running out of questions to ask.
    Afterward he felt a strange exhilaration. After years of dutiful obedience, of deferment to the will of God, he saw this digression from the rite of confession as a form of emancipation. He no longer had to make things better for men who had murdered or assisted in murder.
    Standing over Devine’s dead body, the priest reasoned to himself that everything had happened as was destined. True, he had not envisaged that Devine would end up being murdered, but he saw the workings of some kind of mysterious, possibly even divine justice that enabled him to be the first to find his body. Now he could give Devine last rites and complete the act of confession.
    The priest kneeled down and, gingerly placing his hand on the man’s forehead, uttered the words he had said so many times before.
    “May God Almighty have mercy upon thee, forgive thee thy sins, and bring thee to everlasting life.”
    The prayer took just a few seconds. Afterward he turned to rest his eyes on an ancient hydrangea shrub, covered in sodden masses of last year’s flowers. The branches were bowed with the weight, unable to cope with the abundance of dead blooms. He wondered why nature did not just allow the shrub to scatter its huge flowers when they faded, and lighten its load. He felt a great need for some sign of spring, a fresh snowdrop petal or a leaf bud unsticking itself, but the shrub was as useless to him as all the years of baggage inside his head.
    His eye with the cataract filled with water, and then his good eye began to smart in sympathy with the bad eye. Devine’s body swam into vision like a thorn that could not be extracted.

5
    T he fisherman advised Celcius Daly to sit back and enjoy the view as they pulled away from the rickety jetty. The shoreline became wilder as they rowed out, clearing the inlet to head north into the great gap of water called Lough Neagh. Soon Daly could see the outline of Coney Island, and as the boat drew closer he made out the burnt stump of a large oak tree struck by lightning. A group of men and women, some wearing forensic suits, were foraging their way through twists of blackened wood. As the fisherman steered the boat past a bed of reeds, a tern flew at them with increasingly fretful pipings.
    The sleek, sculpted fiberglass of the police launch, the only boat the force had in service, took up most of the tiny landing jetty. Daly managed to jump ashore without breaking a leg, glad to be reacquainted with surefootedness.
    “As a rule, corpses don’t make any sound,” warned the pathologist, Ruari Butler, as he sauntered over to greet the