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to see them oozing little pearls of blood. ‘Mummy,’ she called and turned and then she screamed and then there were no more memories until she was standing beside Nola in the graveyard, miserable and frightened in the awful coat. 

Chapter Four
    As Phoebe drove away from Rosslare, the flat khaki landscape and utilitarian industrial parks made her wonder if Ireland had been the right place to escape to after all. Where were the stone-walled craggy fields and thatched white cottages of her memory? Where were the sheep and donkeys and statues of the Virgin Mary? Had it all been devoured by the Celtic Tiger? Or maybe they were not true childhood memories at all, but images from films and books – an Ireland of fiction and fantasy that had never really existed.
    This post-boom landscape seemed inhospitable and unwelcoming. For miles Phoebe didn’t see a living person. Her battered Morris Minor passed cars and lorries on the dual carriageway, but the constant movement of their windscreen wipers obscured the drivers until she wondered if she could be the only human being on the sodden island.
    As she headed west the landscape softened and began to undulate a little. Industrial estates were replaced with a succession of small grey towns. The road narrowed, edged with hedges threatening to burst out in green; here and there a snatch of sea, a wooded hillside, ivy-covered walls obscuring country estates, hens pottering on the grassy verge. A man in a flat tweed cap wobbled on a bicycle as he waved to a woman in her garden. Phoebe laughed out loud as she realised he was followed by a donkey, trotting obediently behind him, attached to his handlebars with a rope.
    Past Cork the rain stopped, the clouds parted to reveal a setting sun, and Phoebe’s heart began to lift. The towns grew prettier; brightly painted shops and houses were strung along the road, even the churches were wedding-cake colours; pink or white or virgin blue. The landscape grew mountainous, the roads grew smaller, twisting sharply around rocky outcrops and climbing steeply up hills before dropping with a gear-defying plummet down the other side. The patchwork of green fields seemed to be stitched together with dry-stone walls or hedges raked by ocean winds.
    The sea was always to her left, breakers crashing against high cliffs or rolling onto beaches on an incoming tide. She saw a surfer riding the first spring waves and in the distance little dots of fishing boats bobbed on the horizon.
    For a few moments she let herself believe that David was with her, that they were setting out on holiday together in the car he used to call her Miss Marple-mobile, chatting about the journey, admiring the view; soon she would show him her childhood haunts and walk with him along the beach at Carraigmore.
    The sudden shriek of a car horn and a screech of tyres made Phoebe realise that she had drifted on to the wrong side of the road. A 4x4 had had to swerve to avoid her and as she glanced in panic at her rear-view mirror she could see a man’s hand gesticulating out of its window. Taking a deep breath she determined to banish all thoughts of David until she arrived.
    At last, in fading light, Phoebe saw a sign to Carraigmore which led her off the main road and down a narrow, pot-holed lane. She passed a caravan park next to a small estate of holiday homes, flat-fronted and neatly thatched – a large sign read: ‘Sea View, Traditional Cosy Irish Cottages, with authentic turf-burning stoves’. Out of season they looked cold and empty and Phoebe reckoned the only view you’d get of the sea would be from the roof.
    ‘ Welcome to Carraigmore, we like a cautious driver’, was positioned outside a surprisingly large and modern-looking primary school and adjacent medical centre, and from there an orderly line of fir-hedged bungalows led into the village, each garden neater than the last.
    Nothing looked familiar to Phoebe until she saw the magnolia tree. Thick white buds