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instruments and the music was off again.
    Mary Green brought more drinks. Larry felt the music race in his blood, linking his past to his present, bringing him home. For the first time since he had arrived in Kinvara, the new policeman was happy.

     
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THE TEETOTALLER
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14
    “This parish was unlucky,” said Helen. “Father Doherty was a good priest in a lot of ways, so I’ve been told, but he was one of the worst where the music was concerned. A Sunday hardly passed without him ranting from the pulpit about the terrible vengeance God would wreak on those who believed in fairies and danced to their evil tunes. Even before the act was passed, he walked the roads at night, barging into any house where he heard music and browbeating everyone he found there. He broke a man’s fiddle once, under his boot. But out of all his parishioners, there was none that made him as angry as my grandfather.
    “The hatred was mutual. J.J.—” Helen paused. “Did I tell you he was called J.J.? That you were named after him?”

    “You didn’t,” said J.J. “But someone else did.”
    “Who?”
    “Never mind. Go on.”
    Helen hesitated, wondering whether to press him, then decided against it. “He used to bar the door against Father Doherty and play away while he battered on the door and yelled. Then, on Sundays, he used to turn up in the church and sit through all the tirades as if they didn’t concern him in the slightest. Father Doherty couldn’t take it. He was used to being obeyed. The act was barely made law when he turned the Liddys in for holding a house dance. They weren’t the only ones either. There were a good few prosecutions that year, and a lot of them were successful. People got stuck with fines they could never afford to pay. The act was working. But it didn’t work against the Liddys. People told my grandfather later that Father Doherty had threatened them with eternal damnation if they didn’t stand up in court and swear that they’d been charged an entrance fee at the door of the dance. But for all their fear of the priest and the power vested in him, there wasn’t one person who would betray the Liddys. That’s how highly the family was regarded in the parish back then.”
    Helen stopped for a moment, and J.J. saw a look offierce pride in her eyes. Then it collapsed and she turned her gaze to the flames. “But that was before.”
    J.J. waited. Helen took a deep breath. “The case was thrown out. My grandparents held a dance to celebrate. It was high summer and the nights were long and warm. The dancers spilled out of the house into the yard, and after a while the musicians followed them out there. Everyone said the craic was mighty. There had never been a dance to equal it. Until Father Doherty turned up.
    “He was so furious that not even my grandfather could keep on playing. He was red in the face and shaking with rage.
    “‘You think you got the better of me, don’t you?’ he said.
    “Father Doherty was not a young man. My grandmother was concerned for him. Despite all that had happened, she didn’t want him to have a seizure, on her doorstep or anywhere else. She invited him to step inside the house and have a cup of tea.
    “‘I’ll never again set foot in that iniquitous house,’ he said to her. ‘And I’ll tell you another thing as well. I will put an end to this devil’s music.’
    “He snatched the flute out of my grandfather’s hand and marched out of the yard. My grandfatherran after him, but he was—you have to believe this, J.J.—he was a gentle man. He loved that flute above all else that he owned, but he would not resort to violence to get it back. Father Doherty walked away from this house with the flute that night, seventy years ago, and that was the last time that anyone ever saw him.”
    “What?” said J.J.
    “He disappeared. He was never seen again.”
    “But…you mean they never even found a body?”
    Helen shook her head. “Nothing. To this day