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calculation after all. But it helped to pass the miserable hours of darkness and enforced confinement, when Felix so often lay awake while above and all around him other schoolboys slept. It was better to do sums than to remember the missed pass that afternoon and his captain’s scorn at tea, or to count the minutes until the end of term, and home.
    Father Diamond adjusted his watch first and then the clock on the mantelpiece in time to the chimes of the ten o’clock news. It was irritating that, although these two would now both be in time for this one moment, all the other clocks that had to be adjusted—the central heating, the radio alarm beside his bed, in the sacristy and in the church itself—would perforce be inaccurate, if only by a second or so. He watched the news. Swine flu, the recession, two more British soldiers killed in Afghanistan. “O the mind, mind has mountains,” he quoted to himself. “Cliffs of fall.” When the news was finished, he took his coffee cup into the kitchen and washed it. His house backed onto a high wall and beyond it was the river. It was quiet there at night.
    Stella envisaged the darkness of the river and for a moment closed her eyes. All around her there was noise. Cutlery and glasses, shouted conversations and guffaws. The man on her left had turned to her during the main course with ill-disguised reluctance; she recognized his struggle to findsomething he could talk to her about. His kind was bored by women. I was at school with your husband, he said. But in a different house, of course, and possibly a year or two above. In the bad old days, Stella said brightly. Rufus says it is much better now. Since they stopped the canings.
    Bloody stupid of them, if you ask me. Did us a world of good. That’s the trouble now; no discipline. Lot of whingers and too many bleeding hearts. A good thrashing’s part of growing up.
    But surely you can’t approve of children hitting other children? That’s what happened, wasn’t it? The prefects were allowed to do the canings—
    What d’you mean, children? We weren’t children, we were men. And a sight more decent than what passes for men in some quarters nowadays. Bring it all back, I say.
    The street sounds of a Saturday night rose up toward Fidelma where she sat by her open window; muffled, because they were so far below; voices, motorbikes and music, the pulsing beat of rhythmic bass notes like a heart’s thud heard within the womb. Drumbeats. Tribal drums, like jungle messages or the lambegs—was that the word?—those fellows that played them, with their bowler hats and gray-potato faces. It was queer, now that she thought about it, those stiff figures and their iron laws—Ulster Says No Surrender; Beware the Antichrist—and yet the same God-fearing fingers on the wild drumsticks, thudding out those urgent calls. Thump, thump, thump, they must be echoes, surely, of the pulse of heartbeats in the rhymes of love. Thump, thump, thump, and the bedsprings creaking, hushnow or you’ll wake the young ones up. But those men in their black hats, like versions of the wee fellows on the sacks of Homepride flour, those men and their marching, ah well, their thoughts were very far from love.
    Fidelma ate the Fray Bentos steak pie that had been in the kitchen cupboard, and some beans. There was nothing much to drink but Bushmills. Stocks were getting low, but no doubt Mary-Margaret would be back before much longer. Fidelma supposed she would be glad to see her daughter. She was weary of sitting here in her own smells. The bass beats thudded out and she sat and heard them; she thought they echoed her own heart.
    Stella and Rufus, coming home on Sunday evening, wondered what the crowd was doing, milling round the church at the end of the crescent. Must have been a wedding, Rufus said. Unlikely on a Sunday, Stella thought, but did not contradict him, her mind only on whether there would be an e-mail waiting from Camilla.
    Father Diamond had