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able to see more on foot, and he began by closely examining the ground. One or two of the prints there might have been made by a horse but he couldn’t be sure. As he dragged the gate shut again, it occurred to him that he was wasting his time. The cob could jump, he knew, but he probably wouldn’t. If he had lost Martina in this field he would still be here, stuffing his ugly face.
    All the same, Gerard found that he had to look; had to be sure. He walked across to where a pair of parallel green banks marked the beginning of the ancient road known as the Old Line. It had always been a favourite riding place, even for him, as a boy. It was long and straight and soft and green. The horses seemed to find it as inviting as their riders, and always danced across the grass like racehorses going to the start. When he was young, if he opened Flaherty’s gate and Kelly’s gate Gerard could gallop for more than half a mile in a long, graceful curve exactly parallel to the lake-shore. But Flaherty’s gate was gone now and the gap closed up. The old road ran underneath the hedgerow and vanished. On the other side, Matty Kelly had ploughed up the land and reseeded it. Gerard had been shocked. He was still shocked, all these years later. Nowadays it wouldn’t be allowed.
    There were only three or four hundred clear yards left of the Old Line, but even so it was still a fairly decent gallop. Martina often came here with the cob and Trish sometimes came with her, to give some young horse a pipe-opener. The banks weren’t high, but Gerard walked along the top of one of them anyway, to get the best possible look at the surrounding land. Dan Flaherty’s cattle lifted their heads from their grazing and watched him as he passed. There was nothing unusual to be seen, and the few horse prints that he did find were old and blunted by rain.
    Joseph went down to the bungalow to tell Thomas. He hated going down there, hated the tacky new house, hated having a grandfather who lived out the back. He was afraid of finding Thomas dead; had been since Thomas told him that he had found his own grandfather dead when he was a teenager. He was also afraid of finding Thomas engaged in some kind of private and repulsive activity, like masturbating or pissing in the sink. He was particularly in dread of these things since last night.
    ‘Grandda?’
    The back door was open and the dog came bounding out. Joseph rubbed its ears. He had never heard it bark and it crossed his mind that perhaps it couldn’t, for some reason. Maybe it was a freak. Maybe Thomas had had it de-barked. He wondered if there was such an operation and, if so, could his sister get it. He heard Stephen’s voice. ‘Imagine that! A woman that didn’t talk back!’ and was immediately ashamed for thinking it, especially in the circumstances.
    Thomas came to the door, a cup of tea steaming in his hand.
    ‘Ah,’ he said, stuck for a moment, embarrassed because he could not, could never remember Joseph’s name. He was the quietest of all of them; the darkest and the most distant. Somehow they had never hit it off.
    ‘You’re about early,’ he said, in the end.
    ‘Martina’s gone missing,’ said Joseph. ‘The horse came home this morning without her.’
    Thomas’s face seemed to collapse. ‘Oh, dear,’ he said. ‘That isn’t good. That isn’t good at all.’
    He went back inside, pulled a chair out from under the kitchen table and sat down on it. That, Joseph thought, was a lot of help.
    It wasn’t long before Gerard was quite certain that Martina wasn’t on the Old Line, nor had been. But he also knew that if he turned back before the end he would always be wondering. He dropped down on to the road again, remembering every step of it. There had been charioteers here once; real ones. An archaeological survey in the fifties had shown that the track had once run all the way around the lake, but for some reason the banks on the other side had been lost. They had found chariot