Citizen. Charlie Brooks

said everyone knew. It stood on Main Street, in view of the church. And as Tipper settled himself to wait on a low wall opposite the pub, he watched a funeral procession forming up outside the churchyard gate.

      ‘All right, Tipper?’

      It was Sam, sauntering up on Tipper’s blind side. Tipper swung round and nodded.

      ‘Yourself?’ he smiled. Tipper was immediately struck by Sam’s strength. He wasn’t particularly tall, but he was solid.

      ‘I’m grand. See the pub?’

      He nodded towards McCarthy’s.

      ‘What about it?’

      ‘It’s haunted. Every time one of the family’s going to snuff it, a picture falls off the wall. See that funeral?’

      ‘Yeah.’

      ‘That’s the McCarthys too. They have the undertakers as well as the pub.’

      ‘That’s warped.’

      ‘It’s good business. They do the funeral and the wake all in one package. Come on. We’ve got to walk.’

      The funeral cortege was just passing, led by the coffin borne in a smart Mercedes hearse, with wreaths and bouquets piled on the roof. Grimfaced mourners flanked it or trailed behind on foot. Sam and Tipper kept pace as the procession crawled towards the top of the town where, at the end of Main Street, a sign pointed the way to the cemetery, up a street to the left. But the funeral turned right.

      ‘They’re going the wrong way,’ observed Tipper.

      ‘No funeral in Fethard ever goes the right way.’

      Sam nodded towards the street that had been avoided.

      ‘That’s Barrack Street. Cromwell came in that way, and the funerals have never used it since. They turn right here, and take the long way down Burke Street and round the back.’

      Sam and Tipper left the funeral marchers and forked right by the Castle Inn.

      ‘See those walls there?’

      Sam indicated with a wave of his arm.

      ‘They’re only the oldest complete town walls in Europe.’

      ‘How d’you know that? Jesus, you’re like a guide book.’

      ‘Me Da tells me. He knows all the history. Come here, there’s something I’ll show you.’

      He led Tipper to a place under the town wall and pointed mid way up the stonework.

      ‘See? There’s an old witch in this wall.’

      Set into the stonework Tipper could just make out a distorted head, grinning with a gap-toothed mouth, above a decayed body and arms that reached down below the stomach. Heavy weathering made it difficult to make out the detail of the carving.

      ‘She’s called Sheela Nagig,’ said Sam. ‘There’s little statues of her all over Ireland. Nobody knows who she is. Come on, we’ve miles to walk.’

      He led the way to the stone bridge across the Clashawley River, and set his course along the Kilsheelan road. They took turns to carry Tipper’s unwieldy bag. Sam was setting a fast pace but Tipper found himself constantly slowing down, so he could take in the scene: the geese inspecting the river bank, the horses loose in the fields or tethered to a stake on the roadside, the birdsong in the air and yellow wild flowers billowing from crevices in the drystone walls. They stopped to look at the imposing ivied ruins of Kiltinan Castle, and again to view the shell of an old church by the roadside.

      ‘Cromwell,’ said Sam. ‘He knocked the shite out of everything.’

      After ten minutes they turned into a boreen leading towards the escarpment of a steep ridge that seemed to climb up into the clouds. It was laid out in a patchwork of hedged fields in which horses, sheep and cows grazed, the shining grass patched here and there with clumps of brilliant yellow gorse. This pasture rose as far as a thick belt of pine trees, above which lay an expanse of moorland that stretched up to and beyond the horizon. Sam stopped at last and leaned on a gate to look fondly at this view. Coming up behind, Tipper joined him, his eyes tracing the network of hedges on the hillside, strong barriers of beech, laurel and whitethorn, bursting their buds as they flowered.

      ‘Jesus,’ he said. ‘This is some place.’

      Sam’s response was reverent.

      ‘This is the Golden Vale,’ he said. ‘The home of champions and God’s Own Country.’

       2

      Nikolai Nikolayev, universally known as Nico, sat on a chrome bar stool in the Voile Rouge. The beachside restaurant was heaving. Its tender rushed busily from the small pier on Pampelonne Beach out to the floating gin palaces that had cruised round from St Tropez. The music was beginning to step up a beat and the ‘models’ from the fashion boutique next door were provocatively working the tables.

      At the other end of the bar an overweight, eurotrash rich kid made some desperate girl go down on her knees while he poured Louis Roederer Cristal over her face; he laughed loudly for attention. Nico gave him a sycophantic smile of approval and deftly nodded his head. The girl pretended she was having a good time and squealed. That was what she was paid to do. Her team-mate clapped, yelled and tossed her hair over her shoulder. And adjusted her loose fitting top, so her nipples were visible if you’d paid to be that close.

      Nico spooned up the last scrapings of his favourite hangover cure: a lemon sorbet heavily laced with Italian bitters. His predatory eyes flicked between the guy he was talking to on the next stool, a Bolivian gigolo named Ramon, and the entrance. Nico had long cultivated the habit of noting every new arrival at the beach bar. The males were quickly assessed in terms of their influence or wealth; the females for any hint of availability; and both for their vulnerabilities, for the most advantageous angles of attack.

      It was how Nico lived, how he funded the Jensen and the five-star hotels and vintage champagnes which were the keynotes of his life. With no capital or inherited standing in the world, he might superficially be bracketed with a pique-assiette like Ramon. Yet he stood apart from the hangers-on of his acquaintance, the gigolos, barflies and male models that infested the Riviera. For one thing, he looked different. With his puny physique and polecat face, he had to get by without the standard obvious good looks of those to whom freeloading came easy. Minus that confident jaw, lacking those soulful eyes, Nico compensated by growing a neat beard, wearing designer shades and working considerably harder, and with deeper insight, to access the playboy yachts, private tables and penthouse party circuits that all of them depended on. Nico would have it no other way. He was not, he considered, a Ramon, an expendable accessory, a pawn. He was a player. And he was clever.

      His quick brain had even taken him to Harvard. The public Parisian school system prepared him well, but his father, proprietor of a modest food shop in the French capital’s 6ème Arrondissement, could never have afforded college in America. So Nico won a scholarship and took himself across the Atlantic to learn all about the drug habits and compulsive spending of the East Coast Preppy, the Texas Oilboy and the Jewish Princess. With this preliminary social research under his belt, Nico set forth.

      He’d been recruited by Reitchel-Litvinoff, the trouble-shooting New York tax accountants, who found many uses for his chameleon social skills, undoubted numeracy and ability to bluff in six languages—including both American and British. For half a decade he shimmied from country to country on behalf of clients anxious to keep their wealth out of the clutches of the taxman. Whenever it was necessary to sidestep the electronic banking system, Nico was on hand. Here he picked up bearer bonds, title-deeds and attaché cases filled with large denomination bills. There he made discreet trades, deposits in numbered offshore accounts and deliveries at the clients’ Swiss chalets and Mustique beach houses.

      Yet he featured nowhere in Reitchel-Litvinoff’s