Victor O'Reilly - Rules of The Hunt

This is not always so easy in the cities. In rural Ireland, especially outside the tourist season, every stranger is noted and observed by someone. And sooner or later – if the sergeant is doing his job right and knows how to work with rather than against the local population – that information finds its way back to the local police station.

In the case of a Northern Irish accent, which is quite distinctive to an inhabitant of the Republic, that information tends to find its way to the gardai very fast indeed. There are, of course, a few pockets of sympathizers – less than one percent of the population, if the voting rolls are to be believed – but there were no such pockets in the area around Connemara Regional.

Routine radio communications were in the clear. Intelligence reports were treated more carefully and were communicated by secure fax to Garda Headquarters in Dublin and from there to the desk of General Shane Kilmara, commander of Ireland's antiterrorist force, the Rangers.

As it happens, Kilmara was not there when the intelligence report arrived. He was in the West of Ireland.

Kathleen's father, Noel Fleming, had been a successful builder in Dublin for many years before retiring early to the West of Ireland during one of Ireland's all-too-frequent economic downturns.

In his spare time he had liked to paint, and the light and scenery of the West presented a never-ending challenge. His wife, Mary, was from the area and loved horses, so their way of life was convivial and pleasant. They built a large bungalow some miles from the town, and when Kathleen's marriage broke up it seemed only natural that she would live at home for a while. She was an only child. Connemara Regional was nearby, and she applied for a job and was accepted.

Kathleen had married a solicitor in Dublin. He was young and ambitious and did not want children. She had continued working, so when it became clear the marriage was not going to work it had been relatively easy to make a break.

She had left Dublin without regret. The city had its merits, but it seemed to her that it was losing the human values that had made Ireland special without gaining proportionately material advantage. She had found her husband's friends – mostly lawyers, accountants, and bankers – to be narrowly focused yuppies. They lacked dimension and breadth of vision.

She was no fan of modern Ireland. The country was the least socially mobile in Europe. She witnessed the injustice of the structures every day in her work. If you were born underprivileged, the chances were you would die that way. A rich and powerful element guarded the status quo. The majority had lived on the margin. One-fifth of the population was without work. Emigration was the norm for most of the young. And this is the fruit of our independence, she thought. For this we fought; for this so many died.

Ireland's redeeming feature, in Kathleen's opinion, was its land. It had a beauty and a quality that was duplicated nowhere else in the world. And the most beautiful part of Ireland was the West. In the West there was magic. It wasn't just a matter of how the land looked. It was how it felt. It was a place of spirit, of romance, of sadness. It was a land of mystery and past heroes and great deeds and tragedy. It was a land that touched your soul.

Night shift over, she drove her little Ford Fiesta along the narrow country road toward her parents' bungalow and thought about Fitzduane. Though security kept most of the staff from ever actually seeing him, he was something of a conversation piece in the hospital. Occasionally they had a criminal or a mental patient kept under guard while getting medical treatment, but this was the first time anyone could recall that an assault victim was being guarded for his own protection. Also, the security did not consist, as normal, of one rather bored unarmed garda whiling away the time with endless cups of tea.

In this case, there were gardai on the perimeter all right, but there were also armed Rangers carrying weapons of a type she had never seen before.

It was rather scary, but it was also exciting. It would also have seemed unreal, except for the grim evidence of Fitzduane's wounds. It was truly horrifying, the damage two little pieces of metal could inflict.

She braked as she rounded a bend and saw a herd of cows up ahead. Behind them, a farmer and his dog followed. They were taking their cows from a stone-walled field to be milked in the yard half a mile up the road. While this was going on, the road was blocked. It was possible to pass from behind, but it tended to alarm the cattle and they were heavy with milk.

The air was heavy with moisture, but the sun had broken through and droplets sparkled on the spiders' webs in the hedgerow. To the left there was a lake and in the distance the purple silhouettes of mountains. To her right, the hills were closer. Small rocky fields bordered with dry stone walls gave way to bog and heather and lichen-covered rock. Sheep grazed the higher land. Overhead, a kestrel soared.

The tragedy of Ireland, she thought, is that with all this beauty in our laps we can't seem to find a way to make a living here. The Irish did well enough abroad. There were supposed to be over forty million of Irish descent in America. There were more first- and second-generation Irish in Britain than in Ireland. Meanwhile, back at home, lack of vision, corruption, begrudgery, an inadequate education system, horrendous taxation, poor communications, and straightforward bad government played havoc with the prospects of generation after generation of Irish men and women.

She remembered the James Joyce quotation: "Ireland is an old sow that eats her own farrow." In her experience and observation, it was all too applicable.

Her thoughts switched back to Fitzduane.

He attracted her more than any many she had ever met. Unlike many Irish of their generation, her parents were tolerant and enlightened; she was not inexperienced sexually and had slept with several men before her marriage. She had met other men who had attracted her strongly and aroused her physically.

What was different about Fitzduane was that he combined a strong physical presence and sex appeal with a keen intellect and an approach to life she found deliciously refreshing. The man was not constrained by the dead hand of custom and practice which seemed to stultify so much of Irish society. He had an open and inquiring mind, and he did not seem to care a damn for convention.

Despite its reputation for great conversation and friendliness, Ireland was an indirect culture in which it was the custom to say what people wanted to hear rather than the truth. Accordingly, much of the friendliness was a surface patina rather than the manifestation of a relationship based on mutual understanding. In contrast, though his timing and manner belied any offense, Fitzduane tended to be direct and to cut to the heart of the matter. He was not glib or witty in the surface manner that tended to be a success in Irish pubs. He was kind and amusing, and he was so damn interesting.

She wanted him, but she was not at all sure she was going to get him. Still, she had a window of opportunity, and that in itself was rather fun. Night shift didn't use to be like this.

Ahead of her, the last cow raised its tail and deposited one of the less attractive aspects of rural life on the road before plodding into the yard. Washing a car in the country was something of a pointless exercise.

Kathleen accelerated slowly and skidded through a succession of cow pats as the farmer closed the gate and raised a hand in salute. She took a hand off the steering wheel in a casual wave of reply. Everybody saluted everybody in this part of the world, which was pleasant enough, though not entirely conducive to safety.