phone back in her pocket, and resumed her inspection of the canvas nailed over the window.
It was a naughty little siren of a painting. It had a naïve, dreamlike quality that reminded her of one of Rousseau’s jungle fantasies – especially when the eye wandered to that small, unexpected feral creature in the bottom left-hand corner. A ray of sun filtering through the glass set it aglow suddenly, lending it the jewel-like appearance of a mosaic. Río wanted it. Picking up a shard of slate from the floor, she used it to prise away the nails fixing the painting to the window frame. Then she rolled up the canvas and tucked it inside her jacket. She wasn’t stealing, she told herself. She was safeguarding the painting for Adair. If she left it where it was, it would soon be destroyed by the damp sea air that seeped in through the bockety casement.
The damp was infiltrating her bones, now – she wanted to get back outside to where the sun was pushing its way through raggedy cloud, dispersing rainbows. She made a last, quick tour of the house upstairs and down, snapping a dozen or so photographs that she could attach to an email and send to Adair as evidence of his idiocy. In the kitchen, she even took a couple of shots of the empty whiskey bottles littering the room – proof of how old Madser had been driven to drink, and a premonition of the fate that might befall the new owner. But as she went to leave by the back door, she looked over her shoulder at the picture window beyond which the light bounced straight off the sea into the living space, and she knew that Adair Bolger – whose glass was always half-full – would somehow find a way to be happy in this house.
Chapter Two
Cat was lying in a sun trap on the flat roof of the house. She’d soaked every single item of clothing she possessed in the oversized bath, she’d soaped herself from head to toe in the blue marble wet room before towelling herself dry with her scrap of microfibre towel, and now – damp hair spread out around her like a nimbus – she was allowing the midday sun to do the rest of the work. Above her, gulls were wheeling in a hypnotic spiral, reminding her of the whirligig seeds that used to drop from the branches of the sycamore tree her mother had planted in the garden of the Crooked House, her childhood home. How different two houses could be! This house was all steel and glass and acute angles: the Crooked House was all ramshackle and bockety and – well – crooked.
Slap-bang in the middle of a forest, overlooking a lake, the Crooked House could have been a magical place for a child to grow up. Cat remembered children coming to visit, the sons and daughters of her parents’ friends all bubbling with excitement as they explored the secret rooms and winding passageways within its walls, the bosky tunnels and hidey-holes without. The jewel in the crown – the treat that Cat liked to delay showing off to new friends until the very end of her guided tour – was the treehouse.
Cat’s mum Paloma had built the house in an ancient cypress tree, when Cat was seven. It had been a surprise for her birthday that year, and Cat had never had a better birthday present, before or since. The flat-pack playhouses and designer dens of other children seemed mundane in comparison.
The floor of Cat’s eyrie was a wooden platform, the walls constructed from something her mother told her was called ‘osier’, a type of bendy willow used in wickerwork. With the help of Raoul, Paloma had woven the osier into a beehive shape, then covered it in waterproof camouflage material and tacked on masses of branches and foliage. There was a rope ladder that could be drawn up against intruders, and a basket on a pulley that could be lowered and filled with provisions. There was a window with a raffia blind from which vantage point Cat could spy on the coming and goings of foxes and badgers, and a cupboard for her books and art materials. The house was practically invisible, especially when the tree was in leaf: she and her mum had christened it the Heron’s Nest because, if you spotted it from below, you really might think it was one.
The Heron’s Nest was Cat’s refuge from the real world, her cocoon for dreaming, her very own private property. She had hung ‘Keep Out’ signs at the entrance, but of course she hadn’t been able to resist showing off the place to all comers because she was so proud of it. She was even more proud of the fact that her beyond-brilliant mum had made it. Sometimes they had slept there, Paloma and Cat, snug and cosied up in duvets. Sometimes Cat’s dad would come looking for them, blundering through the under-growth and muttering and cursing when he fell, which was frequently. Paloma would plug them both into headphones then, and Cat would fall asleep to the sound of her mother’s recorded voice telling her stories, and wake to boisterous birdsong.
Cat no longer enjoyed the luxury of falling asleep to stories or music. She kept her wits about her now at all times: even while she slept. The last time she’d been stupid enough to let her guard down she’d woken to the shrilling of a smoke alarm, and the greedy sound of flames lapping against canvas. Under cover of night, someone had boarded her houseboat. They’d crapped on the companionway, jemmied the hatch under which she stowed her paintings, slung turpentine over them, and set them alight before scarpering. That had been a month ago. The following day Cat had posted the keys of the houseboat back to the guy who owned it. After two years of living on the canal, after two years of enduring the kind of persecution that mavericks and vagabonds the world over are subject to, she had decided it was time to move on.
She’d hitched a ride on a rig, and ended up here in Lissamore. She knew the village – she’d worked as a scenic artist on a film, The O’Hara Affair, that had been made in the vicinity, when she’d been put up in one of the numerous B&Bs requisitioned by the film makers. But Cat couldn’t afford a B&B now. Nor would she want to stay in one. Landladies were inquisitive sorts, prone to asking questions and making the kind of observations that Cat would not care to elucidate on. Is it a Donegal Gallagher you are? It’s hard to place you by your accent. Are you travelling on your own? You want to be careful, so. You’re paying by cash? That’s unusual, these days. Is that all the luggage you have? You’re sure? Fill in the register, if you’d be so kind. Signature and ID, please.
Cat hated registers, as she hated all manner of form-filling. She couldn’t get her head round the bureaucracy, any more than she could understand why she had to divulge all kinds of personal stuff to the faceless penpushers who processed the info. Who wanted to know this stuff about her? Why did they want to know it? What was in it for them, and why did they have to make life so unnecessarily, so infuriatingly complicated?
Raoul had offered to help her complete an application form once, for a mobile phone contract, but when she got a load of the stuff you’d need to get one – ID, utility bills, bank account details – she had despaired, and opted for a pay-as-you-go instead.
That pay-as-you-go sounded now, alerting her to a text. She knew who the sender was without having to consult the display. Raoul was the only person in the world who knew her number.
Where are you, Catkin? she read.
In a gud place, she texted back.
Be more specific.
On a roof in lisamor.
I should have guessed. Tin?
No but it is hot.
I like it. Keep your phone turned on. I have news for you.
OK.
News. Good. She hoped it had to do with the house-sitting gig he’d told her about.
A couple of academics, friends of Raoul’s in Galway, were taking a year’s sabbatical in New Mexico, and they needed someone to dust their books and water their marijuana plants and play with their dog while they were away. The house in question was near the village of Kilrowan, and came complete with river views and a light-filled conservatory that
