looks at her then, as if deciding something. ‘There was too much food, for a start.’
‘Too much?’
‘Two pans of bread. Two ham and cheese, sure I can’t remember what else.’
‘Any books?’
He looks at her again. The same stare. Interest piqued. ‘One.’
‘Can I see it?’
He stands and gets a paperback from a kitchen drawer. ‘There you go. I was going to give it to Bridget – thought it was hers, and the extras too.’
Bo studies it. A well-thumbed crime novel that Bridget had picked up from somewhere. She opens the inside hoping for an inscription but there’s nothing. ‘You don’t think Tom asked for this?’
‘Sure why would he? And if he did it wasn’t just his heart that there was something wrong with.’ He says this to the camera and chuckles.
Bo hangs on to the book. ‘Going back to Tom’s duties. What are the duties you have on the farm now?’
‘Same as usual.’ He thinks about it as if for the first time, all the things that Tom did during his day that he never thought about, or the things they used to discuss in the evening. ‘He saw to the well by the bat house. I haven’t been there for years. I’ll have to keep an eye on that, I suppose.’
‘You never mentioned the bat house before,’ Bo says. ‘Can you take us there?’
The four of them and one of the loyal sheepdogs get into Joe’s jeep. He drives them across the land, on dirt tracks that feel dangerous now, never mind during the winter on those stormy days or icy mornings. An eighty-year-old cannot do this alone, two eighty-year-olds were barely managing it. Bo hopes that Jimmy’s son is an able-bodied young man who does more than Joe asks, because Joe’s not a man to ask for help.
A rusted railing stops them in their tracks. Solomon beats Joe to it and jumps out of the jeep to push it open. He runs to catch up with them. Joe parks in a clearing by the forest, Solomon collects his equipment. They must walk up a trail the rest of the way. The dog, Mossie, races up ahead of them.
‘Bad land, we could never do nothing with it, but we kept it nonetheless,’ Joe tells them. ‘In the thirties, Da planted Sitka spruce and lodgepole pine. Thrive in bad soils, good with strong winds. About twenty acres. You can see Gougane Barra Forest Park from up here.’
They walk through the trails and come to a clearing with a shed that was once painted white but now is faded, beaten away by time, and reveals the dull concrete beneath. The windows have been boarded up. Even on this beautiful day it’s bleak, the austere outbuilding at odds with the beautiful surroundings.
‘That’s the bat house,’ Joe explains. ‘Hundreds of them in there. We used to play in there as boys,’ he chuckles. ‘We’d dare each other to go inside, lock the door and count for as long as we could.’
‘When is the last time you were here?’ Bo asks.
‘Ah. Twenty years. More.’
‘How often would Tom check this area?’ Bo asks.
‘Once, twice a week, to make sure the well wasn’t contaminated. It’s over there, behind the shed.’
‘If you can’t make money from this land, why didn’t you sell it?’
‘After Da died, the land was up for sale. Some Dublin lad wanted to build a house up here but couldn’t do anything with that bat house. Environmental people’ – he throws his chin up in the air to note his annoyance – ‘they said the bats were rare. Couldn’t knock down the shed or build around it because it would ruin their flight path, so that was that. Took it off the market then. Mossie!’ Joe calls for his dog, who’s disappeared from view.
They cut filming. Rachel moves close to the bat house, presses her face up to the windows to see in through the cracks in the wood. Bo notices Solomon walk away, equipment in hand, and head towards the forest. She hopes he’s heard something interesting to record and so lets him go. Even if he hasn’t, she knows she’s gotten him and Rachel up early and driven them here with no food, and they can’t function without it, unlike her, and she’s starting to sense their irritation. She lets him go, for a few moments on his own.
‘Where’s the well?’
‘Up there, beyond the bat house.’
‘Would you mind if we filmed you checking the well?’ she asks.
He gives her that same grunt that she recognises as signalling he’ll do whatever she wants, he doesn’t care, no matter how odd he regards her.
While Rachel and Joe talk bats – Rachel can hold a conversation about just about anything – Bo takes a little wander around the back of the bat house. There’s a cottage behind it, run-down, the outside in the same condition as the bat house, the white paint almost completely gone and the grey concrete dreary amidst all the green. Mossie wanders around in front of the cottage sniffing the ground.
‘Who lived here?’ Bo calls.
‘Ha?’ he shouts, unable to hear her.
She studies the cottage. This building has windows. Clean windows.
Joe and Rachel follow her and turn the corner into the path of the cottage.
‘Who lived here?’ Bo repeats.
‘My da’s aunt. Long time ago. She moved out, the bats moved in.’ He chuckles again. He closes his eyes while he tries to think of her name. ‘Kitty. We tormented the woman. She used to hit us with a wooden spoon.’
Bo moves away slightly, closer to the cottage, she studies the area. This house has a vegetable patch beside it, some fruit growing too. There are wildflowers sitting in a tall glass in one of the windows.
‘Joe,’ Bo says. ‘Who lives here now?’
‘Nobody. Bats maybe,’ he jokes.
‘But look.’
He looks. He takes in all that she has already absorbed. The fruit and vegetable garden, the cottage, the windows that are gleaming, the door painted green, fresher paint than anything else in the vicinity. He’s genuinely confused. She walks around the back. She finds a goat, two chickens wandering around.
Heart pounding, she calls out. ‘Somebody is living in there, Joe.’
‘Intruders? On my land?’ he says angrily, an emotion she has never seen from Joe Toolin or his brother in all her time with them.
Hands in thick fists by his side, he charges towards the cottage, as fast as he can, and she tries to stop him. Mossie follows him.
‘Wait, Joe, wait! Let me get Solomon! Solomon!’ she yells, not wanting to alert the person inside the cottage, but having no choice. ‘Rachel, film this.’ Rachel is already on the case.
But Joe doesn’t care about her documentary and places his hand on the door knob. He’s about to push open the door but stops himself –
