Darkhouse. Alex Barclay

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       ONE

       Waterford, Ireland, one year later

      Danaher’s is the oldest bar in the south east; stone-floored, wooden and dim. Salvaged timber from unlucky ships stretches in beams under the low ceiling, making shelves for rusty tankards and tangled green fishing nets. Fires live and die in the wide stone hearth. The mensroom is called the jacks and the jacks is outside: two stalls, one with no door. ‘And we haven’t had a shite stolen yet,’ Ed Danaher liked to say when anyone complained.

      Joe Lucchesi was undergoing an interrogation at the bar.

      ‘Have you ever said, “Freeze, motherfucker?”’ asked Hugh, pushing his glasses up his nose. Hugh was tall and gangly, bowing his head as he talked, always ready to walk through a low doorway. His black hair was pulled into a frizzy ponytail and his long fingers tucked back the stray strands.

      His friend, Ray, rolled his eyes.

      ‘Or anything you say or do can be held against you in a court of law?’ said Hugh.

      Joe laughed.

      ‘Or found peanut shells in someone’s trousers?’

      ‘That’s CSI, you fuckwit,’ said Ray. ‘Don’t mind him. Seriously, though, have you ever planted evidence?’

      They all laughed. Joe couldn’t remember a night when he had gone for a drink without being asked about his old job. Even his friends still pumped him for information.

      ‘You guys need to get out more,’ he said.

      ‘Come on, nothing happens in this kip,’ said Hugh.

      A kip in Ireland was a dive in America, but to Joe, Mountcannon was far from a dive. It was a charming fishing village that had been his home for the past six months, thanks to his wife, Anna. Concerned for their marriage, their son, Shaun, and the family sanity, she had brought them here to save what she loved. Anna wanted him to quit after his last case, but he didn’t, so they agreed he would vest out for a year – temporary retirement that gave him nine months to decide whether or not he’d go back.

      He didn’t know then where that year would take him. Anna was a freelance interior designer and pitched an idea to Vogue Living to renovate an old building, bought by the magazine and shot in stages. The building she chose was Shore’s Rock, a deserted weather-beaten lighthouse on the edge of a cliff outside Mountcannon, the village she had fallen in love with when she was seventeen.

      When they got there, Joe understood how she felt. But he needed his New York fix. He would go to the local store and pick up USA Today or USA Two Days Ago. He’d say to Danny Markey, ‘If anything big happens back home, call me a couple days later, so I’ll know what you’re talking about.’ In New York, Ireland was Sunday afternoons and WFUV 90.7, Forty Shades of Green and Galway Shawls. But in an isolated lighthouse near a small village, the real Ireland was not all sentimental ballads … and it was far from simple practicalities. He could score a great pint and find a friend in any of Mountcannon’s three bars, but try renting a movie, ordering in or finding an ATM. For most people, Ed Danaher played banker and barman, always happy to refill his till with the cash he had just handed out.

      Joe stood up, slid some notes across the bar and said goodbye to the two men. He made his way home in fifteen minutes, enjoying the turn of the last bend when the stark, freshly painted white of the lighthouse would rise up from the dark. He pushed open the gate and walked the hundred metres along the lane to the front door.

      The site was sloping, carved into the cliff side, and made up of an almost jumbled collection of buildings, dating back to the eighteen-hundreds and added to over the years until it was finally deserted in the late sixties. There were three separate two-storey buildings, two of which could be used as living spaces. The first held the hallway, the kitchen, the living room and the den on the ground floor, and the main bedroom, guest bedroom and bathroom on the first floor. The second building was like a huge basement to the first, set lower into the cliff – a darker small-windowed space. The first storey was Shaun’s bedroom and the lower storey, a wine cellar. The third building was the round tower of the lighthouse, a separate structure to the rear of the main house. From the outside, it looked complete, but it was what lay inside that was the biggest challenge. Higher up on the site, above the house, a large shed had been transformed into a fully kitted-out workshop that Joe was still learning to use. He had made some of what Anna called the cruder furniture in the house, but she said it like a compliment, so that was good enough for him.

      By the end of the year, she wanted the house to be modern and comfortable, with as many of the original features as she could keep. She was in the right part of the country for that, with carpenters, ironmongers and builders easy to find, but she learned quickly not to be as exacting in her timings as she would have been in New York. And the usual enticement of a mention in Vogue was hardly likely to stir these guys. But even in six months, they had helped to transform the unfulfilled potential of the dank, crumbling rooms and battered exteriors. When the family had first walked into Shore’s Rock, it was as if everything had been deserted in a hurry, like some great tragedy had swept old keepers away. It stank of the sea, of damp, of rotting timber. It looked hopeless to Joe and Shaun, but Anna called it perfect dereliction.

      Now all the exterior brickwork had been repainted. In the house, underfloor heating had been installed and interior walls and floorboards whitewashed. Simple white wooden furniture with modern touches added minimal decoration to the rooms. Shaun’s bedroom was the first to be finished, but only after a satellite dish was installed. Anna had had to do something to stop the spread of his sixteen-year-old angst. For him, the culture shock had been intense, because he was young and his world was so small. He couldn’t bear the isolation that for Anna was heaven, removed as she was from the same old faces at the same old press launches and gallery openings, transported now to another era. In Mountcannon, you knew your neighbours, you left your car unlocked and no street was unsafe.

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