Chapter One
The Stopped Clock
Every trade has its telltales, and Maeve Byrne's was this: she could stand under any public clock in Ireland and know, within a minute of talk, what the town felt about it.
Loved clocks got argued with. Ah, she runs fast since the lightning, do not mind her. Neglected clocks got apologised for. Dead clocks, ordinary dead clocks, got shrugs and grant applications.
Kilbaun's clock got silence.
She noticed it her first evening, in the bar of the Harbour House, when she mentioned her contract, restoration of the tower clock for the bicentennial, and the room did not stop, nothing so theatrical, it simply adjusted, the way a boat adjusts to a swell: conversations leaned, settled elsewhere, and a man who had been mid sentence about diesel prices finished the sentence somewhere different from where it had been going. The barman topped her glass without being asked, which in her experience of the west meant sympathy, and said, very pleasantly, so you are the clock woman, and did not ask one question about the clock, which in her experience of anywhere meant everything.
The clock itself she had surveyed that afternoon, and it had told her more than the bar had.
