He secured a seat once passengers disembarked at Maynooth. The two women got seats also. Now they were sitting opposite him, albeit a few rows down the aisle.

How he wished he was beside her, with her soft flesh trembling beside his own. Skin on skin. Nothing more beautiful, he thought. Unless you counted the rocking motion of the train. Oh, naked flesh on flesh in tune to the motion of the train. That was an image he couldn’t stop flitting behind his eyes. How beautiful would that be? The quiver of her lips as he looked down on her, the redness puckered, waiting.

For him.

For no one else.

With the answer he craved.

---

Ragmullin train station was crumbling under its age. Multiple renovations over the years had done little to enhance its appearance. The fact that it was a protected structure limited the railway company from doing anything major. Protecting it was a paradox, because it was disintegrating before twenty thousand pairs of Ragmullin eyes.

‘How’s it going, Jimmy? Any news?’ Boyd sauntered over to the porter and leaned on the gate to the platform.

‘Sure, the only news around here is the weather and late trains.’ Jimmy Maguire scratched at a point on his scalp under his cap.

‘I hope this one isn’t late.’

‘Should be in on time. Due at 18.20.’

Boyd smiled as Jimmy made a drama of checking his watch with his gloved fingers. Bright yellow, synthetic fabric. The top of his peaked-capped head only came to Boyd’s shoulder, and he looked as weather-beaten as the station.

‘In fifty-seven seconds, to be exact.’

‘Very precise.’

‘It’s my job to know these things.’

Boyd stared up along the platform as he heard the train approach.

‘She’s a little early.’ Jimmy straightened up. ‘By fifteen seconds.’

Boyd ducked as a pigeon swooped from the gantry that hung over the concrete platform.

The train’s hydraulic brakes hissed as it idled to a stop and the doors slid open. Boyd stood to one side to allow the passengers to pour from the carriages, rush to the gate and head for their cars in the overcrowded car park. As quickly as it had arrived, the train departed with a loud rumble along the tracks.

His sister appeared. ‘Hi, Mark. You look tired. Is anything wrong?’

‘No, just waiting for you. Couldn’t see you for a minute.’

‘I have a new friend.’ Grace looked around. ‘She was here a minute ago. I was going to ask if you could give her a lift.’

‘Probably went on ahead,’ Boyd said, thinking that Grace’s new friend wanted to escape his sister’s constant chatter. ‘Car’s outside. On double yellow lines.’

‘Breaking the law again?’ she said.

‘I am the law,’ Boyd said.

He pinged the key fob and sat into the car. Grace unwrapped her heavy knitted scarf, folded it neatly on her lap and placed her bag in the footwell, then seemed to think better of it and put it on her knee on top of her scarf.

‘Shut the door,’ he said. ‘It’s bloody freezing.’

‘You always state the obvious.’

She’s worse than Lottie, Boyd thought. He wondered if he had been an insanely bad person in a previous life to be condemned to inhabit the same planet as contrary women.

He swung the car around in a U-turn and nudged into the line of traffic.

‘Tell me about your friend.’

‘I met her on the train this morning. She told me she always gets the 17.10 home. So I decided to travel with her.’

‘In your usual carriage?’

‘It got a bit complicated, because she arrived later than me. I had to wait for her and then we had to stand in the wrong carriage. I had a little panic attack, but I’m fine now.’

‘Are you sure you’re okay?’

‘Stop treating me like I’m an imbecile. I might be sixteen years younger than you, but I’m not stupid.’

The traffic lights on the bridge changed to green and Boyd gunned the car to make it through before they flipped again. They were red by the time he was on the crest of the hill, but he kept going.

‘You hit it off with her, then?’

‘Don’t sound so surprised. I can hold conversations with people.’

‘That’s what worries me.’

‘Are you trying to be funny?’

Boyd kicked himself. Grace didn’t get jokes. She saw things as either black or white. Straight down the middle. Whatever you wanted to call it, Grace was it. ‘On the spectrum’ was a phrase he had often heard in the same sentence as her name. He loved his sister, but she tried his patience something terrible. He reminded himself that he’d have to be more careful with his choice of words in her presence. And he’d have to remember she was twenty-nine years old.

‘Why are you driving down Main Street?’ she asked.

‘I’m getting a takeaway for dinner.’

‘But I don’t eat food made by someone else. You know that.’

‘Just this once, Grace. For me? Please?’

‘Mark! You have a date.’

‘How do you know that?’

‘I can read you so well.’

Just like Lottie, he thought, and double-parked outside the Chinese takeaway.

‘Don’t suppose you’ll go in to get it,’ he said.

‘You suppose absolutely correct.’

Boyd shook his head. He was glad he was going out tonight. Then again, he wondered if it might be frying pan and fire. He hoped Lottie would be in better form than Grace. With all that had happened today, he doubted it.