‘I wish, but seriously I’m sixteen, but people always think I’m older.’

She stared at me as though I were a foreign object then, thinking so hard I could almost smell her brain frying. Then she took off on her heel again. Five minutes’ power-walk away, I was panting but Sister Ignatius had barely broken a sweat and we came across some more buildings, more like outhouses, and old stables. First, there was a church.

‘There’s the chapel there,’ Sister Ignatius explained. ‘It was built by the Kilsaneys in the late eighteenth century.’

Remembering that part from my school project I couldn’t take my eyes off it, unable to believe that what I’d stolen from the internet essay wasn’t just homework, it was actually real. It was a small chapel, grey stone, two pillars in the front as cracked as a desert earth that hasn’t seen water for decades. On the top was a bell tower. Beside it was an old graveyard protected by three thin rusty iron railings. Whether it was to keep the buried in or the wanderers out, it wasn’t clear, but it made me shudder just looking at it. I realised I’d stopped walking and was staring at it-and Sister Ignatius was staring at me.

‘Great. I live on the grounds of a graveyard. Just swell.’

‘All generations of the Kilsaneys are buried there,’ she said softly. ‘Or as many as possible. For the bodies they couldn’t find they planted headstones.’

‘What do you mean, “for the bodies they couldn’t find”?’ I asked, horrified.

‘Generations of war, Tamara. Some of the Kilsaneys were sent off to Dublin Castle to be imprisoned, others left through travel or revolution.’

There was a silence while I took in the old headstones, some green and covered in moss, others black and lopsided, the inscriptions so faded you couldn’t read the letters.

‘That’s fucking creepy. You have to live beside that?’

‘I still pray in there.’

‘Pray for what? For the walls not to cave in on your head? It looks like it’s about to fall apart any second.’

She laughed. ‘It’s still a consecrated church.’

‘No way. Are there weekly masses in there?’

‘No,’ she smiled again. ‘The last time it was used was…’ she pinched her eyes shut and her lips moved open and closed as though she was doing decades of the rosary. Then her eyes popped open wide. ‘Do you know what, Tamara, you should check the records to get the exact date. The names of everybody are included too. We have them in the house. Come in and have a look, why don’t you?’

‘Eh. No. You’re grand, thanks.’

‘You will when you’re ready, I suppose,’ she said and moved along again. I rushed to keep up with her.

‘So how long have you lived here?’ I asked, following her into an outhouse, which was used as a tool shed.

‘Thirty years.’

‘Thirty years here? Must have been so lonely here all that time.’

‘Oh, no, it was far busier back then when I arrived, believe it or not. The three sisters were a lot more mobile then. I’m the youngest, the baby,’ she said, and laughed that little-girl laugh again. ‘There was the castle, and the gatehouse…they were indeed busier times. But I like the quiet now too. The peace. The nature. The simplicity. The time to be still.’

‘But I thought the castle was burned down in the twenties.’

‘Oh, it was burned out many times in its history. But it was only partly burned on that occasion. The family worked hard to refurbish it. And they did a wonderful job. It was truly beautiful.’

‘You’ve been inside it?’

‘Oh, indeed.’ She looked surprised by my question. ‘Lots of times.’

‘So what happened to it?’

‘A fire,’ she said, and looked away, located her toolbox on the cluttered work table and opened it. Five drawers slid out, each filled with nuts and bolts. She was like a little DIY magpie.

‘Another one?’ I rolled my eyes. ‘Honestly, that’s ridiculous. Our smoke alarms were connected to the local fire station. Want to know how I found out? I was smoking in my room and I didn’t open the window because it was absolutely freezing out and whenever I opened my doors they used to just slam shut, which was a total head wreck. So I’d turned my music up really loud and next minute my bedroom door was being bashed down by this hot fireman, pardon the pun, who thought my room was totally on fire.’

There was silence, while Sister Ignatius listened and looked through the toolbox.

‘By the way, he thought I was seventeen too,’ I laughed. ‘He called the house afterwards looking for me but Dad answered the phone and threatened to have him put in gaol. Talk about dramatic.’

Silence.

‘Anyway, was everybody okay?

‘No,’ she said, and when she looked at me briefly I realised that her eyes filled with tears. ‘Unfortunately not.’ She blinked them away furiously while she noisily rooted through the drawers, her wrinkled but sturdy-looking hands pushing through nails and screwdrivers. On her right hand was a gold ring that looked like a wedding ring, so firmly on her finger, her flesh growing around it, I doubt she could ever take it off even if she wanted to. I would have liked to ask more questions about the castle but I didn’t want to upset her further and she was making such a racket as she rooted through her tool box for the correct screwdriver I wouldn’t possibly be heard.

She tried and tested a few and I grew bored and shuffled lazily around the garage. Shelf upon shelf of junk filled the walls. A table spanning the three walls was also filled with knick-knacks and contraptions that I didn’t know the use for. It was Aladdin’s cave for the DIY obsessed.

I looked around but my head hopped with new questions about the castle. So it had been lived in after the fire in the 1920s. Sister Ignatius had said she’d been here thirty years and had been in the house after the refurbishment. That would take us back to the late seventies. I was under the impression the castle had been lying idle for so much longer than that.

‘Where is everybody?’

‘Inside. It’s recreation hour. Murder She Wrote is on now. They love that.’

‘No, I mean, from the Kilsaney family. Where are they all?’

She sighed. ‘The parents moved away to stay with cousins in Bath. They couldn’t take looking at the castle like that. They hadn’t the time nor the energy nor the money, mind you, to rebuild it.’

‘Do they ever come back?’

She looked at me sadly. ‘They passed away Tamara. I’m sorry.’

I shrugged. ‘That’s okay. I’m not bothered.’ My voice was too perky, sounded too defensive. Why? I really wasn’t bothered. I didn’t know them from Adam-why should I care? But I did care. Maybe it was because Dad had died that I felt every sad story was my story. I don’t know. Mae, my nanny, used to love watching programmes about real-life cases being solved. When Mum and Dad were out she used to take over the television in the living room and watch The FBI files, which used to freak me out. Not for the gory details-I’d seen worse-but by the fact she was so fascinated by how to cover up crimes. I used to think she was going to kill us all in our sleep. But she also made the best lattes and so I didn’t probe her too much in case she got insulted and would stop making them. I learned from watching one of those shows that the word ‘clue’ actually came from ‘clew’, meaning a ball or thread of yarn, because in a Greek myth, a Greek guy uses a ball of yarn to find his way out of the Minotaur’s labyrinth. It’s something that helps you get to the end of something, or perhaps to the beginning. It’s the same as Barbara’s satellite navigation kit and my line of breadcrumbs from the gatehouse to Killiney: sometimes we have absolutely no idea where we are, we need the smallest clue to show us where to begin.

Finally the lock she’d been working on gave way and unlatched.

‘Sister Ignatius, you’re a dark horse,’ I teased her.

She laughed heartily. As she lifted open the heavy front cover my heart fluttered. The voice of Zoey and Laura told me to be embarrassed about this and I momentarily was until the Tamara of this new world beat them away with a stick. But when Sister Ignatius opened the book that embarrassment came back intensified, bringing anger with it for there was nothing in the book. Nothing at all on the pages.