The Searcher

by Tana French

chance. Sean needed the freedom. He couldn’t stick the thought of working for some other man. For me”—she tilts her head at her surroundings—“this is freedom. Not the other. When I walk out of work, I’m done. No being dragged out of bed at three in the morning because a calving’s going wrong.

The musicians take up the tune, and a few people hum along in a deep soft underscore. Mart tilts his head back to listen, his eyes half closed. “When I was a young lad,” he says, after a while, “you’d never have a night out without a bit of a singsong. Do the young people still sing at all, except when they’re trying to get themselves on the telly?”

In Cal’s view, morals involve something more than terminology. Ben damn near lost his mind over the importance of using the proper terms for people in wheelchairs, and he clearly felt pretty proud of himself for doing that, but he didn’t mention ever doing anything useful for one single person in one single wheelchair, and Cal would bet a year’s pension that the little twerp would have brought it up if he had. And on top of that, the right terms change every few years, so that someone who thinks like Ben has to be always listening for other people to tell him what’s moral and immoral now. It seems to Cal that this isn’t how a man, or a woman either, goes about having a sense of right and wrong.