‘We give it a few minutes, just sit there, both in shock, like. Then we head over and look through the windows into the living room. It’s like the Wild fucking West in there. Blood, guns, bodies everywhere. We go over to the fella in the gravel, careful he’s not still kicking, and we open the case and look inside…and there’s the money. Right there. Paddy stabs the tyres and we take the money and run. Never had to fire a bullet.’ He looked at the cards in his hands and then looked at Lynch. ‘We would have.’

The spaghetti western had reached its cemetery stand-off and outside the world had frozen solid. A blank and lifeless orb.

‘Easy as that,’ Lynch said.

‘Easy as that.’

‘You take the money and run.’

‘We take the money and run.’ The officer smiled. ‘But that’s not the best part.’

‘No?’

‘The best part is what we did in the months leading up to the deal.’

Lynch arched his eyebrows. ‘Which was?’

‘I knew a fella who’d done time in here about four years ago. Me and Paddy found him living in a hovel down south and we went along for a wee chat. He was cagey but desperate and we said we’d cut him in. We asked how long it’d take him to print a block of money. He asked how much. We said it didn’t matter, just enough to fill a gym bag. That was when he admitted he’d carried on printing the minute he was released. He got us what 202we needed and that night we took it with us to the moor. While Paddy was stabbing the tyres, I swapped the real money in the case for the counterfeit money in the gym bag.’

‘Why leave fake money?’ Lynch said.

‘So the police find a pile of money and don’t suspect any missing. If they have the money, then they’re not looking, and if they’re not looking, then we’re safe.’

‘But the money was fake.’

‘Even better. Makes them think the deal went south because one group was trying to fuck the other group with fake cash. Turns out they fucked each other without our help. Over what? Who knows? And that’s still not the best part.’

Lynch waited.

‘The fake money, it was all fifties in pounds sterling. The money we took, the money from the case, the real money, it was all in euros…in five-hundreds.’ He shook his head, laughing to himself.

Lynch rubbed his knuckles across his mouth. ‘Did you ever find out what the deal was for?’

‘We heard something about, I don’t know, human trafficking, something like that.’ He shook out whisky dregs from his cup and sat back, his smile gone. ‘How were we to know?’

‘You don’t worry what you do in the dark will be brought to the light?’