He hadn’t left the house, though. Instead, he sat in the living room and watched Liam and the boys eat fish and chips washed down with cheap lager. There was a brief argument over who was entitled to eat his battered sausage but Liam sorted it by pulling rank. The boys were obviously in total awe of him and it sent a shiver through Cormac that he’d once been in exactly the same position as them.

By the time they turned sixteen, there was a definite split within the three musketeers. Harry had long grown tired of Liam’s bullying and political ranting. He told Cormac he no longer wished to be associated with Liam. Liam grew to despise Harry for his lack of interest in the only thing that truly mattered to him. So Cormac was piggy in the middle. He’d see Harry on one day, where they’d listen to music and talk about girls, and on another day he’d be with Liam, who was impossibly well read on Irish history and politics for a boy of his age. Liam’s house was always full of books. It also had a mysterious quality about it that Cormac could never quite get to grips with. Often, when he was there, the door to the room they were occupying would be hastily shut. They’d hold their ears against the barrier and try, with no success, to make sense of the muffled footsteps and hushed voices of the newly arrived strangers. Liam would educate him about Ireland’s plight, about her tragedy and about the wrongs bestowed upon her by her powerful neighbour. Cormac always left those conversations with feelings of great pain and anger that he should be imprisoned in his own country by this cruel foreign aggressor. He had borrowed Liam’s books and devoured them by torchlight late into the night in the little room upstairs. Despite Harry’s constant warnings, by the time he was eighteen, Cormac was already lost in the romanticism and necessity of the Republican armed struggle. He saw it as the only credible weapon Ireland possessed in the centuries old quest to attain independence from England. With nothing else to balance the incessant drip feed of Republican propaganda, it was inevitable as to where this particular pathway would lead him.

Cormac finished his water and went to find Liam.

He found him where he had left him, holding court in his mother’s living room, sitting behind his father’s kitchen table. His two disciples sat obediently, peeping up at him from his mother’s settee, and nodding like pet puppies. He didn’t acknowledge Cormac as he entered the room.

‘Have you told me everything I need to know? All I have to do is to answer this phone tomorrow at eight o clock?’

He raised his eyes, but not his head, which was resting on his bruised knuckle.

‘Well, technically, you don’t even have to answer it. Just have it in your possession in that room at eight. I’ll track you to the exact spot and when I am satisfied you are in position, I’ll do the rest. If that phone is not in the position it should be, or if you’re not with it, then your daughter will die and I’ll make sure it is slow and she knows exactly why she is dying. Anything that gives me cause for suspicion will result in her death.’