He washed his face at the tiny sink in a corner of the room, wondering how many travelling salesmen had pissed in it over the years. Then he changed out of his suit into a navy-blue blazer with brass buttons, and fawn slacks with a crease you could cut your finger on. The black shoes he had been wearing wouldn’t go with the light-coloured trousers, so he put on a pair of brown leather casuals with gold buckles on the insteps. Penny loafers, Americans called them. He wondered why. He had always been a sharp dresser, since he started earning real money and could afford decent clobber. He took his shortie overcoat from the hook on the back of the door, but instead of putting his arms into it he draped it over his shoulders, for the casual Parisian look. He surveyed himself in the full-length mirror in the door of the wardrobe. Someone had said he looked a bit like Tommy Steele. He couldn’t see it, himself. More the Frank Sinatra type, he would have thought. Frankie was a short guy too.

He walked up to O’Connell Street and had a gander at Nelson’s Pillar. It wasn’t as tall as the one in Trafalgar Square, or at least it didn’t seem so to him.

It was a long time since Terry had been in Dublin. The orphanage he had spent his childhood in was way over in the west, in a place called Carricklea. A couple of times a year he and half a dozen others would be brought to the city on the train for a treat, accompanied by one of the Brothers – Harkness, usually, the biggest bastard in the place.

Those were the days, Terry thought bitterly. Oh, aye, those were the days. He’d got so sick of it all he tried to cut his throat. Made a botch of it, of course. Blood everywhere. A week in the infirmary with a bandaged throat, and on the day he got out, Harkness took him round behind the boiler house and beat the shit out of him.

He crossed the road to see if the ice-cream parlour from the old days was still there. It was. The Palm Grove. It looked smaller and drabber than he remembered. Harkness would leave him and the others there for an hour and take himself across the street to Wynn’s Hotel. There were always priests or Christian Brothers there to drink whiskey with and talk about whatever it was the buggers talked about. Wynn’s was the place the clergy went to, their exclusive watering-hole. The booze didn’t cheer up Harkness, in fact it made him even more surly and vengeful than—