‘Rachel Levy.’ I said her name out loud. The force of it in the silence of the empty room startled me. It was easy to pretend to want something I knew I couldn’t have. But you don’t forget your first love – even if I struggled at times to bring her face into focus. No matter how futile it was to pretend anything could have gone differently than it did, the feeling for her was still there – though whether what I felt was for her, or the idea of her, was impossible to untangle at that distance. Whatever it was, it still felt real: as real as the bullet wound in my shoulder, or the scars that ran down her wrists like tramlines – a journey that never reached its destination. It was a relief of sorts to know that I could still feel anything at all. I saw her as if from the wrong end of a telescope. I’d fantasized about bringing her back from the brink. Maybe it hadn’t been her that needed saving. As a teenager I’d thought she’d blown my world apart. And then it was – for real.

‘Forget it,’ I said out loud. ‘Forget her.’ But I’d become as bad at taking orders from myself as I was from other people.

I reached over and picked up the Browning, dropped the magazine and checked the breech: one 9mm ball in the chamber, twelve in the box. The familiarity of the moving parts was reassuring. I ejected the round and checked the safety, the trigger pull, the hammer drop. I peered inside, worked the slide and reloaded. Definite actions with definite outcomes. Concentrating on the details helped me weigh anchor. The pistol was in immaculate condition. Most likely Doc’s old personal protection weapon; most probably never fired in anger. Shootouts weren’t his style. But he’d been deadly in his day, about that there was no dispute. I gulped down the refill of Paddy and thought about the hundred-dollar bill. But then, still trying to remember what Rachel looked like, I lapsed into deep, exhausted sleep – one hand on the whiskey glass, the other on the Browning.

Zero three hundred.

The rain stopped. The timbre of the room had changed.

Doc’s house was south-west of Ballina town, on the north-east shore of Lough Conn. I could hear lake water lapping limestone outside and nothing else. County Mayo spread out around us in silence. Frank couldn’t have chosen a better place for a debrief; Doc couldn’t have chosen a better place to retire. The wick in the lamp still burned bright. I sat up and put the loaded pistol and empty glass on the bedside table, and examined my dressings.