But through the holes the SIG tore into the gloom of the other room had come a bright, deafening volley in reply. One round buzzed my ear. The other clipped my watch. Four more peppered the edges of my jacket. The bullets were streaking out of the holes I’d blasted. I’d turned side-on and fired again, trying to anticipate the movement of an assassin I couldn’t see but was almost close enough to touch. Yet the shots had kept coming.

In the end I’d hurled myself towards the front door of the cottage, rolling and tumbling back on to the sodden turf, all the while pursued by a stream of armour-piercing pistol rounds.

I’d made it to the car. But the drive from Donegal to County Mayo had not been a pleasant one – six hours at the wheel, changing cars first in Strabane and again in Monaghan. Of the other half-dozen rounds from the shooter’s little pistol that had drawn blood, only one had checked me at the time: a ricochet that had torn a neat furrow in my right thigh. Mercifully it hadn’t kneecapped me, or severed an artery.

It was in Strabane, too, that I’d first looked properly at the banknote I’d pulled from the dead man’s fingers. The shock of unfolding it had been so unexpected that I’d sat and stared at it for a full five minutes before driving on. Crouched in the rain-soaked gully I’d imagined that, whatever the target might have been expecting, it wouldn’t have been me. But perhaps I was exactly whom they’d been expecting.

I shivered at the thought of it.

Frank couldn’t see the wounds, but I knew he’d already be calculating the blowback in London, and how to deal with it. I summoned my strength to play the game and lifted my glass.

‘Sláinte,’ I said. I drank deeply, gulping down the bittersweet black. As the alcohol relaxed me, I remembered I was exhausted. ‘Before “what happened” how about “who was he”?’

Frank shifted in his chair.

‘You didn’t want to know who he was when you took the job.’ He picked up his pint again deliberately, holding it in front of his mouth. ‘So why do you want to know now?’

‘Cut the crap, can we? When I agreed, I didn’t know there’d be a one-man army waiting for me.’ Or a message, I thought. But I kept my mouth shut.

Frank just shook his head like the ever-disappointed parent he pretended to be. It was a role he both loved and loathed in turn, mixing affection and admonishment as my father had done before he died.

‘Max,’ he hissed, ‘it’s your fucking job to know that. At least to anticipate that there might be. Anyway, he was hardly an army, was he? For Christ’s sake, what did you do – walk in whistling “Danny Boy”?’