I arrange to meet him at the weekend. Outside normal working hours. I want to keep this from Ryan as much as possible.

When I hang up, the details scrawled into my notepad, I punch the air. I’ve got him and I’ve got the story. I push away the niggle of fear – my nerves at the thought of coming face to face with the man we’d come to think of as the bogeyman who’d stolen our childhood innocence from us.

Chapter Four

Ingrid

Thursday, 17 October 2019

It’s a brisk morning. The sun is high in the sky and if this had been three months earlier, there’s every chance it would have been a scorcher of a day. But it’s not. It’s heading towards the end of October and in the last couple of weeks the temperatures have taken a marked dip. This morning is the first time this autumn that I have noticed my breath rise like steam in clouds in front of me. The first time I’ve noticed the dew on the grass now has a sparkle of frost to it.

I’ve parked the car on Broadway, in the Creggan Estate. It’s much less glamorous than its New York namesake, but it’s the council estate where I grew up and even though my father has passed away, and my mother has long since moved, it always feels a little like coming home to be here. I sit in my car and look around. It hasn’t changed all that much. Most of the houses now have white uPVC double glazing. There are more cars on the street, satellite TV dishes decorating the skyline. But apart from that, it looks much as it did twenty-five years ago. Rows of uniform terraced houses, tidy gardens to the front.

I’ve come here just to look around. To walk the same streets again. To try to ground myself in this place that I rarely return to. I want to make sure I’m remembering the geography correctly. I wonder if many of our old neighbours are still here, or have a whole new generation of families moved in and started their lives?

Although, no doubt, there will be less children running around the streets than when I was little. Children don’t play out any more. Not in the way we used to.

I put on my gloves and get out of the car, pulling up the collar of my coat to keep my neck warm. I retrace the steps that were once so familiar to me until I find myself standing outside what used to be Jamesy Harte’s house. The garden he had once been so proud of has been paved over. A few wilting pots of flowers, long past their summer bloom, sit beneath the window. A blue wheelie bin, emptied of its contents, waits to be taken back through the house to the back garden.