‘Do you want to talk about it?’ I ask him and his eyes widen. ‘I don’t necessarily mean for the paper or anything. But sometimes talking helps, and I remember what it was like back then. How awful it was. All the grown-ups losing the run of themselves. We weren’t allowed out past the door for months.’

He shook his head. ‘I didn’t want to leave the house for months,’ he says and he looks again towards Jamesy’s old house. ‘It messed me up, Ingrid, ye know.’

I remember that he changed overnight. He wasn’t the boisterous messer he had been. He became withdrawn. Sullen. A meanness in him emerged that had never been there before. In hindsight, I could hardly blame him.

‘I can’t imagine,’ I tell him, but I can. I’m blessed or cursed with a very vivid imagination and working this job has opened my eyes to a lot of the darker elements in the world. I’ve seen and heard things that I will never be able to forget, no matter how hard I try. ‘Look, why don’t we get a cup of tea?’ I say to him. ‘It’s freezing out today and I’m not exactly dying to get back to the office. We can have a chat. I’ll even buy the tea.’

He looks at me and smiles a weak, watery smile. I wonder what his life has become. This man with the sad eyes who is ‘in between jobs’ while his twin brother excels.

‘A cup of tea would be nice, Ingrid,’ he says. ‘Throw in a sausage roll or two and it’s a done deal.’

I smile, wrap my arm through his and lead him to my car so we can drive the short distance to the café at the Rath Mor Centre. It’s only as I spend more time with him that I realise his clothes have definitely seen better days. He’s really just skin and bone, and there’s a shake in his hands that doesn’t go away.

Chapter Five

Declan

3 November 1994

His ma had hit Declan square around the head before pulling him into the tightest of hugs. The slap, he knew, was because he’d not come straight home after school. The hug, because she knew what he had just seen and she could see he was traumatised.

Not that he was crying. He had stopped crying by then. He had stopped almost everything except breathing. He couldn’t speak. No words would come out. He wasn’t even thinking in words now, just images. Just sensations. How his stomach had fallen through his boots when he saw the stick sliding into the soft grey matter of Kelly Doherty’s brain.

Niall was talking, though. Telling her. Telling everyone what he saw. What he did. ‘But she was dead already, Mammy. I didn’t kill her!’