Niall, it seems, has told police that yes, Kelly Doherty had been on her way home when she saw he was upset. She followed him to the country park, even though he kept telling her to go home. She was there when Frankie had turned up, shouting the odds and threatening to take his belt off to Niall. Kelly was crying and shouted that she was going to go and get a grown-up, but Frankie was so enraged that he screamed at Kelly to go home then pushed her.

He hadn’t meant to kill her. He was drunk, didn’t realise his own strength. Didn’t know she would fall and strike her head so violently on a rock that she would smash her skull.

Niall expected Frankie to get help. He’d left his ten-year-old son sitting in the dark as the life drained from Kelly Heaney’s body to get help. So Niall couldn’t understand why, when he came back with a friend, the two men just stood looking at Kelly. He begged them to call an ambulance, but Frankie had grabbed him by the shoulders, shaking him violently. He shouted that she was dead and he was fucked if he was going to take the blame for it.

Niall had sat, snivelling on the ground, while Frankie Heaney and his friend had rolled Kelly’s body into the reservoir and pushed it out into the deeper water. He’d watched her float at first, her dress billowing around her, and then she had sunk out of his sight and he was told never to mention it again. In fact, Frankie had told him if he so much as breathed a word of what had happened, he could be made to disappear just as easily.

‘You say you saw your da walking back down the street with Niall later that night?’

‘Aye, I did,’ Declan says.

‘And there was another man with him?’

Declan nods. There was. A smug shite just like his brother, who had made a successful life for himself despite everything.

He stops for a moment, realises he has to reframe how he thinks of Niall from now on.

‘Declan? For the recording?’ DI Bradley says, pulling him away from his thoughts. ‘Do you know the name of this man?’

Declan thinks of the scene again, Niall being marched down the street, his da on one side, Ryan Murray on the other. He doesn’t hesitate in naming him.

‘He was just a reporter then, no big shakes. But he liked to think he was somebody. Connected, you know. There were a lot of them. Hangers-on. Trying to stay on the right side of the big Frankie Heaney.’

His voice is laced with bitterness and he doesn’t care. His da has destroyed more lives than he dares to imagine.