When the air had emptied itself of everything but dust I said, very softly, “But you do give a damn about Jenny Spain.”

A muscle flicked, at the corner of Conor’s mouth.

“I know: you didn’t expect me to understand that. You didn’t think anyone would, did you? But I do, Conor. I understand just how much you cared about all four of them.”

That tic again. “Why?” he asked, the words forcing themselves out against his will. “Why do you think that?”

I rested my elbows on the table and leaned in towards him, my clasped hands next to his, like we were two best mates in the pub having a late-night session of I-love-you-man. “Because,” I said gently, “I understand you. Everything about the Spains, everything about that room you set up, everything you’ve said tonight: all of it tells me what they meant to you. There’s no one in the world who means more, is there?”

His head turned towards me. Those gray eyes were clear as still water, all the night’s tension and turmoil drained away. “No,” he said. “No one.”

“You loved them. Didn’t you?”

A nod.

I said, “Let me tell you the biggest secret I’ve ever learned, Conor. All we really need in life is to make the people we love happy. We can do without anything else; you can live in a cardboard box under a bridge, as long as your woman’s face lights up when you get home to that box in the evening. But if you can’t manage to do that …”

Out of the corner of my eye I saw Richie easing backwards, off the table, leaving the two of us in our circle. Conor said, “Pat and Jenny were happy. The happiest people alive.”

“But then that went, and you couldn’t give it back to them. Probably someone or something out there could have made them happy again, but it wasn’t you. I know exactly what it’s like, Conor: loving someone so much that you’d do anything, you’d rip out your own heart and serve it to them with barbecue sauce if that was what it took to make them OK, but it’s not. It wouldn’t do one fucking bit of good. And what do you do when you realize that, Conor? What can you do? What’s left?”

His hands lay spread on the table, palms upturned, empty. He said, so low I barely heard him: “You wait. All you can do.”

“And the longer you wait, the angrier you get. At yourself, at them, at this whole terrible fucked-up mess of a world. Till you can’t think straight any more. Till you barely know what you’re doing.”

His fingers curled inward, fists tightening.

“Conor,” I said: so softly, words falling weightless as feathers through the hot still air. “Jenny’s been through enough hell for a dozen lifetimes. The last thing I want to do is put her through any more. But if you don’t tell me what happened, then I have to go over to that hospital and make her tell me instead. I’ll have to force her to relive every moment of the other night. Do you think she’s strong enough to take that?”