That brought Fiona’s head up, but he was shaking a coffee sachet and looking at her with simple interest. She said, “He wasn’t jealous like you mean. He just … he’d noticed it, too. So when I broke up with Conor, Pat got me on my own a couple of days later and asked me was that why. I didn’t want to tell him, but Pat … he’s really easy to talk to. I always told him stuff. He was like my big brother. So we ended up talking about it.”

Richie whistled. “When I was a young fella,” he said, “I would’ve been raging if my mate was after my girlfriend. I’m not the violent type, but he’d’ve got a smack in the puss.”

“I think Pat thought about it. I mean”—a sudden flash of alarm—“he wasn’t the violent type either, not ever, but like you said … He was pretty angry. He’d called round to our house to see me—Jenny was out shopping—and when I told him he just walked out. He was white; his face looked like it was made out of something solid. I was actually scared—not that I thought he’d do anything to Conor, I knew he wouldn’t, but I just … I thought what if everyone found out, it’d smash the gang to pieces, everything would be horrible. I wished …” She ducked her head. More quietly, down to her mug: “I wished I’d kept my stupid mouth shut. Or just never gone near Conor to begin with.”

I said, “It was hardly your fault. You couldn’t have known. Or could you?”

Fiona shrugged. “Probably not. I felt like I could’ve, though. Like, why would he be into me when Jenny was around?” Her head was tucked down lower.

There it was again, that glimpse of something deep and tangled, stretched between her and Jenny. I said, “That must have been pretty humiliating.”

“I survived. I mean, I was sixteen; everything was humiliating.”

She was trying to turn it into a joke, but it fell flat. Richie gave her a grin, as he leaned over her shoulder to take her mug, but she passed it to him without catching his eye. I said, “Pat wasn’t the only one who had a right to be pissed off. Weren’t you angry, too? With Jenny, or Conor, or both?”

“I wasn’t that kind of kid. I just felt like it was my own fault. For being such an idiot.”

I asked, “And Pat didn’t get physical with Conor after all?”

“I don’t think so. Neither of them had bruises or anything, not that I saw. I don’t know exactly what happened. Pat phoned me the next day and said not to worry about it, forget we ever had the conversation. I asked him what happened, but all he’d say was that it wasn’t going to be a problem any more.”

In other words, Pat had kept control, dealt neatly with a nasty situation and kept the drama to a minimum. Conor, meanwhile, had been smacked down good and hard by Pat, humiliated even more excruciatingly than Fiona, and left in no doubt that he didn’t have a chance in hell with Jenny. This time I did look at Richie. He was messing with tea bags.