“And how much difference did it make?” Richie pointed out. “You had to know Pat and Jenny had photos, man. All you did was set us back a couple of hours and piss us off.”

“My colleague speaks the truth,” I said. “Can you remember that, next time you’re tempted to dick us around?”

Conor said, “How’s Jenny?”

I snorted. “What’s it to you? If you were so concerned about her health, you could have just, I don’t know, not stabbed the poor woman. Or are you hoping she’s finished the job for you?”

His jaw had tightened, but he held on to his cool. “I want to know how she’s doing.”

“And I don’t care what you want. Tell you what, though: we’ve got a few questions for you. If you answer them all like a nice boy, without any more messing, then maybe I’ll be in a better mood and I’ll feel like sharing. Does that sound fair enough?”

“What do you want to know?”

“Let’s start with the easy stuff. Tell us about Pat and Jenny, back when you were all kiddies together. What was Pat like?”

Conor said, “He was my best mate, since we were fourteen. You probably know that already.” Neither of us answered. “He was sound. That’s all. The soundest bloke I’ve ever known. Liked rugby, liked having a laugh, liked hanging out with his mates; he liked most people, everyone liked him. A lot of popular blokes are wankers, when you’re that age, but I never saw Pat be a bastard to anyone. Maybe all that doesn’t sound like anything special to you. But it is.”

Richie was tossing a sugar sachet in the air and catching it. “You were close, yeah?”

Conor’s chin pointed from Richie to me. “You’re partners. That means you’ve got to be ready to trust each other with your lives, right?”

Richie caught his sachet and stayed still, letting me answer. I said, “Good partners do. Yeah.”

“Then you know what Pat and me were like. There’s some stuff I told him, I think I might’ve done myself in if anyone else had found out. I told him anyway.”

He had missed the irony, if it was there. The flash of unease almost sent me out of my chair and circling the room again. “What kind of stuff?”

“You must be joking. Family stuff.”

I glanced across at Richie—we could find out somewhere else, if we needed to—but his eyes were on Conor. I said, “Let’s talk about Jenny. What was she like, back then?”

Conor’s face softened. “Jenny,” he said gently. “She was something special.”

“Yeah, we’ve seen the photos. No awkward phase going on there.”

“That’s not what I mean. She came into a room and made things better. She always wanted everything lovely, everyone happy, and she always knew the right thing to do. She had this touch, I’ve never seen anything like it. Like once we were all at a disco, one of those underage things, and Mac—this guy we used to hang out with—he was hovering around some girl, kind of dancing around her and trying to get her to dance with him. And she made this face at him and said something, I don’t know what, but her and her mates all collapsed laughing. Mac came back to us scarlet. Devastated. The girls were still pointing and giggling; you could tell he just wanted to disappear. And Jenny turns around to Mac and holds out her hands and says, ‘I love this song, only Pat hates it. Would you dance with me? Please?’ And off they go, and next thing you know Mac’s smiling, Jenny’s laughing at something he said, they’re having a ball. That shut the girls up. Jenny was ten times prettier than your woman, any day.”