“So you came back for another fix.”

“Yeah. A couple of weeks later. Emma had her dolls out in the garden, making them take turns to do some dance, showing them how. Jenny was hanging out her washing. Jack was being an airplane.”

“And that was peaceful too. So you kept coming back.”

“Yeah. What else was I going to do all day? Sit in that bedsit, staring at the telly?”

I said, “Next thing you know, you’re all set up with a sleeping bag and a pair of binoculars.”

Conor said, “I know it sounds crazy. You don’t have to tell me.”

“It does. But so far, fella, it also sounds harmless. Where it goes into full-on psycho is where you start breaking into their gaff. Want to tell us your version of that part?”

He still didn’t think twice. Even breaking and entering was safer ground than Jenny. “I found the back door key, like I told you. I wasn’t planning on doing anything with it; I just liked having it. But one morning they were all out, I’d been there all night, I was damp, I was bloody freezing—that was before I got the decent sleeping bag. I thought, Why not, just for five minutes, just to warm up … But it was good, in there. It smelled like ironing, and tea and baking, and some kind of flowery thing. Everything was clean, sparkly. It’d been a long time since I’d been in a place like that. A home.”

“When was this?”

“Spring. I don’t remember the date.”

“And then you just kept coming back,” I said. “You’re not much good at resisting temptation, are you, old son?”

“I wasn’t doing any harm.”

“No? So what did you do in there?”

Shrug. Conor had his arms folded and his eyes cut away from us: he was getting embarrassed. “Nothing much. Had a cup of tea and a biscuit. Sometimes a sandwich.” Jenny’s vanishing ham slices. “Sometimes I’d …” That flush was rising on his cheeks. “I’d close the curtains in the sitting room, so the arsehole neighbors couldn’t see, and watch a bit of telly. Stuff like that.”

I said, “You were pretending you lived there.”

Conor didn’t answer.

“Ever go upstairs? Into the bedrooms?”

Silence again.

“Conor.”

“A couple of times.”

“What’d you do?”

“Just looked into Emma’s room, and Jack’s. Stood at the door, looked. I just wanted to be able to picture them.”

“And Pat and Jenny’s room? Did you go in there?”

“Yeah.”

“And?”

“Not what you’re thinking. I lay down in their bed—I took off my shoes first. Just for a minute. Closed my eyes. That’s all.”

He wasn’t looking at us. He was falling away into the memory; I could feel the sadness rising off him, like cold off ice. I said, sharply, “It didn’t occur to you that you could be scaring the living shite out of the Spains? Or was that a bonus?”

That brought him back. “I wasn’t scaring them. I always made sure I got out of there way before they were due back. Put everything back just like I found it: washed my cup, dried it, put it away. Cleaned the floor, if I’d tracked in dirt. The stuff I took was all tiny; no one’s going to miss a couple of elastic bands. No one would’ve known I’d been there.”