Dympna held up and opened his left hand. A key adhered to his clammy palm.

‘I put her in the bathroom. Fannigan agreed that was best, gave me a hand getting her in there. He’s waiting for you in the sitting room.’

‘Is he going to make it awkward, you reckon?’

Dympna ran his right hand over the ginger stubble on top of his head, shaved so tight it shone like vapour in the morning light.

‘You never know, but I don’t think so. He knows it’ll go over easier if he just takes it.’

‘How easy should it go?’ Arm asked.

Dympna smiled wanly, ‘Well, don’t kill him.’

The story came out last night, when Mary Rose, the third eldest of Dympna’s seven sisters, discovered Charlotte—Charlie they all called her—the youngest, weeping hysterically in the upstairs bathroom. Charlie had to be given a cup of warm milk chased by a sedative jigger of whiskey before she calmed down enough to tell what happened.

‘It’s myself I blame,’ Dympna had confided on the drive over. ‘Letting uncivilised fucking animals like Fannigan past my front door.’

Dympna Devers was twenty-five, a year older than Arm. Dympna sold marijuana, fat green ziplocked bags of the stuff, all over town. The town was small, and Dympna held a monopoly on such business. Fannigan was the eldest of the crew of five dealers currently in Dympna’s employ. Fannigan sold out of the industrial estate, where he worked evenings as a production-line stiff in the Allgen medical prosthetics plant.

The Friday evening gone, as he periodically did, Dympna had invited over the crew, Fannigan included, for drinks at the Devers’ family home, where his mother June and three of his seven sisters still lived. The Devers were a sociable breed, and liked crowding the house up. The parties tended to putter amicably on into the early hours, and attendees were encouraged to crash on the couch or floor if they had drank, snorted or smoked away the wherewithal to get home in one piece. The problem was that on that last night, Fannigan, completely pig-eyed, had at some point found his way up to young Charlie’s bedroom, let himself in, and attempted to stick several parts of himself in under her bedcovers. Charlie had only turned fourteen a couple of weeks ago.

Dympna told Arm all this on the way over. Arm was amazed that Dympna had put the lock on his initial impulses, had waited out the night before taking action; amazed again that Dympna had gone in there and given Fannigan an opportunity to explain himself instead of just caving the man’s skull in.

‘So did he offer another side, then?’ Arm said.

Dympna rolled his little eyes.

‘First he claimed he couldn’t remember a thing at all. Then he started swearing blind that in the state he was in he thought Charlie was Lisa.’