Dympna and Arm started smoking dope, lots and lots of dope, and Dympna, who had a connection through the uncles, started selling it. Arm lost his virginity to Lisa and additionally got his dick into Fatima and Christina, the twins. Dympna, who always deferred to the coven wisdom of his sisters, took their plural interest in Arm as a sign of clinching approbation, and brought Arm in permanently as his muscle. Arm’s name was Douglas Armstrong, but every creature around knew him as Arm ever since Dympna christened him such. Arm was what Dympna threatened to sic on you if you dared cross him. Don’t make me put the Arm on you, Dympna would say, though most of the time Arm was required to do little more than hover stone-faced behind Dympna’s right shoulder.

On the drive back to the Devers’ house Arm kept the window down. He looked in the wing mirror, imagining the ruination he’d dosed upon Fannigan’s face dosed on his own. Arm had been beaten badly a couple of times in the ring, of course—had to have ripped eyelids sewn up, the flopping cartilage of a disjointed nose wedged back into place—but nothing too serious, and in Dympna’s employ he had suffered little more than an occasional scratch.

Arm watched the Devers’ home appear. They lived in a big redbrick, two-storey house on the edge of Farrow Hill estate. The family was of traveller extraction, and though they’d been settled going back three generations, such origins, however distant, were enough for the house to be known locally as The Tinker Mansion, though no one called it that to Dympna’s face.

Dympna’s cousin Brandon was outside. Brandon was a slope-shouldered, paunchy lad in his twenties, with a round pale face and a shock of long, prematurely white hair that came right down to his arse. He seemed to wear only black T-shirts emblazoned with the name and artwork of various metal bands, and was himself a guitarist in a local band called Satan On Sabbatical. He was standing in the front lawn, his head bent forward, drawing a comb through his hair with girlish solicitude.

Brandon was originally from Guernsey. He’d become involved in some vague, not very serious trouble (vandalism, petty theft, a painted cow) after leaving school and his mother—Dympna’s aunt, an obese diabetic divested fairly recently of the toes on one foot—had sent the lad here, ostensibly to spend the summer. That had been a year ago. He was a docile lad, his only passion the pursuit of metal. White wisps of hair floated in the air around him.

Arm hefted the plasma from the back seat.

‘How do, Brandon,’ Dympna said, and Arm nodded at him.

‘Hi,’ Brandon said in his soft voice, ‘you lads coming to our gig tomorrow?’ Satan on Sabbatical was playing in Quillinan’s pub on the main street.