Paddy grinned, this was a question he could answer easily. ‘I’m little Paddy, I am. I live there.’ He nodded towards the grimy front window of his house which hadn’t seen a wash leather since the Dohertys had left and the front step was unscrubbed, didn’t smell of Lysol and bleach like all the others. Paddy could see Mrs Trott on her hands and knees with a bucket scrubbing her step and willed her to look up and help him finish something he truly wished he had not begun.

The woman wrinkled her nose and, following his gaze, looked past Mrs Trott, down the street towards the docks. ‘Well then,’ she said, ‘we are going to be neighbours. My husband and I are to live here, so your mother had better get her house in order before we arrive, I can tell you. Those nets are filthy and I’m not living next door to that.’ She sniffed with distaste as she bent to look back into the window of Maura and Tommy’s old house.

‘What? How can you be doing that?’ Little Paddy was about to say that his mother’s nets weren’t filthy, but he knew better than to start an argument he couldn’t win. He looked down the road and saw Annie O’Prey, her gleaming white nets twitching at him from the side of the window. He felt in need of protection and for once was reassured to be under the gaze of the four streets’ nosiest neighbour. The woman peered down at little Paddy again, her face a picture of distaste.

‘I think the women of these streets need to know that Margaret Wright is moving in.’ Paddy sucked harder on his thumb. The woman had decided he would be as good a way as any at getting the message across, but his silence made her wonder. She felt a need to fill the silence his lack of response had created. ‘My husband is the new police sergeant, been promoted he has. He’s going to be in charge of what goes on at the docks and I can assure you, bringing order around here will be his first challenge, especially with the O’Prey boys living here. We will be your next-door neighbours, young man, and I’ll tell you this for nothing: my husband is a man who enforces law and order and we aren’t stupid. Nothing anyone says or does gets past my Frank. Do you understand that?’

She bent down until her face was on a level with his own. Her red lipstick had bled into the cracks in her skin that ran away from her top lip and Paddy was transfixed by the faint orange line on her neck where her foundation ended and the white skin on her neck began, for it resembled a noose. She was also now obviously struggling to maintain her composure.

‘What is up with you, boy?’