Now of course more or less everybody was dead. The mother, the father, the two sisters, another brother, uncles, aunts, cousins coming out the wazoo, a rake of buddies – dead dead dead, or at least mostly, and if they weren’t dead, they were in Castlerea prison, or the secure ward at the madhouse (many a Mullaney had bothered the same walls), or gone to England. The droning of the traffic beside him as he reached now the clampers’ yard was much of a muchness with the droning of his dead’s babble.

In some ways, Patrick felt he was doing well by Tee-J. For a nice stretch there, he had the boy set up with his own bedroom in an executive apartment overlooking the Shannon. A good seven-fifty square foot of a job, with French doors out to a balcony, an extractor hood, power shower, underfloor heating.

‘We’re fartin’ through silk here, Teedge.’

‘You ain’t tellin’ no lies, Patch.’

He was in the other of the two bedrooms. He’d lie plumb in the middle of the bed and lay out his limbs as though he was doing a starjump. It was a golden period in their lives even if it wasn’t their own apartment, technically speaking. He had gained access to it by the balcony. They had found a woman’s swimsuit on the balcony. It would have been from the summer previous and it had been forgotten and the freshwater she must have swam in had dried the river slime into it and had left it stiff. That blasted Shannon must have been crawling with the dirt altogether, was Patrick’s feeling. He was concerned also, for a reason he could not name, at the way Tee-J handled the swimsuit and was fascinated by it and the way the boy kept taking it back out of the pedal bin.

All of the apartments at the complex were empty that season and they had a prize November there. They had watched box sets of DVDs and eaten pizza every night and they kept the heating on full blast. Of course it couldn’t last and the Ukrainians had shown up with tyre irons soon enough. What class of a security operation is it that sends fellas around to you with tyre irons and they babbling their gobbledy-gook and big ignorant pusses on them? That was what Patrick Mullaney wanted to know. Tee-J was all for going toe-to-toe with the Ukrainians, no better man, but Patrick knew there was no odds in that and there you had it – they were living out of the white Hitachi.

Again.