‘She’s my real mother,’ I say, pointing at Mam. ‘Not you.’

‘Finn,’ Mam says. ‘Be kind. Please.’

I’m not kind, though, I’m bad.

‘I hate you,’ I say to her. ‘I never want to see you again.’

Her face.

Her tears.

So sad.

So what.

Her head down, running away, door slamming, Mam after her, loud words out front.

Then quiet.

Me in the garden.

Mam coming out to me.

‘Oh, Finn,’ Mam’s saying. ‘Poor Nora is very upset.’

‘I don’t care,’ I say.

‘I don’t want to see her any more,’ I say.

And I never did.

The mistake I made.

And.

Not straight away. A few weeks, a month, later.

Her dead.

She tried so hard, then stopped trying.

Because of me.

My mistake.

The biggest mistake I ever made.

Didn’t know the full story till later.

But always knew the truth, deep down.

That it was my fault.

All my fault.

And now Rhona.

Two deaths.

My fault.

My fault.

My fault.

I got out of bed and opened the blind. The moon filled the room with a cold hard light. I scrunched myself into the window seat, knees drawn up to my chin, my body twisted, my hands pulling at my hair, my forearms in front of my face, my breath coming in wet gasps.

Then sleep.

Awake again, with a sore neck, I unpicked myself from the frozen knot I had become. I went to the other side of the room, and checked the time on the ancient luminous travel clock I keep on my locker. 5.40 a.m. Monday. No work to go to.

And the investigative work I had been doing? A disaster. How could I have messed up so badly? When I met Joey O’Connor, I saw what he was like, the spurned boyfriend, the obvious candidate for what had happened to Deirdre. Almost everything he had said had identified him as the man responsible for the vicious attack on Deirdre, everything had fitted, but I had ignored him and gone chasing after Jeremy Gill. Who had an alibi for the time of Rhona’s death. Maybe I had been wrong about that, too. Maybe it was a random mugging, like the Gardaí thought. Random or not, it was my fault. Normally so security conscious, Rhona must have been distracted by what we’d talked about. She had told me how upset she had been as a result of my visit. And she had sent me an email only ten or fifteen minutes before she was killed.

Or was it possible that Joey had something to do with Rhona’s death? My head said no, that it was too far-fetched, but then so was the idea of him burning my car. He was capable of extreme violence. Was he capable of murder? But there was no evidence that he knew Rhona. Even if he did, what would his motive have been? I discounted the idea.