I thought about my birth mother then, and how little I knew about her, and how little I had wanted to know. And I thought about my birth father, his name unknown to me. Did Deirdre and I have the same father? There was an age gap of six and a bit years between us. It was unlikely that we did, but not impossible. And I thought about family, and blood, and what that might mean, the thoughts I had spent my life avoiding.

Yet something had shifted for me when I’d met Sean Carney. I hadn’t sent him away, hadn’t dismissed him. He had led me to Deirdre, to my sister. And she had suffered and died, and that was wrong, about as wrong as anything could be.

I kept walking, tracing and retracing my way among the dead. Time passed and the short grey day dwindled into dusk. I left as the gatekeeper was locking up for the evening.

‘You cut it fine, love,’ he said. ‘Are you not afraid of ghosts?’

He was a squat tank of a man in a tight fleece jacket, a bobble hat and all-white trainers that glowed like fresh snow in the half-light.

‘Depends on the ghost,’ I said.

On the road outside it came to me that, from what I had seen of the Carneys and of how they had loved her, Deirdre had had a good childhood. And that she would have grown up to have a life, and whether that would have been good or bad, it would have been hers to do with as she wanted, were it not for what had happened to her, either at the hands of Jeremy Gill, or someone else. I couldn’t do anything about her life: that was over.

But maybe I could do something about her death.

7

Night had fallen by the time I reached the Carney house again. Ann opened the door before I had a chance to ring the bell.

‘I wondered if you’d come back,’ she said. ‘I’m glad you did. I’m sorry for earlier,’ she added. ‘We were wrong to dump all that on you.’

‘It’s okay.’

‘Still,’ she said, ‘it wasn’t right. But when Sean gets an idea in his head, he can’t let it go. I went along with it for the sake of peace, but I shouldn’t have. He’s not here, by the way. I sent him down to the pub to watch the soccer match. It was either that, or kill him.’

I laughed.

‘I’m not joking,’ Ann said.

But, for the first time since we’d met, she was smiling and, for those few seconds, I glimpsed who she had been before.

‘Will I make more tea? Or maybe wine? I’m sure there’s a bottle somewhere.’

‘No,’ I said. ‘No thanks. A glass of water would be good, though.’