“There you are,” Ma snapped, elbowing someone out of her way. She had changed into an eye-popping lavender getup that was clearly her top-level finery, and she had done some fairly serious crying since that afternoon. “You took your time, didn’t you?”

“I came back as fast as I could. Are you holding up all right?”

She got the soft part of my arm in that lobster pinch I remembered so well. “Come here, you. That fella from your work, the one with the jaw on him, he’s been saying Kevin fell out a window.”

She had apparently decided to take this as a personal insult. With Ma, you never know what’s going to fit that bill. I said, “That’s what it looks like, yeah.”

“I never heard such a load of rubbish. Your friend’s talking out his hole. You get on to him and you tell him our Kevin wasn’t a bleeding spastic and he never fell out a window in his life.”

And here Scorcher thought he was doing a favor for a mate, smoothing a suicide into an accident. I said, “I’ll be sure and pass that on.”

“I’m not having people think I raised a thicko who couldn’t put one foot in front of the other. You ring him up and tell him. Where’s your phone?”

“Ma, it’s out of office hours. If I hassle him now, I’ll only put his back up. I’ll do it in the morning, how’s that?”

“You will not. You’re only saying that to keep me quiet. I know you, Francis Mackey: you always were a liar, and you always did think you were smarter than everyone else. Well, I’m telling you now, I’m the mammy and you’re not smarter than me. You ring that fella right now, while I can see you do it.”

I tried to detach my arm, but that made her clamp down harder. “Are you afraid of your man, is that it? Give us that phone and I’ll tell him meself, if you haven’t got the guts. Go on, give it here.”

I asked, “Tell him what?” Which was a mistake: the crazy level was rising fast enough without any encouragement from me. “Just out of interest. If Kevin didn’t fall out that window, what the hell do you think happened to him?”

“Don’t you be cursing at me,” Ma snapped. “He was hit by a car, of course. Some fella was driving home drunk from his Christmas party and he hit our Kevin, and then—are you listening to me?—instead of facing the music like a man, he put our poor young fella in that garden and hoped no one would find him.”