The room was heating up. It smelled rich, reckless and familiar: hot whiskey, smoke, special-occasion perfume and sweat. Sallie pulled up her skirt and did a little dance step on the hearth, between verses. She still had the moves. “When he’s had a few jars he goes frantic . . .” The lads hit their punch line—“ . . . And by the end of the night, Kev’s gone home with the fittest girl in the place!”—and doubled over, shouting with laughter and clinking their cans to Kevin’s long-ago score.

Every undercover knows the dumbest thing you can ever do is start thinking you belong, but this party had been built into me a long time before that lesson. I joined in on the singing—“Goes frantic . . .”—and when Sallie glanced my way I gave her an approving wink and a little lift of my can.

She blinked. Then her eyes slid away from mine and she kept singing, half a beat faster: “But he’s tall and he’s dark and romantic, and I love him in spite of it all . . .”

As far as I knew, I had always got on just fine with all the Hearnes. Before I could make sense of this one, Carmel materialized at my shoulder. “D’you know something?” she said. “This is lovely, so it is. When I die, I’d love a send-off like this.”

She was holding a glass of wine cooler or something equally horrific, and her face had that mixture of dreamy and decisive that goes with just the right amount of drink. “All these people,” she said, gesturing with the glass, “all these people cared about our Kev. And I’ll tell you something: I don’t blame them. He was a dote, our Kevin. A little dote.”

I said, “He was always a sweet kid.”

“And he grew up lovely, Francis. I wish you’d had a chance to get to know him properly, like. My lot were mad about him.”

She shot me a quick glance and for a second I thought she was going to say something else, but she checked herself. I said, “That doesn’t surprise me.”

“Darren ran away once—only the once, now, he was fourteen—and, sure, I wasn’t even worried; I knew straightaway he’d gone to Kevin. He’s only devastated, Darren is. He says Kevin was the only one of the lot of us that wasn’t mental, and now there’s no point to being in this family.”

Darren was mooching around the edges of the room, picking at the sleeves of his big black jumper and doing a professional emo sulk. He looked miserable enough that he had even forgotten to be embarrassed about being there. I said, “He’s eighteen and his head’s wrecked. He’s not firing on all cylinders right now. Don’t let him get to you.”