I picked up an extralarge coffee and an undefined organic-looking muffin in Dalkey—I get the sense Olivia thinks that feeding me might be taken as an invitation to move back in—and had breakfast sitting on a wall, watching overweight suits in tanks get outraged when the traffic waves didn’t part specially for them. Then I dialed my voice mail.

“Yeah, um, Frank . . . Hi. It’s Kev. Listen, I know you said this wasn’t a good time, but . . . I mean, not now, like, but whenever you’re free, can you give us a ring? Like tonight or whatever, even if it’s late, that’s OK. Um. Thanks. Bye.”

The second time, he hung up, no message. Same thing the third time, while Holly and Jackie and I were stuffing our faces with pizza. The fourth call had come in just before seven, presumably when Kevin was on his way into Ma and Da’s. “Frank, it’s me again. Listen . . . I kind of need to talk to you. I know you probably don’t want to think about any of this crap, right, but honest to God, I’m not trying to mess with your head, I just . . . Could you ring me? OK, um, I guess . . . bye.”

Something had changed, between Saturday night when I sent him back to the pub and Sunday afternoon when the phone campaign kicked in. It could have been something that had happened along the way, maybe in the pub—for several of the Blackbird’s regulars, the fact that they haven’t killed anyone yet is down to pure chance—but I doubted it. Kevin had started getting edgy well before we ever hit that pub. Everything I knew about him—and I still thought that was worth something—told me he was a laid-back guy, but he had been acting squirrelly since right around the time we headed into Number 16. I had put it down to the fact that your average civilian does tend to get a little thrown by the idea of dead people—my mind had been on other things. It had been a lot more than that.

Whatever had been bothering Kevin, it wasn’t something that had just happened this weekend. It had already been stashed at the bottom of his mind, maybe for twenty-two years, until something on Saturday jarred it loose. Slowly, over the rest of the day—our Kev was never the fastest little sprinter on the track—it had bobbed to the surface and started nudging at him, harder and harder. He had spent twenty-four hours trying to ignore it or figure it out or deal with the implications all by himself, and then he had gone to big brother Francis for help. When I told him to get lost, he had turned to the worst possible person.