And there it was. Just that quickly, like gears interlocking and starting to move, dozens of little things going right back to my childhood spun and whirred and clicked neatly into place. I had thought up a hundred possible explanations, each one more involved and unlikely than the last—Matt Daly ratting out one of my da’s less legal activities, some hereditary feud going back to who stole whose last potato during the Famine—but I had never thought of the one thing that starts practically every fight between two men, specially the truly vicious ones: a woman. I said, “The two of them had a thing together.”

I saw her lashes flutter, quick and embarrassed. It was too dark to tell, but I would have bet she was blushing. “I think so, yeah. No one’s ever said it to me straight out, but . . . I’m almost sure.”

“When?”

“Ah, ages ago, before they were married—it wasn’t an affair, nothing like that. Just kid stuff.”

Which, as I knew better than most people, never stopped anything from mattering. “And then what happened?”

I waited for Nora to describe unspeakable acts of violence, probably involving strangulation, but she shook her head. “I don’t know, Francis. I don’t. Like I said, nobody ever talked to me about it; I just figured it out on my own, from bits and bobs.”

I leaned over and jammed out my smoke on the gravel, shoved it back in the packet. “Now this,” I said, “I didn’t see coming. Color me stupid.”

“Why . . . ? I wouldn’t’ve thought you’d care.”

“You mean, why do I care about anything that happened around here, when I couldn’t be arsed coming back for twenty-odd years?”

She was still gazing at me, worried and bewildered. The moon had come out; in the cold half-light the garden looked pristine and unreal, like some symmetrical suburban limbo. I said, “Nora, tell me something. Do you think I’m a murderer?”

It scared me shitless, how badly I wanted her to say no. That was when I knew I should get up and leave—I already had everything she could give me, every extra second was a bad idea. Nora said, simply and matter-offactly, “No. I never did.”

Something twisted inside me. I said, “Apparently a lot of people do.”

She shook her head. “Once, when I was just a wee little young one—five or six, maybe—I had one of Sallie Hearne’s cat’s kittens out in the street to play with, and a bunch of big fellas came along and took it away, to tease me. They were throwing it back and forth, and I was screaming . . . Then you came and made them stop: got the kitten for me, told me to take it back to Hearne’s. You wouldn’t remember.”