It was what I would have done, in Shay’s place, and it would have been almost that easy. Kevin wouldn’t have been happy about the idea of going back into Number 16, especially in the dark, but Shay was a lot smarter than he was and an awful lot more desperate, and Kevin had always been easy to bulldoze. It would never have occurred to him to be afraid of his own brother; not that kind of afraid. For someone who had grown up in our family, Kev had been so innocent it made my jaw ache.

Jackie said, “Honest to God, Francis, nothing happened. It was just like today. They all had a game of football, and then we had the dinner and watched a bit of telly . . . Kevin was grand. You can’t be blaming yourself.”

I asked, “Did he make any phone calls? Get any phone calls?”

Shay’s eyes flicked to me for a second, narrow and assessing, but he kept his mouth shut. Carmel said, “He was texting back and forth with some girl—Aisling, was it? I was telling him not to be leading her on, but he said I hadn’t a clue, that’s not how things work nowadays . . . He was awful snotty with me, so he was. That’s what I mean about out of sorts. The last time I saw him, and . . .” Her voice had a subdued, bruised note to it. Any minute she was going to start crying again.

“No one else?”

The girls both shook their heads. I said, “Hmm.”

Jackie asked, “Why, Francis? What difference does it make?”

“Kojak’s on the trail,” Shay said, to the lilac sky. “Who loves ya, baby?”

I said, “Put it like this. I’ve heard a whole bunch of different explanations for what happened to Rosie and what happened to Kevin. I don’t like a single one of them.”

Jackie said, “No one does, sure.”

Carmel popped paint blisters on the railing with one fingernail. She said, “Accidents happen. Sometimes things just go terrible wrong; there’s no rhyme nor reason to it. You know?”

“No, Melly, I don’t know. To me that looks exactly like all the other explanations people have tried to shove down my throat: a great big stinking lump of shite that’s nowhere near good enough for either Rosie or Kevin. And I’m in no humor to swallow it.”

Carmel said, with certainty weighing down her voice like a rock, “There’s nothing that’ll make this better, Francis. We’re all of us heartbroken, and there’s no explanation in the world that’ll fix that. Would you not leave it?”