I dropped my voice a notch and put a pained twist on it. “We’re just . . . We both really need to talk. About stuff, you know. Could we take just a few minutes, Mammy? Would that be all right?”

A pause. Then, grudgingly: “Go on, then. It’ll keep an extra ten minutes. If yous aren’t down by then—”

“Thanks, Mammy. Seriously. You’re a star.”

“Course I am, when he wants something I’m a star, the rest of the time . . .” Her voice faded back into the flat, still grumbling.

I shut the door, shot the bolt just in case, got out my phone and took photos of both our faces from various artistic angles. Shay asked, “Proud of your work?”

“It’s a thing of beauty. And I’ve got to hand it to you, yours isn’t half bad either. This isn’t for my scrapbook, though. It’s just in case you decide to start whining about police brutality and trying to dump the arresting officer in the shite, somewhere down the line. Say cheese.” He gave me a look that could have flayed a rhino at ten paces.

Once I had the gist of things on record, I headed for the kitchen—small, bare, immaculate and depressing—and soaked a J-cloth to clean the pair of us up with. Shay jerked his head away from it. “Get off. Let your mates see what you did, if you’re so proud of it.”

I said, “Frankly, my dear, I don’t give a damn about my mates. They’ve seen me do a lot worse. But in a few minutes’ time they’re going to be walking you down those stairs and up the Place, and it had occurred to me that the entire neighborhood doesn’t need to know what’s going on here. I’m just trying to keep the drama to a minimum. If that’s not your style, by all means let me know and I’ll be happy to give you another clatter or two, for top-up.”

Shay didn’t answer that, but he shut his gob and stayed still while I finished wiping the blood off his face. The flat was quiet, just a faint snatch of music I couldn’t place coming from somewhere and a restless wind wandering through the eaves above us. I couldn’t remember ever looking this closely at Shay before, close enough to take in all the details that only parents and lovers ever bother to see: the clean savage curves of his bones under the skin, the first speckle of five o’clock shadow, the intricate patterns his crow’s-feet made and how thick his lashes were. The blood had started crusting dark on his chin and around his mouth. For a strange second I caught myself being gentle.