She was there, standing over by the bar, wearing a shell-pink costume. Her hair was as it had always been, blonde, lustrous; her eyes were blue and her impish smile was just the same.

It was her. It was his Claire, the same Claire he had walked through the meadows with . . .

It gave him such a jolt it made his head spin. He reached for his glass of Bushmills single malt and emptied it quickly, then took another look. No. It wasn’t Claire. Claire would be in her forties. This girl was in her twenties. But she looked so like his lost love.

‘Excuse me,’ he said to his hosts, and stood up and walked over to the bar, his eyes searching. She was gone.

Fucking hell, he thought. Now what was happening? He was getting punch-drunk, that’s what it was. Seeing old flames when they weren’t there at all. Imagining things. This was what every boxer feared; that he would get punchy in the head and start seeing gremlins crawling out of the wallpaper. A lot of people said the greatest, Ali, had got Parkinson’s from brain damage sustained in the ring.

It’s happening to me, he thought. I’ve got to give this fucking game up.

He would go home. Retire. Live a life of ease and luxury. Which ought to make him feel happy and relieved and hopeful. Only it didn’t. It just made him feel depressed. Yes, there was Connor. But also he had a wife he hated, and Aysha – and his doubts over her parentage had never left him, much as he had tried over the years to set them to rest, to be kind to her as a true father should be.

‘Can I help you, sir?’ asked a female voice beside him.

He turned. It was her. She was looking up at his face and he thought again, Oh Claire, it’s you, it’s you at last.

He had missed her, longed for her so much. Settled for a poor second-best with Shauna, who was a treacherous bitch.

But it wasn’t Claire and he wasn’t punch-drunk. This girl was American, with a southern twang to her accent. Now he could see the differences. This one’s face was broader; she was more inclined to smile, she didn’t have Claire’s quiet, calm demeanour. She had a mole on her left cheek and Claire didn’t. He stared down into those blue eyes and said the only thing he could think of.

‘You’re extremely pretty.’

She looked uncertain for a moment and almost seemed to sway back, away from him as if he might be a lunatic or something; he knew his sheer size was intimidating. But then her mouth turned upward in a smile. She had pretty teeth, small, well-formed. She looked into his eyes and then raised a hand to the cut over his left eye, brushed against it very gently.