Crean had played rugby for Connacht when he was younger. The rim of his left ear was baroquely gnarled, his nose coarsely flattened from repeated breaks. These historical injuries, combined with Crean’s big belly and bull neck, suggested vigour and capability. Noonan could hear air being expelled in a slow, thoughtful jet through the crushed passage of his nose, a noise she had always found reassuring.

‘Judge was in the middle of robbing the oil tank in the yard when these two interrupted him,’ she said.

Crean lifted his foot, rotated it carefully in the air, and put it down.

‘Who shot him?’

‘Bertie here, the senior of the two, is claiming he did,’ Noonan said when neither man spoke.

‘I did not mean to,’ Creedon said.

Crean chuckled to himself.

The paramedics were preparing to move Judge. They had strapped him to the stretcher and placed an oxygen mask over his face. Crean touched Noonan on the elbow to indicate that she should stay put. He joined the paramedics, exchanging a couple of hushed sentences with one of them before they lifted the stretcher and began making their way toward the yard.

‘Is he still alive?’ Noonan asked when Crean came back over to her.

Crean’s grunt was equivocal.

‘I reckon he was just about to go as you got here,’ Noonan said.

‘That’s not your call to make,’ Crean said. ‘That boy isn’t dead until they say he’s dead.’

Crean addressed the Creedon men.

‘So walk us through what happened here,’ he said.

‘We’d been away at the mart in Balla,’ Creedon said, ‘only we came back earlier than usual this afternoon because the young fella was supposed to have football training tonight. We got in and Bubbles went out to the yard to check on the animals.’

‘That’s when I saw him, brazen as you like, straddling that tank like he was up on a horse,’ Bubbles said. ‘He’d his back to me. Before I could stop myself I called out hey! But he didn’t pay me a blind bit of heed.’

Bubbles pointed a finger at the side of his head.

‘The fella had headphones in! Sat up there in broad daylight, listening to music, having the time of his life. So I rang the oul fella on the mobile and told him come out quick, there’s a fella in the yard , and that’s when he turned around and saw me. He was down in a flash, that length of rebar there in his ­hand –’ Bubbles nodded at the piece of metal in the grass ‘– and before I knew it he’d hit me a clout on the head.’

‘I came into the yard and that’s what I saw,’ Creedon said. ‘This fella stood over my son with a steel bar in his hand and my son’s head pumping blood. To see your child like that, the shock of it.’