They were waiting on a light near the entrance to the Tesco carpark. A pack of teenage boys were crossing the road. There were five of them, moving in addled formation. They were dressed interchangeably in branded hoodies, some in tracksuit bottoms, some in jeans. They were ­clean-­faced and ­dark-­haired. They so resembled one another, at least at a passing glance, that they might all have been brothers. As they moved from street light to street light Noonan watched their bobbing, intent, vociferating heads and smiled, because the thing about boys was that they only had the one haircut. That haircut changed every couple of years, but whatever it was, they all had it. Noonan remembered that for a while – ten, twelve, fifteen years ago? – it had been the ­peroxide-­blond highlights; every strutting little gangster coming up had the ­peroxide-­blond highlights. The style now in vogue was tight at the sides, with just enough hair on top to brush forward or into a part. Her own sons wore that style, and each of these boys did too. For an idle moment Noonan’s attention dwelled on the lad trailing the group, actually the tallest but not carrying himself that way, head hung and shoulders stooped, sunk in his thoughts it seemed, indifferent to the animated ­cross-­talk of the four in front. He looked up and caught Noonan’s eye. Without thinking, Noonan raised two fingers from the steering wheel in that ubiquitous gesture of laconic country salute. The boy’s neutral face compressed into a sudden snarl as he hocked a thick pearl of phlegm into the gutter by the squad car and kept on walking.

‘Did you see that?’ Noonan said to Swift, watching the boys recede in the ­rear-­view mirror.

‘See what?’ Swift mumbled.

Noonan swerved the squad car on to the kerb, unclipped her seat belt and bolted out on to the pavement. She came right up behind the boy, grabbed a fistful of his collar and shoved him against the ­car park wall so forcefully her cap went twirling to the ground.

‘What was that now? Have you something you want to say?’ Noonan roared into the boy’s face.

The boy looked at her, startled, a muscle jumping in his clenched jaw.

‘Hey, he didn’t do nothing,’ one of his friends blurted.

‘Shut up,’ Swift said to the friend as he arrived on the scene.

‘Well?’ Noonan asked the boy.

‘Tell me what I did,’ the boy said.

‘You know what you did!’

The boy said nothing. The muscle in his jaw stopped jumping.

‘Pick that cap up,’ Noonan said.

The boy looked at the Garda cap on the ground, looked back at Noonan.

‘Pick. It. Up.’

Noonan released him from her grip and the boy reached down and picked up the cap. As she snatched it from his hand, he skittered out of her reach and straightened his rumpled top.