It got late. Gerry found the tub of Pringles and finished them off. The house quietened. Pell didn’t bother him again, and Gerry kept playing. Eventually, he heard a car. From his window, he could see that the yard light had come on. He stood up to look. The door of Nick’s Vectra was open, as was the boot. The car, parked at an untidy diagonal to the house, looked abandoned, ambushed. It was empty inside, welling with shadows. The yard light made the snow around the car unnaturally bright. Then his brother appeared, returning from the direction of the house’s front door. Gerry watched Nick, still in his white ­T-­shirt and white work trousers, his breath trailing visibly from his mouth. Even the canvas sneakers he was wearing were white. Nick was drawing shopping bags from the boot. He must have been freezing, his shoes soaked. A wince flickered across Gerry’s features as he considered the lengthy detour his older brother would have had to make in order to accommodate so late a run for provisions: the ­24-­hour petrol station on the Dublin road was the only place open this side of midnight, and it was five miles out the other side of town. He wished he liked his giant humourless prick of a brother more.

Gerry heard shouts, gunfire, and turned back to the screen. He had forgotten to pause the game, and Skuse was taking hits. Dora Levigne had long been rescued and returned to the care of her madam, and Gerry, travelling onward from Monteroy to the northern town of Aristo, had meandered into a forested area, where he’d stumbled upon a Cullen encampment set into a treed thicket at the foot of a hill. Gerry had left Skuse crouched behind a wedge of rock in preparation for an assault, but now a number of the Cullen party had manoeuvred behind him and were unloading their weapons into Skuse’s back. Gerry turned his avatar just in time to take a fatal shot to the torso, and the screen cut to black. In the black, words appeared:

DO YOU WISH TO CONTINUE?

YES / NO.