‘She loved it and this useless article under the table here only had to go after it with a sword,’ the man with the club said. ‘Managed to stab the poor thing to death and near killed the mother too with the fright he put on her.’

‘What sort of a man has it in him to top a cat?’ the first man said.

Derek was silent under the table, his long feet sticking out.

‘That cat was always mocking me,’ he said eventually.

The man with the club sighed. ‘It was a cat, Derek.’

‘They are not the most amenable creatures, but still,’ the first man said.

‘Come out now until we go home, Derek,’ the man with the club said.

‘No,’ the young man said.

‘Derek, come out before I drag you out and make a further mock of you in front of all your new friends.’

‘No. You’ve my head ringing.’

The man with the club darted forward and got a hold of one of Derek’s heels. Derek wrapped his arms around the centre beam of the table. The man with the club began towing Derek. The table toppled over but Derek clung steadfastly to it and dragged it thunking along with him across the burgundy carpet.

‘Ah, here,’ Bimbo said, stepping across the path of the man with the club, fist tight around the handle of the katana. ‘I’m not saying he didn’t do what you said he did, but touched as he is I can’t let you be dragging that fella out the door like that. It’s not right.’

The man with the club stopped and looked at Bimbo. Derek looked up from the floor at Bimbo.

‘That’s your own brother you’re making a spectacle of,’ Rory said to the man with the club.

‘I know Derek seems . . . soft,’ the first man said. ‘But the truth is he is a living trial.’

‘Sure aren’t we all?’ Bimbo said. ‘Aren’t we all living trials to one another.’

‘Maybe it’s you two should leave and let that fella with us,’ Eustace said.

Rory and Eustace had arranged themselves so that they were now flanking Bimbo.

The man with the club considered the dense wall of the Alps boys. ­Muscle-­wise, what was there was flabby, and without definition, but there must have been a good seven hundred pounds of it combined. He looked at the first man. The first man shrugged. The man with the club dropped Derek’s foot to the floor.

‘Ow,’ said Derek.

‘He should be in a home is where he should be,’ the man with the club said. ‘But the mother wouldn’t have it. Well she has gone and learned her lesson now.’

The two men began to back towards the clubhouse door.

‘Here,’ Denise McIlenden shouted at the first man. ‘The keys.’

The first man checked, looked at the keys in his hand, lobbed them at Denise.