‘Ye stormed into the gaff at all hours,’ Judge said with genuine recollection.

‘We thought we had you, Dylan.’

‘And ye were out of luck.’

‘That time, we were.’

It must have been a little over a year ago. They’d received a tip considered credible that Judge was sitting on a significant quantity of cigarettes smuggled down from the North, so they got a warrant and raided his place, in the Glen Gardens estate. Technically not even his place, because there was only the girlfriend’s name on the lease, if Noonan remembered correctly. They raided the house at dawn and made Judge, his girlfriend and their little daughter stand outside in their pyjamas in the chill grey light while the Guards turned the place upside down. Noonan remembered the girlfriend; five foot nothing, stick thin and incensed, unceasingly effing and blinding while a ­saucer-­eyed and gravely silent little girl, no more than three or four years old, sat up in her arms watching the Guards troop in and out of the house. Not a peep out of this fella that Noonan could remember, Judge just skulking meekly behind his raging beoir, eyes on the ground. And though his entire demeanour had read guilty as sin, the raid somehow turned out to be a waste of time. All they found was a half dozen cartons of cigarettes under a tarp in the back of the property’s suspiciously empty shed, nowhere near enough to hang an ­intent-­to-­sell charge on.

‘Are you still with that young one, Dylan? That one with the mouth on her?’ Noonan asked. She wanted to keep him awake and talking.

‘Amy, yeah. Same bird.’

‘Such language out of her, this slip of a thing stood there in her fluffy slippers calling us every name under the sun, and the little beaut good as gold up in her arms. What age is your girl?’

‘That’s Amy’s kid.’

Gingerly, Noonan removed the towels covering Judge’s groin. Judge gasped.

‘That’s OK, that’s OK,’ Noonan said. ‘It doesn’t matter a whit whether she’s yours or not, so long as you treat her well.’

‘I treat her like a queen,’ he slurred.