‘I bet you do. Bear with me now, Dylan,’ Noonan said. She slipped off Judge’s runner, lifted the cuff of his trouser leg and with the trauma shears drew a clean slit from his ankle up to his hip and peeled back the panel of the jeans. She could make out several raw black punctures where the buckshot had gone into his thigh. His skin was stained with drying blood and there was fresh blood oozing steadily from the wounds. Noonan continued cutting, tearing delicately away his ­T-­shirt. His abdomen was completely sodden in blood and there were big ugly perforations in the flesh of his stomach, as if he’d been gored. A malign smell began to gather under Noonan’s nose. It took her a second to recognise it as the smell of human shit.

‘How’s it look?’ Judge croaked.

‘Like you got shot.’

‘Ah fuck, am I gonta die?’

‘I reckon if you were going to bleed to death, you would have done so by now,’ Noonan hedged.

There was little she could do but keep Judge calm and conscious. Steadying her touch as best she could, she began tearing gauze into strips and placing the strips over the ­worst-­looking wounds, watching as each swatch of material was immediately soaked through with a fresh bloom of red. She picked back up one of the towels and pressed it against his abdomen. In close, she heard a small, insistent noise, and there, down in the grass under Judge’s head, a racing, paper-thin beat was escaping from an earbud.

‘What’s the little girl’s name?’ Noonan asked but Judge did not answer. His eyelids were heavy and fluttering, like those of a child fighting sleep. His lips were colourless, stuck to his teeth.

‘Come on now, Dylan,’ Noonan asserted, tapping his cheek with her fingers. ‘Ambulance’ll be here any second. Come on. They’re going to pump you full of the good stuff. ­Pharmaceutical-­grade narcotics and no fucking about.’

Noonan thought she saw a smile, a faint flicker on Judge’s lips. A few feet away in the grass were tossed a metal bar and a plastic jerrican, a length of hosepipe sticking out of it. Noonan wondered where it was Judge might have been heading, and then she saw it, at the far edge of the field, the squat, ­muddy ­white body of a quad bike parked in the declivity of what must have been a boreen.

‘See that?’ she said to Swift. ‘The getaway vehicle.’