It’s gone too far, now. To be a Teague, is to be living on borrowed time. The feud between the families has erupted into something that can’t be set right by fisticuffs. It’s all shotguns and slash hooks and petrol bombs now. It’s not just the combatants who are vulnerable to attack. Anybody with a connection to Papa Teague runs the risk of being put in the ground. All the old rules have been ripped up. The women, the children, the older members of the extended clan – they’ve all been put on notice. A pregnant cousin was run down and crippled at a halting site in Dundalk; her fiancée hacked bloody with slash hooks and a machete. An uncle, long since disconnected from the main body of the family, was crucified on the roof of his caravan, his dead son’s ashes decanted into his throat from a gleaming silver urn. Two associates out at Waterford were blasted with shotguns, the barrels sawn so close to the butt that the nearer of the pair didn’t so much die as evaporate.

The slayings are said to be the work of a man that her father won’t speak of without blessing himself. The Heldens called in a family associate; a man they quietly call ‘Cromwell’ due to the amount of Irishmen he has put in the ground. She’s heard all the rumours about his origins. Born in the bowels of a mental hospital, or so they say. Smuggled out by authorities afraid of a scandal. Raised in total isolation by a half feral brother and sister who made a living recommissioning weapons and crafting self-assembly handguns and shotguns from items that wouldn’t set off alarms. Cromwell started killing people for money before he was sixteen. Thirty years on, he’s almost a myth, and the mere suggestion that he had taken the Heldens’ money had been enough to persuade Papa Teague, as head of the clan, to send his children into hiding. His sons and daughters have been scattered out among distant relatives like different pieces of a treasured stained-glass window, ready to be reassembled after the war. It is Roisin’s misfortune to have been placed with Auntie Eva-Jayne, here on this godforsaken estate in the Soviet-looking steel town in the colon of Lincolnshire.

‘It could be worse,’ says Eva-Jayne, good naturedly. She’s a cheerful sort: plump and dumpy but pleasing to the eye. She’s not far off fifty, but years of chain-smoking and fizzy pop have taken their toll and her features are a mess of wrinkles and empty gums. Her long hair is dyed purply-black, like her fingernails, but there is nothing about her that could be called unremarkable, from the big fleshy holes in her earlobes to the constellation of mirrors on her floaty red skirt. She’s wearing her unicorn slippers today: two multi-coloured foam horns poking out from beneath her hem. She’s wearing a huge fleecy hoodie too: a doe-eyed, baby seal-cub on the front. There are rainbow braids in her hair. Roisin finds herself unable to maintain her temper in the face of this riot of joie de vivre. She has to look away before she feels her temper begin to fade. Grins into the cushion and keeps the temper in her eyes.