He stops when he finds the name he’s been looking for. Clicks on their profile and finds a link to a cheaply-built website, offering VHS and DVD recordings from the underground fight scene. He scrolls down, his eyes flicking over familiar names, Travellers with blossoming reputations as hard men: McDonagh, Joyce, Nevin, Teague, Helden …

There’s a mobile phone number at the very bottom of the site. An email address too.

He stares through the window, at the damp brick of the little house across the street. There’s a cat sitting on a windowsill, glaring into the wind and the rain, as if daring it to hit harder. He chews his cheeks. Checks his watch.

Two birds, one stone, he tells himself. If you do the right thing and the wrong thing at once, you’ve got all bases covered.

He sends a message to the number on the screen: an act as optimistic as prayer.

The girl we both know. How much trouble is she really in? I can help.

He holds Roisin’s gaze for a moment before he puts the phone away. What would she be now? Eighteen? Nineteen? She’s beautiful, he can see that much, and there’s a fierceness about her: something intelligent – endlessly questioning – about the way she gazes out from the tiny screen and seems to see right through to the words written on his bones.

Then he begins to change into his uniform. If he’s going to fuck everything up, he at least wants to be appropriately dressed.

TEN

5.45 a.m.
Hessle Foreshore

Roisin McAvoy: cross-legged on a big plush rug. In her leopard-print dressing gown, a towel wrapping her hair up in an extravagant turban, she looks as though she is riding a magic carpet.

In front of her is an old metal tin: pink and violet, emblazoned with a Forever Friends teddy bear. In it, she keeps her memories, her keepsakes, her precious mementos. It gives off a whiff of wet metal; of stale herbs, of old smoke. The letters and journals within cannot transport her into reminiscences as perfectly as this scent. It tugs at her heart; pricks tears in her eyes – makes her skin tingle as if containing an electrical charge.

She doesn’t touch the papers. Just stares into the box as if it were a window. Sees the pressed flower: a pale blue Himalayan poppy, still carrying a trace of perfume. A Valentine’s card, received at aged fourteen and written in her own hand. Cinema passes. Receipts. Bus tickets. A yellowing scroll, bound with red. Crystals. Passport photos. Her rosary, in a silk purse. Daddy’s ring. An old, police-issue notebook; muddy boot print on the cover. A ragged patch of bloodstained cotton, white and frayed at the edges.

She closes her eyes. Feels memories come. Fights them down. They threaten to bring her a comfort to which she has no right.

There’s a pain at the back of her neck, where her soft dark hair meets her warm skin. She yearns for Aector’s big pink hands, kneading at her knots, her gristly clumps of tension, moving her head around gently with his thumbs while his fingers raise gooseflesh from her crown to her painted toes. She knows he would offer, were he here. But she doesn’t deserve his kindnesses. Can’t acquiesce to his kisses, his caresses. She deserves the pain. Deserves to wake rimed in sweat, her fingers in her mouth, probing at the soft and pulpy fruit of her bloodied gums – the last traces of the nightmare rising from her skin like smoke.