“I told you!” She laughed as he gripped at his broken face. “You fucking arsehole!”

Bran had her by the arms and was dragging her back. Jay rolled, fumbled for the gun that he’d discarded by the couch when he started to beat her. Amanda tried to lunge forward, to reach for it at the same time, but Bran’s arms held firm. As Jay’s fingers came within inches of the barrel they froze at the sound of a wail.

“Nobody move!”

Sweeney was in the doorway to the back garden, having slid the glass open silently, her gun at the ready. No one breathed.

“Back the fuck up!”

Her aim was on Jay. The man with the bloodied, crooked nose was sprawled on his stomach, fingers hovering unsteadily over the barrel. Sweeney was panting now, her eyes wild. “Don’t even think about it!”

Jay backed up. Amanda wriggled out of Bran’s arms and flopped onto the floor, grabbing the pistol from the pile of glass where it lay.

“Sweeney,” she said, laughing. “You’re an absolute—”

A bang. Amanda screamed. In the fraction of a second Sweeney had taken to glance to her left at the corpse in the chair by the door, Bran had grabbed his gun from the back of his jeans and shot her.

Amanda watched Sweeney fall, one hand clutching the front of her shirt.

A taxi finally came, but I had nowhere to direct it to. All I knew was that I needed to be moving, needed to know that I was in pursuit of Kevin Driscoll. It seemed as though hearing his surname increased the burning hatred twofold. He was suddenly more than a concept. A real person. I held the phone and watched people flash by the car, couples walking along the footpath, motorists in other cars. Kevin Driscoll had, for a time, had a girlfriend. He was twenty-six. He did not have a daughter, or a younger cousin, or anyone in his life that Chloe could think of who was small and blond and school-age. All she could tell me was that when they were together, he’d struck up a sort of friendship with the little girl next door in the house where they previously lived. Chloe had seen them talking over the fence. I’d tapped the address of their old house into my phone with painstaking care, Chloe on speaker, the confused rumblings of her friends or whoever was in the background of the call now and then distracting her, causing her to pull away. Chloe didn’t know where Kevin lived now. He’d unceremoniously dumped her, giving her little reason, a few months after Claire’s abduction.

Did Kevin Driscoll have a new girlfriend now? I gripped the seat belt at my chest, squeezed it until my fist shook and ached. Were Kevin Driscoll and his new girlfriend planning on getting married? Having babies? Buying a house? Kevin Driscoll had stolen my life. A ludicrous impulse I couldn’t deny kept surfacing in my mind, that when I found him, I would take my life back from him. He had it, like a talisman, a physical object. I would get it. I would steal it back. I would hurt him. I would kill him.