Karen Cullen looked on with sour-faced suspicion as she grabbed another glass. She knew it was bullshit, but what could she do?

‘Are we chasing?’ Joe asked.

Andrew thought about it, cocking his head to one side as he considered the proposition.

‘A small Jameson’s? That’d be grand.’

Joe nodded to Karen. The whiskey was served with the same cynical scowl.

‘On your own?’ Andrew asked, before bringing his pint glass carefully up to his mouth and sinking a couple of inches.

‘Well,’ Joe said, ‘I was supposed to be having a drink with my daughter. But we had a bit of a row. Screaming blue murder she was! They grow up fast, young girls. And they never stop shouting!’

With that he buried his face in his Tetley’s and waited.

Andrew’s rasping breath developed into a chuckle.

‘He’s not wrong there, is he, Karen?’

Joe looked at the landlady, who hovered nearby and was doing her best to ignore them both.

‘Just like little Lisa! She tore the bloody place down! Hammer and tongs!’

‘What, today?’ Joe asked.

‘Aye, this afternoon!’

Andrew’s face was screwed up now, the whole thing wildly amusing to him. But Karen was pinning him with an expression of hardly disguised loathing. He got the message soon enough, took both drinks, nodded his thanks to Joe and shuffled back to his table over by the wall, out of the landlady’s range.

‘How old is Lisa?’ he asked when the old man had gone. ‘What, twenty-one, twenty-two?’

‘Twenty.’

‘Craig Shaw was twenty-five. You ever meet his mum?’

She shook her head.

‘Decent woman. The father was never involved. She did it all on her own. Do you know what she’s telling herself now?’

She shrugged.

‘She’s telling herself that it’s all her fault,’ said Joe, putting his pint down. ‘She brought him into the word, raised him on her own, and he turned out to be some second-rate drug pusher who got torched in a bloody Toyota Corolla. Her Toyota Corolla, actually.’

‘That’s drugs for you, eh?’

‘Lisa was living with him. She was involved. What if there’d been two bodies in that car?’

She took her time.

‘It’d be the end of my life.’

He gave it a second.

‘Help me, then.’

She shook her head. ‘It wasn’t anybody from here.’

‘You sure?’

‘Yeah. I know it.’

‘Shall I tell his mum that? You just know it? Jane, she’s called. Jane Shaw.’

‘It’s none of my business.’

‘It could’ve been. So easily.’

She tried to look away. But he held her stare.

‘Give me a mobile number,’ he said. ‘Somewhere I can reach you, in confidence.’