‘I think you’ve made a dreadful mistake. I said as much to the guards who called this morning. Pauline wasn’t taken. She left. Steve was knocking her about and she got away from him. It was all planned.’

The news had yet to sink in properly with Barbara Gavan, Pauline O’Hara’s sister. Tom and Ray had driven to Waterford that same Monday morning, a couple of hours after the local guards had broken the news to her that Pauline’s body had been located. Barbara’s husband brought them through to the kitchen of the terraced house, where his wife sat, puffing her way through a pack of Marlboros, lighting one cigarette from the other. She kept insisting he go to work, further proof that she was in denial.

The back door was open, but still Tom could feel the secondary smoke burning his lungs and seeping into the fabric of his shirt. Two small children were playing outside, climbing all over a Wendy house and throwing grass and small stones into the neighbour’s back garden. Their mother cast them an occasional worried glance, but it was no more than habitual reflex. She had other things on her mind.

‘So, that’s why her partner reported her missing but you didn’t? What’s his full name?’

‘Steve Moore. He came around here a week after she left. I’d only been let out of hospital the day before. I’d just given birth to my eldest, so I remember the date. The 24th of February. He said Pauline had gone missing a few days after Valentine’s Day, on the 17th. “She hasn’t gone missing,” I told him. “She’s left you, arsehole.”’

Barbara adopted the same fierce tone she’d used on the man when he called. She paused to tap some ash and chew one of her fingernails. Tom estimated her age to be around twenty-nine, the age her sister had been when she’d gone missing six years ago. So she’d have been roughly twenty-three at the time. Young, to be fronting up to a man her sister claimed could be violent.

‘Why were you so certain Pauline had left him? How long had they been together?’

‘They started seeing each other the year I finished nursing training. I’d just turned twenty-one, so …’ She counted on her fingers. ‘Two years. That’s how long they were together. He was all smiles at first. Friendly, like. Used to drive around to our dad’s house to collect her, loaded down with flowers and chocolates. He worked in a wholesalers that delivered to supermarkets, got everything on the cheap. Pauline was still living at home then, because Dad wasn’t well and she didn’t want to leave him on his own. He died a couple of months after she started seeing Steve. That was when he started to show his true colours.’