‘I’m not comfortable, hanging their dirty washing out like this,’ he said. ‘I don’t want you getting the wrong idea about me. But you need to know the family to know why I made the judgement I did. Nora and Elizabeth would tell you Mary Ellen was whiter than white, that she just had the odd boyfriend. That wasn’t the case. Not only was she sleeping with everything that moved – including, I might add, married men – but the apple hadn’t fallen far from the tree where drink was concerned. She was down here most nights knocking it back in any pub that would serve her. Maybe I’m a little traditional, but that kind of behaviour in a young lass – it was always going to lead to trouble.’

‘I see,’ Michael said, edging the man along. ‘But none of that explains why you didn’t take her disappearance seriously. Even if all those things are true, even if the girl had upped and left herself, you didn’t know that for certain.’

Doyle’s eye twitched and for a moment, there was a hint of something behind the façade of affability.

‘I didn’t just dismiss her family.’ He shook his head, indignant. ‘The story they told me didn’t add up. And I figured that they were so embarrassed by Mary Ellen’s departure they were creating a fiction to mask it.’

‘What was their story?’

‘They claimed she hadn’t come home the night before. Now, this was only the next day and I knew for a fact that there had been plenty of nights when Mary Ellen hadn’t made it home. They’d never called to the station to report her missing before. But this night, as it happens, she’d got a taxi home. The man insisted he brought her to her gate and we had about twenty witnesses to say he was back in the pub fifteen minutes later and stayed there for the night.

‘That man was hounded by the Lehanes. The two women confronted him in the village, claimed he was lying, that a gang of local men had done away with Mary Ellen and he was covering up for them. All sorts of fantastical notions, they had. He was mortified. He hadn’t even charged the girl, she’d been so out of it. Somebody else had to give him directions to get her home; he’d only moved to the area a short time before. He was trying to be a Good Samaritan and look where it got him.’

‘You’re positive he did nothing wrong?’ Michael asked. ‘Did he know Mary Ellen before he gave her a lift that night? Was he one of the men she’d had a relationship with?’