‘Well,’ he rejoined. ‘No clichés there. A guard owning a pub. You’ll tell me next you own a rake of rental properties.’

Sean raised his glass and drank deep, silence his answer.

‘Shit, Sean. Maybe I should have taken your job. Now, talk to me about Joe Kennedy’s father. The suspense is killing me.’

‘Got any cigars on you?’

The inspector reached for his jacket and then cursed. He’d left it in Willie’s car.

‘How can a man who visits Cuba and comes back sporting Fidel Castro’s beard not have cigars on him?’ Sean clicked his tongue.

‘For crying out loud, will you ever just tell me what the scéal is on Kennedy?’

‘Keep your shirt on. I can’t believe you’re not aware of it already. Joe’s father was a detective.’

‘I didn’t know that.’

‘I rest my case. And he wasn’t just any detective. He was notorious. One of the Special Eight.’

Tom’s eyes widened. The Special Eight were infamous – corrupt gardaí, the absolute antithesis of what it meant to be an officer these days.

A gang of eight detectives, the men were renowned for dodgy policing practices in the early seventies that led to numerous unsafe convictions. They’d acted pretty much with impunity for most of that decade, despite whispered rumours of beatings, threats and falsification of evidence. By the mid-nineties, however, a number of the convictions they had secured had been quashed and a tribunal of inquiry focusing on several of their cases was established.

The gang had operated more or less before Tom’s time, but he’d always been aware of them as an unpleasant footnote in garda history.

He ran through their names in his head now.

‘There was no Kennedy in the Special Eight,’ he said.

‘Joe’s dad was Malachy Sutton. Kennedy is his mother’s maiden name.’

Sean flicked a fruit fly from the side of his glass as Tom gaped at him.

‘Holy crap!’

‘Indeed.’

‘He was the one who went after …’

‘Susan Harte, yes. That’s the one.’

Tom took a gulp of wine. How had he not known this?

The tragic case of Susan Harte was one of those that the tribunal into the Special Eight’s activities was originally set up to probe. Harte had accused several men in her town of gang-raping her one night in 1976. The medical evidence in support of her claim had been overwhelming – one of the assailants had abused her with a beer bottle. The men’s story was that Harte was an unstable woman who had consented to group intercourse and cited her affair with a local married man as proof of her loose morals.