“I will,” Phyllis said. “Fred hasn’t had a decent walk in days, and it looks as if I’ll be spending the next while trying to get the shop sorted. He’d love a decent run out, stretch the old legs.”

“Phyllis was telling me about that poor girl last night,” Maeve said. “I hope she’s okay.”

“I think she’ll be fine. I just ran into her sister.”

“What was the name of that drug again?” Phyllis asked. “G something …”

“GHB,” I said. “It’s a new drug apparently …”

But Maeve had stopped with her mug halfway to her mouth. “My God, G?” She put the mug back down. “One of my clients’ kids died from that. It’s awful. It’s liquid ecstasy. Used to be a date-rape drug.”

“Date-rape drug?” Phyllis was appalled.

Maeve nodded. “And now, weirdly, it’s really popular with young women. No calories, no hangover, it’s like liquid confidence, it seems. It makes you happy, you think nothing’s wrong, even if you’re upset about something. You can even exercise on it.” She gave a sigh. “But there’s a shocking rate of overdose. You can go into a coma really easily …”

As she spoke, something was bothering me, something in the far reaches of my brain that I couldn’t quite get hold of. Something Molloy had said about how the drug was administered. Sprayed into a drink, he’d said. I had a memory of a child playing with a perfume bottle before it was snatched away from him. I tried to place it. And then suddenly I had it. It was Peadar. He’d been playing with a spray perfume bottle he must have taken from his mother or his aunt’s bag. Sue had been very quick to grab it back from him.

Phyllis was speaking. “That’s what happened to Lissa. Isn’t it, Ben?”

But I was still thinking things through. That entry on Sue’s Facebook page; GNO didn’t mean Girls Night Out, it meant night out on G. But why had Sue been taking the drug? She was a nurse, for God’s sake. Then I remembered Lissa had mentioned her sister had been going through a rough time. Was Sue the one who had given her sister the drug?

Before I could get any further, the coffee machine, the music and the lights all went off at the same time. There was a loud expletive from Tony at the bar, followed by “Oh, for Christ’s sake. That’s all we need.”

He called Stan to take over while he headed down the back of the pub and out the back door, then reappeared within a few minutes with the announcement that water had got into the fuse box.