“I think we’re the last. We were waiting for Peadar to wake up from his nap. Is everything okay?” Jude asked, brow furrowed.

His daughters appeared behind him, Sue with Peadar in her arms as usual and Lissa dragging a wheelie case behind her, thunk-thunk-thunk down the stairs. They arrived at the bottom in a clump, dumping their bags at their feet.

“May I have a word with you?” Molloy asked. “It won’t take long.”

“Sure.” Jude glanced uneasily at his daughters. “Alone?”

Molloy said, “It’s probably better if you’re all here.”

“Okay.”

“I’d like you to tell me again about your relationship with the dead man. We’ve discovered some connections between you that we previously weren’t aware of.”

Jude sighed, resting one arm on the banister. “I thought that might happen, as soon as you had a chance to look properly. Are you sure you want to hear it? It’s a long bloody saga, to be frank. Whatever you’ve found out is probably true.”

“Start at the beginning,” Molloy said firmly.

Jude took a deep breath. “I knew Bob Jameson well, better than I admitted.” He glanced at me. “Better than I wished. But it was true what I said: I knew the twins at school; Bob and Derek, the loud one and the quiet one, the big personality and the studious one. The bully and the bullied. I was there for Derek’s accident.” He paused. “Do you really want me to go back this far?”

Molloy nodded.

“Okay. Bob was taunting Derek as usual, daring us all to climb onto the roof of their turf shed, knowing Derek was terrified of heights and that we’d all get into trouble for it. Bob always had to push things to their limit.” He closed his eyes for a second. “Derek did it although he was absolutely shit scared and Bob taunted him until he fell off the roof in terror. Landed on his feet and seemed all right, at least he pretended he was.”

He shook his head. “I’m not sure how, but the result was that a few weeks later, Derek got sepsis and had to have his leg amputated from below the knee. He was fourteen. That wasn’t the way Bob spun it, of course. He made it look as though he was the hero who sat beside his brother’s hospital bed for months, never admitting that he was the one who had caused the accident in the first place.”

He rubbed his neck. “Because I was there, and I knew the truth, Bob tried to keep on the right side of me ever since. Bastard.”

He shot an apologetic look at his daughters who were both now sitting on the stairs. Peadar was between them, fast asleep again, leaning against his mother.

“Why didn’t Derek say what had really happened?” Molloy asked.