After a rather shocked McFadden had handcuffed Mary and driven her away, Molloy and I went back into the kitchen. Molloy picked up something from the stool on which Mary had been sitting and showed it to me. It was a newspaper cutting of the family feature on the Jamesons from the Irish Independent. I remembered Stoop saying that Mary never missed her Indo. I wondered if it had been the last straw for her.

I handed it back to him. “What did you want to speak to Jude about?” I asked.

“I wanted to ask him if he’d heard anything on Friday night. He said no, but if his bike was parked where it is today …” He trailed off.

I looked at him quizzically. And then it hit me. Jude’s motorbike was parked in front of the shed in which another car was parked, a car that could only be Mary’s. Jude’s motorbike had been blocking Mary in, all weekend.

“He’d have had to move it to let Mary out,” I said.

“Exactly.”

“He knew.”

Molloy nodded. “He knew.”

Chapter Twenty-Seven

Saturday night, the following weekend

I KNOCKED ON the door, shading my eyes against the sun, a bottle of wine in my hand. We’d had relentless blue skies since the weekend before, and people were already beginning to complain about the dryness and the heat.

Molloy opened it with a smile. “Why didn’t you use your key?”

I handed him the bottle and stepped into the hall. “I thought we were dating!”

I followed him through the house, past tantalising cooking smells in the kitchen, and out into a backyard I didn’t even know existed. I was amazed to see that he’d put out some chairs and a small table, on which he’d laid a wine cooler with an open bottle of wine and cereal bowls with olives and crisps.

I looked up at him with an urge to laugh, the same urge I’d felt when we’d discussed “the proposal that never was”.

“So, we’re really doing this then?” I asked.

He poured me a glass of chilled white wine and handed it over. “Looks like it.”

I reached into the pocket of my jeans and handed him a key, his key.

“Keep it,” he said, as he clinked my glass and we sat, on the rather bockety kitchen chairs. He sighed and took a sip of his wine. “Two full days off.”

“Garda Station empty again?” I asked.

“They’re both on remand, in Dublin. Looks as if there’ll be no trial, pleas to manslaughter for both, I’m told. I hope that remains the case.”

“They didn’t try too hard to escape discovery, either of them, did they?” I said, taking a sip from my own glass. It was dry and fresh. Molloy’s taste in snacks might not be too sophisticated but he knew his wines.