The musicians returned to the stage and then Irina announced that they were going to play one of Liam’s favorite bits of music, an old Irish jig, while the coffin was carried out. A jostle of figures came onto the dais: Vin again; Erika; a man with a long gray beard and an embroidered kimono; a stringy youth dressed in vertical stripes like a convict; two other tall young men wearing almost identical paisley-patterned shirts. They positioned themselves around the coffin and grasped it. Vin nodded and up it went, tilting this way and that, the boots on its lid sliding. Jude imagined Liam inside, his body shifting in the cramped space. One of the men almost lost his grip and Vin said something fierce in a carrying whisper. But finally it was on their shoulders and they very slowly maneuvered their way down the steps and off the dais, followed by the sweet swirling notes of the jig.

Danny stood up, then Tara and Andy, Alfie between them. Danny put out her hand and grasped the hand of her little son. He was wearing a knitted waistcoat, blue with flowers stitched into it, and he looked bemused as he staggered on his bandy legs behind the coffin. When they reached the door, Danny scooped him up.

Gradually the room emptied. Jude remained where she was as people passed her on the way out. She listened to the music and could picture Liam dancing to it; he was a good dancer, loose-limbed, in his own world. She thought of the strangeness of his loss and the strangeness that nobody had said that he had been murdered.

She saw Dermot, his tie pulled off and glassy-eyed, heading for the exit and she intercepted him, stood in front of him. He saw her and there was a slow arrival of recognition; she stepped forward and looked him full in the face.

“You’re in shock,” she said. “I know what it’s like. But you’ll start to feel it before long, and then you’ll get through it.”

“Yeah,” he said dully.

“And it was good of you to come and do this. Liam would have appreciated it.”

He looked more intently at her, as if he were noticing her properly for the first time.

“Would he?”

Jude thought to herself that the Liam she had known probably wouldn’t have appreciated it all that much.

“Of course he would,” she said.

Forty

Jude stepped outside. The light was fading and there was already a moon. At the far side of the lot, the pallbearers had stopped by a hearse and were attempting to insert the coffin into its open back. It was shedding flowers. Two men in formal black suits, one very small and the other very large, stood by watching with obvious disapproval. The sound of the Irish jig could still be heard, and the mourners stood in huddles in the cold wind, waiting.