He braked sharply, making her head jerk.

“I’m a safe driver. You don’t need to worry.”

“Perhaps this isn’t the right time to be driving though,” said Jude. “After everything you’ve been through.”

They were now going at twenty. The car behind them tooted its horn and Dermot gave an evil grin and slowed even more.

“Arsehole,” he said.

“Perhaps you could just drop me at the station,” said Jude. “Please.”

“No. A long drive will be therapeutic. And we can chat: fellow executors.”

Jude tried to unclench herself. Her fists were tightly curled and her jaw ached. The low sun glittered on the smeary windshield and she wondered nervously about visibility. Dermot accelerated again as they left the town and began their journey south.

“What are you going to be doing there?” she asked as the car screeched round a corner.

He shrugged. “Business,” he said. “Nothing interesting. I hate London.”

After that, they didn’t talk. Jude looked out of the window at fields, hills and trees in the gathering dusk. There was a small river winding through the valley beneath them. Two horses grazing placidly in a meadow. A man standing beside his neat bonfire. A kestrel hovering. Ordinary life, she thought, as they shot past, the needle on the speed dial rising ominously.

She glanced across at Dermot. He was gripping the steering wheel fiercely; his face was pinched and his hair wild; he smelled unwashed. He looked disordered and wretched and her heart went out to him.

“Maybe,” she said, “you should think of talking to someone about all you’ve been through.”

Which of course was what her mother had advised her.

“You’ve no idea what I’m feeling,” Dermot replied, once more twisting his head to look at her while the car jolted over a pothole. He’d bitten his lip and there was blood at the corner of his mouth.

She started to reply but he interrupted her.

“Liam would have told me to just get on with things. Square up.”

“Like you’re in a battle?”

“Exactly. He said you had to fight for yourself like a soldier fights. Or a warrior.” His whole face puckered as if it was a matter of painful importance to remember the exact phrase. “Maybe he said warrior. That sounds more like Liam. You know—daggers and fists, not guns and tanks.”

“Who are you fighting?”

Dermot shrugged. He had taken off the tracksuit jacket and Jude saw there were damp rings under his armpits and little beads of perspiration on his forehead. “Whoever’s against you or gets in your way. It’s them or you.”

“It sounds like a grim way of being alive,” she said.

“Maybe.”

He rubbed at his eyes with a knuckled fist. Her eyes felt sore as well, gritty with tiredness.

“I know he was your older brother and that you’re mourning him,” she said. “But that doesn’t mean he was right.”