I could tell he was dismayed: it meant a couple of days of difficulty for him, trying to find a suitable barman to stand in for that length of time. But he had courteous manners, and he was not the sort of man to take a mother’s illness lightly. After all, I had never missed a day before. I had noticed that the well-being of his own large, extended family weighed unusually heavily on him. He seemed permanently oppressed by a father-in-law’s medical bills or a cousin’s interminable legal studies in Morocco. His face, above a forcefully starched collar of blinding whiteness, always looked crumpled and wearied.

‘That’s terrible news, Jacky,’ he said, after a brief pause of reckoning. ‘Don’t worry, we’ll sort something out here. I do hope your mother recovers. Give us a call in three or four days and let us know how she’s doing.’

‘Of course I will, Hassan. Sorry about this.’

‘No, no, I’m so sorry about your mother.’

For a second, I felt bad for lying about my mother’s life-threatening illness. I had never done that before: it was pretty low. But Titch was dead. And then I thought the reason that most people worry about using something so terrible as an excuse is because they fear that perhaps their mother really will die soon, as fate’s punishment for lying.

My mother was already dead, however, and it had happened to me before I ever thought about lying. Any debt I owed to fate was pre-paid in full almost before I could talk. The more I thought about it, the more I realised that I could, with every justification, use the excuse of my mother nearly dying – or, indeed, having just died – again and again throughout my entire life, until I became far too old myself for it to carry any credibility. Fate had handed other people all the benefits that came from a real live mother, and coolly denied them to me, like some hard-faced cloakroom attendant who lost my only coat on a freezing night and never said sorry. Why should I also turn down the few famished advantages that could flow from bad luck?

I briefly wondered, though, what my mother would think of me killing McGee, and felt a pang of guilt. She had probably had high hopes for me: Big Jacky said she used to sing me to sleep every night. I pushed her out of my head. I had had a long run of bad luck. She had died, Big Jacky had died, and now Titch. My existence so far had been like some bloody Shakespearean play, littered with corpses.