The dog served him until its sudden end, and then – after Hitler and Eva Braun took cyanide themselves – their dog-handler shot each one of Blondi’s puppies. That’s where loyalty to a headcase gets you.

Still, a person who made as many enemies as McGee shouldn’t rely on anything or anyone.

It came to mind that Phyllis had a packet of sleeping pills that she kept in the bathroom cabinet. To get hold of the pills, though, I had to get back into my old house.

It’s complicated to kill someone, even when you are doing it with an organisation behind you, which I wasn’t. It takes a lot of planning. Think of all the work that used to go into those multiple demises that the IRA and Loyalist paramilitaries regularly arranged for us in Northern Ireland: the industrious collection of information on the target, the spying and strategising, the agreed division of roles, the justification for the attack, the overcoming of doubts, the squashing of compassion, the rush of adrenalin, the cleaning of a gun, the priming and planting of a bomb, the cool anticipation of the aftermath, the finalising of the press statement, the shooting or the explosion, the shredding of flesh. And after that came the strenuous maintenance of self-righteousness in the face of the screaming, the weeping, the disbelief.

There’s so much to get right.

The people who were the softest targets, usually, were those who had a routine. In most places a routine makes a life easier, but in my country it helped to finish it off. People settled into patterns, the shapes that fall naturally in a week. They opened their grocery store at the same time each day, or locked up after work, or went to church or Mass on Sunday. And then right in the middle of the irreplaceable ordinariness, instead of the next polite greeting to a customer or the anticipated lull of the afternoon tea break, instead of the short drive home, just as the leg of lamb was spitting hospitably in the oven or the kettle bubbling towards tea, what on earth oh my God what on earth should come walking purposefully towards them but Death?