One other thing worried me, too: what if that photograph threat simply slid off McGee, and he went after Phyllis anyway? Fears have a way of shrinking over time while resentments sprout muscles. Phyllis was well liked locally, and if McGee’s lot harmed her openly it might go down badly, but I knew things didn’t have to be so clear-cut. He only had to wait until a feverish patch of the year when for some reason there’s a bit of mayhem on the streets and then one young hothead among many happens to chuck a petrol bomb through a ground-floor window in the wee small hours and whoosh a middle-aged woman sleeping upstairs is burned or asphyxiated.

Then the talk will start. Isn’t it awful, what happened? Och it is indeed a dreadful tragedy, just a nice lady alone in her own home, not an enemy in the world, clearly he got the wrong house, what on earth is this country coming to, even the leadership is furious apparently and they issue a stern disciplinary warning against these young bucks who get over-excited, there’s to be no more of this carry-on, but in a place like this with our difficult history sure tempers run out of control now and again, it seems the fire spread unusually fast, must have been the foam in the soft furnishings, but it isn’t an official breach of anyone’s ceasefire thank goodness for that, as even everyone in the government agrees so there’s some consolation at least.

Far away in another city, however, one person will understand very clearly the precise nature of what sailed through that ground-floor window, exactly as he is meant to. A message in a bottle, addressed to me. Was any of this likely? It was hard to tell any more.

I fell into the habit of ringing Phyllis at home every couple of days to gauge the temperature around her. She was delighted with the calls, of course: it seemed to her as if I was finally behaving almost like a son. I’d kick it all off with ‘How are things?’ and then she’d be straight out of the starting blocks, telling me that prices had rocketed at the local butcher’s now they’d smartened the place up, and how the doctors had cut a tumour the size of an orange out of her friend Julie’s husband just in the nick of time before the thing seeded itself all the way through him.