I put my hand down deep into the pocket of my overcoat. McGee’s spare keys were still there, tucked into my wallet. I wondered had he ever noticed they were missing. Part of me was reluctant to let them go. It felt risky still to have them on me, though, so I pulled them out and dropped them down a nearby drain.

That night, I woke up in bed in the dark and thought about what McGee had left behind. His legacy, if you want to call it that. A trail of misery, certainly. I was sure, without knowing the names of the victims, that he had been involved in murders. He left behind the grief of sundry relatives of the dead, the pain and death of Titch, the nagging ache in my bones, the braille of scars on my arms.

There were only these stains to remember him by, and then slowly history would close back over him like the surface of a river over a drowned man.

After his funeral he’d fade perhaps to a name on a gable wall, an incidental footnote in a history of the Troubles, an occasional nostalgic late-night mention from those fellow paramilitaries who still held him in their dubious esteem. The rain would fall down as it always did on the grey street where he had died and soon almost no one would think of him at all.

He had believed in his violent vision of order, until somebody else’s version of it required him to be destroyed.

He left behind him a small, empty, tidy house, with bills on the doormat and cans of lager still cooling in the fridge.

He left behind him an Alsatian dog, to whom he had perhaps been sporadically kind. I was glad the dog was still alive.

He left behind him a father, hard and mean of spirit, who had brought up his son in his own image and seen him crumble to dust.

He left behind him a son, about whom I had not known, and a woman who maybe once felt something strong for him until the feeling grew complicated and sour.

He left behind him me, damaged but not dead. I had managed to survive him now, and I supposed I would remember him.

The second time I woke up, near to dawn, I thought about him at the age of seven when his mother went missing, and how he must have hunted for her every day like a hungry and abandoned pet, until finally he accepted she was never coming back.

And then I thought about his own seven-year-old son, being told of his death, the child’s mouth falling open in surprise and his face turning pale as the telephone kept on and on ringing and the funeral preparations gathered force around him.