The minute I had proved unable to kill McGee, he had begun to despise me all over again. He couldn’t comprehend the language of mercy or conscience, or even ordinary squeamishness. He only spoke the local dialect of power. I wondered what emotion he had felt in his car, in the few seconds between seeing the gunman and the emphatic arrival of the bullet. Had he perhaps thought, in that instant, that I was the gunman? The notion brought me an unexpected flicker of pleasure, followed by a jolt of shame.

The next evening, about an hour after I got back from work, I heard the thin whine of the doorbell. From my room at the top of the house I could hear Mrs Wharton answering it, and a muffled conversation before she called up the stairs for me: ‘Jacky, visitors!’ in a voice slightly breathless with excitement. No one ever visited me there. I came downstairs warily. I suppose I half thought, against all logic, that it might be something or someone linked to the business of McGee’s death.

There Eve stood on the chilly doorstep, her pallor framed by the darkness, looking at me steadily but with some kind of suppressed nervous pleasure in her decision to come. I knew she was serious because she had Raymond with her, his hand linked tightly in hers, his greenish eyes also fixed expectantly on me.

I stared at them both for a minute, frozen by the weight of joy that had descended on me, and then I opened my arms.

Part Three

24

I flew back to Belfast for Murdie’s funeral, under grey skies baggy with the threat of rain. They had just renamed the City airport after George Best, and I couldn’t be sure whether it was because he was such a brilliant footballer or such a hopeless alcoholic, or both. In Belfast we have a weak spot for glittering wrecks. Steady, reliable success isn’t memorable enough for us.

I took a taxi from the airport. Through the back-seat window I could see Samson and Goliath, the yellow Harland & Wolff gantry cranes, our two biblical giants looming over what was once the world’s biggest shipyard. The crowds massed along here in 1911 to watch the dazzling bulk of the Titanic slide on greased slipways from her building yard into the waters of Belfast Lough. Big Jacky’s granny was there as a young woman, he told me – she was always so nosey, he said, she’d turn up to the opening of a can of corned beef – and when she was old she used to tell him how it was such a scorcher for May that she got sunburned on the back of her neck, and everyone on the quayside waved hankies and hats in the air and roared with full-throated pride that Belfast had built this unforgettable ship.