It trickled out over the next few months, like a line of blood from under a locked door, the story of Dunne and his friends. They had abducted men, and women too. Some captives were fathers or mothers, some were kids hardly out of their teens, some were in the IRA and some weren’t; they were taken up alleyways or driven away in the dark, down hopeless, nameless little rural lanes, on and on until finally the car stopped and they were shoved out faltering and afraid. Their tormentors would play wee tricks and jokes, kidding people they were about to be freed when in fact they were seconds from death.

There were much the same ingredients in every story, doled out in different measures. There was extreme pain, dispensed with ingenuity, or the intimate threat of it. Sometimes those held were in trouble because they had spoken out of turn, or lost the plot momentarily and punched a more senior IRA man. Maybe, with youthful folly, they had ignored the organisation and tried a small-time crime spree of their own. But most often the charge against the prisoner – the one that could turn bowels to liquid – was that he or she had been touting, passing on information that helped the British Army or the police.

Tout was a bad word. It stank of shame and brutal retribution. It sprawled obscenely across gable walls, inviting trouble, turning nods and smiles to cold glares of suspicion. Tout could stick to you like wet tar.

The enforcers kept to due process, all right: their own version of it. They would often compel the captive to make a tape recording admitting alleged crime, a stuttering confession which was retained as evidence that IRA justice had been done.

The process could take hours or days. The prisoner would cling to the dwindling hope that there was still a way out, a narrow tunnel through violence or shame or some as yet unspecified bargain which would permit them to crawl on their belly back to life. It had happened before to others, maybe it would happen again.

I keep pondering the moment when they finally realised that there was to be no way back, when they understood that this petered-out country road or that particular room, with its stained mug of tea and the nondescript blanket on the bed, was the last one they would see. The fine drizzle that flecked the windowpane would be the last rain: there would be no more of anything. The thought of them trapped there in that condition of knowing haunts me, their loneliness drifting across the decades like smoke on the wind.

And when I think of that I also sometimes think of McGee leaving the newsagent’s cellar that grey morning, walking stiffly back out into the short portion of his life that was left.