I kept on the move, out of the streets where I was born and then on, up past the boxy behemoth of the City Hospital, across towards the university area and into the Botanic Gardens. When I got there I briefly sat down on a wooden bench, just like old times, but after a minute or so I could feel a kind of nameless panic rising in me so I walked twice round the gardens fast with none of the old pleasure and then out past Botanic train station and towards the city centre.

I walked past the Crown Bar and Robinsons and thought about stopping in for a pint but I knew the restlessness would be too powerful again if I sat down in an enclosed space, so I carried on up through the wide streets past the City Hall until I made it to the waterfront at the edge of Belfast Lough, where the wind wheeled around the monumental new buildings that had risen near the water after the ceasefires. Eventually something about the churning movement of the grey sea allowed me just to keep myself still there and stare into it.

It’s not even that I felt guilty about McGee, especially when I remembered what he did to me. By the time I knew him he had already hardened into what he was. Still, it knocked me sideways, the pity of it. Time had yanked back a tarpaulin and exposed a filthy secret curled in there, a knotted weed that throttled the hope in him when he was small and had possibilities.

Ten minutes or so passed, and gradually I started to breathe more slowly. I saw a stone lying next to me, part of a little decorative border, but large enough to be significant. I picked it up and threw it down into the shifting water and waited with my eyes closed for the faint report as it clipped the surface and disappeared.

You dig down into the past and finally your spade comes up against rock. There’s no way through. Sometimes you need just to set the spade to one side. The thing is, I started remembering again recently. When I heard about what they found in that quarry near Kilkeel it churned everything else up too.

I’m watchful – that much has become a habit – but without always knowing what I’m looking out for. Something that doesn’t sit right, I suppose, that sets the alarm bells ringing. When I walk into a room the first thing I take note of, still, is the exit.