‘What’s up?’ I asked, hanging my jacket in the narrow hall. She ushered me into the front room and nodded towards Titch’s bedroom.

‘He got into bother at McGee’s shop. The old man caught him taking a packet of biscuits he hadn’t paid for and there was a bit of a row, I think.’

She watched me warily, the hazel eyes waiting for a definitive reply.

‘Oh dear,’ I said. It was worse than she knew. I had heard that the McGees were hardmen, heavily involved. The older McGee was a nasty piece of work: rancid with an unnamed resentment, quick to anger and loath to forget any slight. He hung about in a couple of local drinking clubs with a guy called McMullen, who had a pot belly and weaselly eyes, and who was said to have killed at least three people himself. I didn’t know if he had or not, but bad rumours clung to him.

There was no missus on the scene. People whispered that oul McGee’s wife had abandoned the family and Northern Ireland years ago, when her two boys were young, never to return. This was a maternal crime alluded to only in hushed voices, although I heard Titch’s mum say once – as though uttering a small heresy – that she was a good-looking woman and the only one in that family with a civil tongue in her head. For most people, though, the wife’s flight had given her husband a reason for the drop of arsenic in his soul.

From what I remembered, McGee’s grown son now called round after work twice a week to take him to a drinking club where he stayed until the small hours, diligently feeding the next day’s irritable mood with copious amounts of spirits. The son lived a few streets away from me. He had an Alsatian dog tied up in his back yard that growled if it heard anyone walking past.

As a shopkeeper, the da maintained a testy politeness with his regular customers, but he wouldn’t take kindly to some fat chancer just wandering in for a free packet of chocolate bourbons.

‘What exactly happened?’ I asked.

‘I don’t know. You go and speak to him. I can’t get any more out of him.’

I started walking up the stairs towards Titch’s room. Titch was lying on his long-suffering bed, ostentatiously scrutinising one of his mother’s very old Hello! magazines. He had heard me come into the house long ago, which is why any moment now he would affect a sudden surprise at my appearance.