Given his difficulty in speaking, Tommy was tight with his words, but he had great timing. One afternoon I walked in to look for Big Jacky and Tommy immediately started agitating for me with his arms. I got up close to hear him say in his distinctive voice, as if transmitting from several leagues under the sea, ‘Barbara’s had her hair done.’

The next second big Barbara steamed into view, dead serious beneath a majestically awful new custard-coloured bouffant, and the pair of us cracked up.

Tommy’s dad was a very senior Loyalist, above even the likes of McMullen in the hierarchy, and – despite his readiness to okay the shattering of other families – he dearly loved Tommy, who held a place in the one small compartment of his heart that had not yet ossified. He had a slack face and hard-working eyes, and he observed how much Tommy liked Big Jacky, who was endlessly patient with him, taking him back and forth to the toilet without complaint and listening carefully to whatever he said.

Big Jacky didn’t like Tommy’s dad, though. I could see that in the tension of his jaw in the man’s presence, the way his natural reticence retreated even further into the guarded handover of monosyllables. But he gave him the minimal courtesy due to any father of Tommy’s. And perhaps because of this chance connection down at the club, Big Jacky never had too much trouble from anyone. You couldn’t rely on that, though. You couldn’t rely on anything.

Mrs Hackett in the corner shop sometimes filled me in on stuff that was going on locally, so long as no one else was in earshot. I had learned that good timing and a modest outlay on a tin of Buitoni ravioli and a packet of Punjana teabags could purchase some thought-provoking snippets. She had long ago developed the habit of confiding in Big Jacky – something perhaps to do with the natural fraternity of shopkeepers in a volatile city – and now it had transferred to me. What Mrs Hackett wasn’t told, she overheard. She was an assiduous wee gatherer of information. I couldn’t be entirely sure of its direction of flow, even though I trusted to her good intentions, and so I never told her anything I didn’t want others to know. Given my caginess, that limited the scope of our chat, but I kept the ball in the air with pleasantries. Thank God for the weather in all its variations.

‘Another oul rainy day,’ I observed.

‘Och, will it ever stop?’

As she handed me my change she took a quick squint down the central aisle of the wee shop, then right and left. A signal to linger. She leaned over the counter and whispered: ‘Say nothing but there was another beating last week.’

‘Who was it?’