Frank left the room, the warder at his side. He was in a daze. As he got back onto the landing, someone slapped his shoulder.

‘Well done, Frank,’ they said, and he wanted to rip their arm off and beat them with it.

‘I didn’t get it,’ he said, and the landings fell quiet as he walked all the way along them and back to his cell. ‘I didn’t get fucking parole. They turned me down again.’

He went to his bunk and sat down.

No early release.

He stared at the floor. Today he should have been happy, and now this.

Full term.

Well, all right. He’d do it. The full stretch. And then he’d do what he’d been itching to do for years. Get that bitch Dora – and her fucking offspring, and any other member of her family left standing. The O’Briens were his. And he was going to wipe them off the face of the earth.

112

‘Anything?’ asked Hunter when they were driving back to the station, DS Farmer at the wheel.

Farmer shrugged as he steered the car through the traffic. ‘Maguire’s background is pretty sad.’

‘Yes. His brother killed himself. The mother too. I know.’

This was said so coolly that Farmer gave his boss a glance. Farmer wondered if Hunter had even had a mother, or if he had been beamed down from another galaxy as a full-grown robot, programmed to solve crime and not give a fuck about anything else. Hunter had a broken marriage in his background, Farmer knew that. And no real surprises there. His boss was a good detective, but not great on empathy.

‘The father’s still alive. In a home. Donny’s missus gave me the address. You think I should pay a visit?’

Hunter heaved a sigh. ‘We’ve got nothing else. So yes. I’m getting back on the Farlow case today. I’ve turned over nearly every available stone to see if Maguire crawls out, but so far, no luck. I’m happy to let you take over on this, but keep me up to speed, OK?’

‘Sure, boss.’

Solverton Place was a big Victorian gabled red-bricked house with ornate wooden eaves painted white. It was set at the end of a long gravel driveway, wide lawns either side of the drive studded with bare circular cut-outs, empty of the past summer’s bedding plants. Once the house must have belonged to a banker or a successful merchant. Now, it was a nursing home. Farmer parked up at the front of the house alongside a raft of other motors and went up the steps and through a big arched doorway. He walked across what seemed like acres of swirly patterned carpet in shades of red, green and orange to where a sixtyish nurse with bushy dried-to-fuck blonde hair in a navy-blue uniform was seated behind a reception desk tucked in at the base of a huge oak staircase. The lighting in here was dim, the air tainted with overcooked cabbage and Deep Heat.