He had this strong gut feeling: she’d lied. And another: she did know Donny Maguire. Logic was his stock-in-trade, but he was starting to get all sorts of ideas, and some of them were pretty wild. He was thinking of Poulter in the pub, laughing at him. Donny’s old mate. In fact, it seemed all Donny’s mates, all those creepy old bastards with the right sort of handshake, believed that Donny was abroad and living it large – which had led to the beating that Farmer had taken in the street, to deter him from pursuing this further. They didn’t want Donny’s peace disturbed.

But what if he didn’t have any peace?

Or . . . peace of an entirely different nature?

Peace that involved being dead and six feet under – not sunning himself on a beach with some hot totty to keep him company?

He knew he ought to drop it. That upstairs would go mental if they knew he was doing this. But . . . the truth was, it fascinated him, and Angel O’Brien fascinated him too.

‘Fuck it,’ he muttered when the phone rang.

He snatched it up.

‘Got a Mrs Fiona Maguire for you,’ said the switch.

‘Put her through,’ he said, and a moment later Donny Maguire’s wife was on the line.

Maybe his widow, thought Farmer before he said: ‘Mrs Maguire? What can I do for you?’

‘Did you speak to her? To the woman?’ asked Fiona.

‘I did.’

‘And?’

‘She denied knowing your husband.’

‘Then she’s lying! And there was something else I had to tell you.’

‘Go on, Mrs Maguire.’

‘You know I told you about Donny’s mother and brother committing suicide? That all came about because of a woman called Dora O’Brien. She said something to one of the gangsters she hung about with, something about Donny’s younger brother Wills.’

‘Like what?’ Farmer was taking notes.

‘That he was pestering her. Bothering her. Trying to chat her up, you know? Anyway, these people set upon him. Broke both his legs so badly that he would never have been able to walk again. Poor Wills killed himself. The O’Briens’ house was in the same road as the Maguires, a couple of doors down from where Donny’s parents lived. I’ll give you the Maguires’ address . . .’

She reeled it off. While she did so, Farmer glanced at his notebook. He had the next-door-but-one house already written down. The O’Brien family home. The one Angel O’Brien had hurried off to, as if anxious to avoid any further questions.

Into his brain floated Michael and Sam Jackson, in their hot little flat.

‘A middle-aged blonde, and a young blonde honey, she was arguing with Maguire one night out in the road.’

The young blonde had to be Angel O’Brien.

When Fiona rang off, Farmer sat and stared at the notepad on his desk. Dora O’Brien. Who had been instrumental in getting Wills Maguire’s legs busted and his subsequent suicide, and in Donny Maguire’s mother taking her own life in despair at what had happened to her youngest son.