She smiled, then ran back up the stairs to pack her things.

When he motioned to go towards the front door, Hamilton stopped him.

‘Go out the back and across the yards, in case anyone is watching.’

He lay in his bed that night, waiting for the knock on his own door, expecting that when Duggan reached the house and realised Hamilton had gone, he would immediately suspect that someone had talked, someone had alerted the cop to the threat. And, based on the past few days, Tony was the only logical person that might be. He’d at least expected a knee-jerk reaction of some sort, hushed calls between them telling him what had happened, or more correctly, what had not. Instead, there had been silence. No calls, no messages, no word from anyone else.

Had Duggan called that night, Tony was ready to confess, defiant almost in the certainty of his righteousness. By 4am he had convinced himself of the nobility of his sacrifice. By 6am, he was shuddering in the bed as he waited for the knock that did not come, his fear a palpable force, twisting his hands in the bedsheets, popping sweat on his skin despite the relative cold of the morning. He would confess, he still believed, but he feared the form Duggan’s retribution would take nevertheless.

He’d seen the pictures; bodies lying along the back alleys of Derry, stripped naked, their hands bound behind their backs, black plastic bags tied over their heads, the skin livid with bruising, the final shot, from behind the head, designed to destroy the face so that a wake with an open coffin would be impossible.

Or failing that, a body never returned, family members never really sure what had happened to their loved one, denied the final chapter of a burial, their story abandoned, unfinished.

Tony wondered whether he should call Karen, tell her what had happened, what he had done, but his anger both at what he had witnessed at the party and the paucity of her excuse for it was still raw. More importantly, he knew that in so doing, he would be putting her at risk, making her an accessory to his actions. Regardless of what had happened at the party, she did not deserve to suffer because of something he had done.

Then he began to panic. Maybe Duggan had gone ahead with setting the device and the police had been waiting for him. Maybe he’d been shot, lying in a puddle of blood in the driveway. Or worse, Tony thought, with some shame at his blatant self-interest, maybe he’d been captured, alive. Maybe he was being questioned, right now, giving up all their names and addresses, implicating them all. He sat up at the edge of the bed, scrolling through the channels on his radio alarm until he found a news report, waiting to hear of someone being arrested. But there was no such report.