That day he’d contemplated pretending he was sick. He’d phone the bar, leave a message for whomever, say that he’d food poisoning, say he’d come the next day. But he realised it would make no difference. They’d suspect him straight away, would come to his flat and forcibly remove him. If he was going to claim innocence, he had to look innocent.

Shauna Laird briefly came to his mind, and with her, Macbeth: ‘to beguile the time, look like the time…’ He’d not heard about her funeral arrangements yet, and he realized, with a sudden stab of fear, that his funeral might well come before hers. Unless he denied everything. What could they do to him then?

In fact, if the bar was busy with people about who would see him coming in, meeting this man who had called, there would be witnesses. What, indeed, could they do to him?

But he knew what they could do, which is why, by the time he reached Betty’s that morning, having had to phone in sick to school, he’d already had to stop twice to vomit through sheer terror, his pulse drumming in his ears and his limbs humming with the constant drip feed of adrenaline running through his system.

He paused outside Betty’s, taking a breath, wondering whether he should turn and walk away, but the door opened and Duggan stood inside, holding it ajar for him, Hades at the entrance to his kingdom.

‘Come in, Tony,’ he said grimly. ‘We’re through here.’

The bar was empty, the shutters pulled.

‘Betty’s not well,’ Duggan explained. ‘She’s closed up for the day. A family thing.’

Tony nodded, tried to control his shivering, tightened his jaw a little. The empty bar wasn’t a good sign.

Duggan led him through the bar into a back room, a lounge he’d not seen before, smaller than the main area; the type of place to be used by families looking to offer soup and sandwiches after a funeral, perhaps. That thought brought him no comfort.

Three seats sat behind a table at one end of the room, a single chair sat in the middle of the room in front of the table. The room was dimly lit, so Tony had to squint a little to see the two men sitting behind the table: he recognised one as Sean Mullan, didn’t know the second. Duggan moved forward and took the third seat.

‘Sit down, Tony,’ Mullan said.

Tony shuffled slowly forward towards the seat that Mullan had indicated. Only in doing so did he hear the dull crinkle of the plastic sheeting as he stood on it. He looked down, dumbly, to see that a square of builder’s plastic, twelve feet or side each side, had been set on the floor, the chair at its centre.

‘Jesus Christ,’ he muttered, backing away, the bile rising raw in his throat once more.