‘I still dream of what happened to him,’ Barr said. ‘Since I was a kid, I dream I’m standing there, holding on to whatever they made him hold, whatever stress position they put him into. I wake and my muscles are numb with it.’

Tony nodded. He didn’t admit that he sometimes dreamt of Danny, dreamt that he’d gone down to meet him and had stopped him at the corner, before he’d stepped out into the path of the car. Or that he dreamt more often of Alice. In those dreams she was still a child, standing in an empty building. Tony released that the building was crumbling around her and he needed to find his way inside, to reach her, to save her. Sometimes he did and woke with a sense of warmth, as if his sleep had refreshed him. Other times, just as he reached her, the building would collapse around them and he’d wake, frequently with a migraine aura flickering around the edges of his field of vision, and find it impossible to easily dispel his grief at her imagined passing.

‘So, yeah, I think there is a point. I think on some level what happened to him was passed to me, like it hadn’t been resolved, hadn’t been dealt with. I don’t think he’ll ever be a rest until the job’s done. It’s like that O’Donovan Rossa line; he’ll never be at peace.’

Tony walked alongside the youth, but did not speak. If he was honest, Barr’s conviction frightened him. He’d assumed that most people had moved on with the relative peace, had acclimatized to the changed circumstances. He knew some communities still relied on the paramilitaries as a police force, often used them to help discipline their own children, but he’d always thought such people were the exception.

He’d taught one such child, a year or two before Ann’s illness drove him to early retirement. The boy’s name was Brandon. He’d been involved in anti-social behaviour, breaking windows, a little joyriding. When he’d progressed onto dealing drugs in school, the principal had called in his mother. She’d sat in the office and decried her powerlessness to deal with the boy. When the principal had suggested getting the police involved, she’d launched into a diatribe about traitors and instead promised that she would deal with it once and for all. That evening, the boy got a message to present himself the following day at 3pm to an alleyway in the city, to be shot. If he came peacefully, they’d only do one leg; if they had to come looking for him, he’d be shot in both.