‘Or what? Are you going to shoot me?’

‘I should have, thirty years ago.’

Tony stepped in front of Karen, blocking her from Hugh. ‘It should be me. I told Hamilton about our plot, told him to leave. Karen was just trying to look out for me.’

‘Don’t think I haven’t enough bullets for the pair of you,’ Duggan said. ‘And you, Sean. You took her word for it. You believed her.’

‘We were all there,’ Mullan said. ‘You heard him; he admitted they’d broken up. There was no reason to think she was protecting anyone, least of all the ex-boyfriend she’d cheated on.’

Tony shook her head. ‘Is that what those questions were about? Whether you could trust Karen?’

Mullan nodded. ‘Her cheating on you saved both your lives. Ironic really. If you’d still been together, we’d have had to investigate a lot more.’

‘We need to keep moving,’ Barr said, surprising them, apparently, with the control he took of the situation. Tony wondered whether it was fear; what might happen to him, after all, if Duggan did turn his gun on them all?

‘We’ll go when I say we’ll go,’ Duggan said. ‘Just keep your mouth shut, son.’

Barr nodded, his jaw tight. ‘We need you to find Kelly’s grave,’ he explained. ‘We can deal with all this when we’ve done that. Now, more than ever, his family deserve to recover his body, especially if he was innocent.’

‘He was never innocent,’ Karen said resignedly, standing. ‘He just wasn’t guilty of this.’

She began moving again, not looking to Duggan to see how he might react. Tony fell in alongside her, Mullan and Barr a few steps behind, Duggan to the rear.

‘I am sorry,’ he said. ‘You should have told me.’

Karen smiled, shook her head. ‘Seriously? I should have told you? Why didn’t you tell me?’

‘When?’

‘Back then.’

‘I couldn’t. I didn’t have a chance. I’d no time.’

‘We were in a cellar for two hours, waiting for them to finish questioning Kelly.’

‘Two hours?’ In his memory, it had seemed perhaps twenty minutes. ‘I… I wanted to. I actually was about to when Duggan came in and told us we had to go.’

‘And afterwards?’

‘Duggan was with us.’