Mullan inclined his head. ‘He’d never have come without you. We wanted Kelly back; Hugh wanted to get answers on what happened back then. He couldn’t get those unless all of you were here.’

‘You used us?’ Tony said. ‘Again.’

‘You’re never out,’ Mullan joked, mirthlessly.

‘So, what now?’ Karen asked, daubing her eyes with her sleeve. ‘What happens to us?’

Mullan considered the question. Behind him, his hands clasped before him, stood Barr, waiting, like a well-trained dog.

‘What about you?’

‘I have kids. A husband. What we did happened thirty years ago, no one got hurt.’

‘Martin Kelly would disagree,’ Mullan said. ‘As would his family.’

‘Martin Kelly sold drugs to children,’ Karen said. ‘He sold stuff that caused a kid to overdose. He gave me a date-rape drug as a joke. Martin wasn’t innocent. What we did was wrong, and we’ve all had to deal with that in our own ways, but, Jesus, we were only kids ourselves, Sean.’

She looked wildly round at Tony, who still sat on the woodland floor, pleading with him to say something. But he was too tired to argue for himself.

‘Karen did nothing wrong,’ he managed. ‘If someone needs to be held accountable, it should be me. I went to the cop, Hamilton. I warned him what was planned. I took cold feet. And I should have spoken when Martin was brought here. I was a coward, from first to last. Karen just did what she thought was the right thing, for me. But ultimately, I did this. I was wrong.’

He sat for a second, lost in thought, picked up a stone that lay beside him and tossed it into the undergrowth. ‘My father warned me why I shouldn’t have looked for revenge for Danny. He told me it would spiral, a perpetual reciprocity of grief. He was right.’

He struggled to his feet, using the tree behind him for support. ‘I’ve no family, no one left to cry for me. So if someone needs to pay for what happened, it should be me. There would be no more grief.’

He looked at Karen and, for a moment, was pained to see tears rise in her eyes for him. But she had a husband, kids, a life to go back to that did not, and would not, include him.

Mullan nodded. ‘Someone needed to pay for the cop, Hamilton, getting away. Martin Kelly did that. Someone needed to pay for Martin Kelly; Hugh has done that. The way I see it, the sheet looks balanced. It’s all about optics, right?’

He looked over his shoulder at Barr who shrugged and nodded.

‘Now, I’ve to go back to Glasgow. Richard is coming with me. We can leave you in Glasgow.’

‘I want to go home,’ Tony said.