And, more than that, he wondered if she turned to someone next to her in that bed and lied about what had disturbed her dreams. Or had she found someone to whom she could tell the truth? Or was her bed cold and wide and lonely, as his was now. As cold and lonely as Martin Kelly, where he lay beneath the earth.

Chapter Three

The earth clattering across his brother’s coffin heralded a scream of agony from his father such as he had never heard before. The man, tall, solidly built, proud, seemed to crumple, as if the wail had taken something of substance with it as it left him. Tony gripped his arm, tried to hold him upright, while the priest looked at him with a mixture of pity and embarrassment and his mother began sobbing once more into the clump of damp tissues she gripped.

Tony felt the shuddering of his father next to him and wondered at his own detachment. He felt a quiet guilt that he wasn’t weeping too, wondered what the absence of emotions said about him.

To his rear, two of the group of men who had walked behind them up through the cemetery in a loose formation moved forward. ‘It’s all right, son,’ one of them said. ‘We’ve got him.’

His father recoiled at their touch, his hand scrabbling for Tony’s to help him stand again. The men, seeming to understand, stepped back, respectful, heads bowed.

After the burial, the men, dressed uniformly in white, open-necked shirts and black trousers, spoke in soft earnest terms to his mother, passed his father with a nod and a grimace of shared loss but offered their hands to Tony to shake. The last one to pass him, one of those who had moved forward to help his father, cupped Tony’s shoulder in one hand as he shook the other, his grip firm and warm.

‘Sorry for your loss, son,’ he said. He was small, heavy-set, brown-haired, with a thick moustache. He spoke with a slight stutter, as if his breath caught with every few words.

‘Thank you,’ Tony said. ‘Thanks for your help there.’

‘Your father’s still raw,’ the man said. ‘Anything we can do to help, just let me know. Anything at all.’

Tony nodded, uncertain who the man was. He’d been at university in Belfast for the past few years, had lost track of his parents’ neighbours and friends.

‘They’ll not get away with what they did to your Danny,’ the man said, his gaze level and unyielding.

Tony nodded once more, muttered agreement, not entirely sure what else he was meant to say. He did, at least, know who ‘they’ were.

His brother, Danny, two years his junior, had been walking home from watching a football match in the Brandywell. The evening was cold, so he’d had his Derry City scarf pulled up over his nose and mouth. He’d cut up through the alleyways and out onto Bligh’s Lane when an army Land Rover, racing away from a riot happening at the top of the lane, had careened down towards him. A petrol bomb had caught the wire mesh on the windscreen and the flames and smoke had, it was reported afterwards, made it almost impossible for the driver to see. He’d mounted the kerb just as Danny appeared, as if from nowhere, he claimed, and the boy went under the wheels.