Around eleven, Tony suggested he would head on home. He stood in the doorway, his coat over his arm.

‘Thanks for a good day,’ Karen said. ‘I’m glad things worked out.’

‘Me too,’ Tony said. ‘I feel like a proper grown-up now, dealing with an argument without throwing the head and walking away.’

Karen laughed lightly and standing on tiptoe, kissed him.

‘You can stay, if you like,’ she murmured, as he closed the door again and moved back into the hallway and into her room. They pulled the clothes off each other, not even bothering to turn on the light.

He lay on his back on her bed, the street lights from the road beyond blinking through the thin fabric of her curtains as she straddled him, felt the warmth of her, heard the catch in her breath, her hands gripping his shoulders, a faint blush rising along her throat and for the first time since he’d arrived in the country, he felt like he was home.

Chapter Twenty-Six

‘So where is home for you, Richard?’ Karen asked Barr. ‘Derry or Galway?’

‘Derry, completely,’ Barr said.

‘Not Galway, with your mum?’

Barr shook his head. ‘No. Galway’s nice and all, but you can’t beat Derry.’

‘It feels like a city that’s in the act of rediscovering itself, these past few years,’ Tony said. ‘Like it’s taken a lot of the stuff that happened to it and tried to find value in it.’

‘In what way?’ Karen asked.

‘I don’t know. Things like using the river to bring the city together rather than splitting it up. I see things now that, when I was young, I hated, but they seem to have changed.

‘Do you think if you’d lived through all the events it survived, you would feel the same way you do now, about the cause?’ Tony asked.

‘I’ll never know. But I think so. We get shaped in the crucibles of fire, Uncle Sean says.’

Duggan glanced across at the youth with barely disguised disdain, while Karen smiled lightly at the absurdity of the image.

‘Do you like working for him?’ Tony asked.

‘It’s great. You feel like you’re making a difference, you know. Doing things that matter.’

‘He has a knack for that, does Sean,’ Duggan said, clearly still seething.

‘What?’ Barr asked tersely.

‘Making kids feel important.’

‘I’m not a kid.’

‘You are to me, son. And I was younger than you the first time your uncle sent me out to do a job. He was one of ours who joined the cops. Your uncle wanted me to pop him. That’s how he put it, like it was nothing. Not shoot, not kill – pop, like a balloon at a party.’

‘Did you?’ Karen asked.

Duggan nodded. ‘He was coming out of the Rialto with his girl. We’d got word he was there, at The Shootist of all things. Him and her comes out, with the rest of the crowd and starts walking down the Strand towards their car. I was hiding up on the walls opposite the picture house. When he started walking, I comes out and across the street, behind him. I’d a parka on, the hood zipped up around my face so I couldn’t see properly, and my own breathing loud as anything inside the hood. I’d my piece in my coat pocket and a pair of gloves on. Just as I went to pull it out, he turned and looked at me. And he knew. I could see his eyes, he knew what was coming, as if he’d been waiting for it all along. He wasn’t surprised or hurt. It was like he was disappointed, like he’d thought maybe he’d have been given a pass on it.’