‘I thought it was yours,’ Tony said.

Duggan looked at him askance. ‘Why would I? It must have been her. I knew she’d go soft.’

Tony followed Barr around to the back of the car to put his own bag away. He had to shift Duggan’s a little to make space for his own. When he closed the rear door, he saw that Duggan had already taken his seat in the front, though he’d not noticed the car shift with the man’s weight as it now did when Barr climbed into the driver’s seat and started the engine again.

Tony took the back seat. He was glad in a way. He could tune out of the murmured conversation happening in front of him. It also meant that Karen would be sitting beside him, in the back. He reached across, brushed a few crumbs of dirt off the seat.

Barr was filling the silence with chatter. ‘My da talked about you all the time,’ he said. ‘You and him did time together.’

‘He was a good fella,’ Duggan muttered. ‘God rest him.’

Barr laughed, seemingly having not heard the prayer offered for his dead father. ‘He told me this one time that the screws were bringing you across the courtyard because they thought you were passing messages through the wings and you took the piss out of them, pretending to hide things, and this screw was running from one side of the yard to the other, having to check every fucking hole in the walls. He said they even had to go down the drains, cause you pretended to drop something.’

His face lit up at this shared memory he had not even witnessed. A prison yard joke, passed between the generations, now mythologized.

‘What–’ Tony began, about to ask why Hugh had served time, but the question was pointless and he realised he did not care to hear the answer. He could guess; the specifics would change nothing.

‘Do you remember that?’ Barr asked, smiling open-mouthed across at his passenger.

‘Do you mind just driving the fucking car,’ Duggan said. ‘What’s that saying? The past’s another country? Well, that’s another country.’

The smile faltered a little on Barr’s lips, as he processed the man’s response. Somehow, he found a way to rationalise it to his own satisfaction, for he nodded earnestly and turned his attention to the road.

Chapter Five

The glare of the fluorescent light in the holding cell, buzzing behind a protective mesh cage, coupled with the heat of the room, had left Tony’s eyes dry and reddened. He was aware of Hugh Duggan, the man with whom he was sharing the cell, studying him and wondered if he thought he’d been crying.

‘That fucking light,’ he said.

‘They do it deliberately,’ Duggan said. ‘And it’s either far too hot or far too cold. They don’t want you getting comfortable.’

When they’d first arrived and were being processed, they’d had their cheeks and hands swabbed, prints taken and Tony’s had been offered a Tyvek suit to wear in the cell. Tony had watched the insouciance with which Duggan had dealt with each element, the familiarity with which he opened his mouth for the cotton swab, didn’t gag when they pushed it too close to the back of his throat. He’d clearly been through it all before.