After almost half a minute, Katie said, ‘Billy was born a girl, Donal. To begin with, she was your sister. Don’t tell me the nuns called her Billy when she was a girl.’

Donal still didn’t answer, but Katie could see that his lips were tightly pursed and his scrawny Adam’s apple was rising up and down, and suddenly two large teardrops rolled down his cheeks and dripped off his chin.

At last he managed to say, ‘I’ve lost her not only the once. I’ve lost her twice.’

Katie waited, because she could tell that he desperately needed to explain what he meant. He might never have said this to anybody else before, but now that Billy was dead, it had to come out. He couldn’t keep it bottled up inside him for the rest of his life, especially now that he was probably going to be locked up in prison for more than a decade.

‘The nuns – the nuns they called her Neala,’ he whispered. ‘She was my little sister. I always took care of her because nobody else did. I even used to change her if she wet herself, like, and what was I, five years old? I loved her. I loved her to death.’

He wiped his eyes with his sleeve, and gave a rueful smile, still looking down at the tabletop as if he could see a model of his life with Neala being played out on it, in miniature.

‘She was always a round little thing, even when we didn’t have much to eat. The other kids used to tease her and call her “Balloony”. She used to fight them back, though. She was always having a scatter with them and it didn’t take long before they learned to treat her with respect. I mean, holy Jesus, she was tougher than me. I loved her. But I lost her. And now I’ve lost her again.’

‘How old was she when she realized that she wanted to change?’ asked Katie.

Donal sniffed and pulled a face. ‘I think she always knew it, right from the very beginning. That was why she always called herself Billy. But she’d only just started at the Mercy College in Sligo when she told me that she didn’t feel right there. She talked to one of her teachers but the teacher said it was only a kind of a phase she was going through, like, and she’d soon get over it. After that she tried so hard to be a woman, I’ll tell you. She growed her hair long and she painted her nails and she started jagging with boys. But, you know. Inside her head she still felt like a feller.’

‘So when did she decide to go for the operation?’