As she drove back to Cobh, with reflections glittering in the darkness from the River Lee, she felt a wave of loneliness. She could picture the January evening when she had met Garrett in the bar of the Hayfield Manor hotel as if it were only a week ago, instead of years – the evening she had given him the claddagh band.

He had twisted it on to the third finger of his right hand, and kissed her, and said, ‘I promise you this, Katie. I’ll still be wearing this the day I die.’

22

They huddled together at the far end of the laboratory, keeping their voices down so that nobody could overhear them. Beside them, the sun was shining on the shelves that were stacked with glass bottles of propylene glycol and sorbitol solution and sodium citrate and all the other inactive ingredients that go into medicinal syrups and pills and pessaries.

Only three other students had arrived so far and they were too preoccupied with prodding at their smartphones to take any notice of them, and Dr Griffin had yet to appear to start them off on their morning’s pharmacy project.

There were only four of them now: Eoin Keating, Cormac O’Driscoll, Kevin Moynihan and Lorraine Byrne. Lorraine was wearing a black armband but Eoin told her to take it off.

‘It’s to show that I’m in mourning for Tadhg,’ she protested. Lorraine had dark brown undulating hair and she was quite pretty in a plump, pouting, droopy-eyed way, although her wide hips made it difficult for her to fasten the bottom two buttons of her lab coat.

‘I know that, Lorraine,’ said Eoin. He was short and round-shouldered, with a snub nose and tightly curled hair, so blond that it was almost white, like unwashed lambswool. ‘But somebody’s going to wonder why you’re wearing it and we don’t want them to find out that any of us were friends with him. Otherwise they’ll start to suspect that the High Five is us. Not that we can call ourselves that any more.’

‘But what do we say if the guards come around asking questions?’ put in Cormac. He was tall and skinny and mournful and he always swayed from side to side when he talked, like a poplar tree in the wind.

‘We act mongo sap, like we never knew what Tadhg was up to.’

‘Don’t be an eejit,’ said Kevin. He was the oldest of them, bull-necked and bearded, with a prickly black crew cut, and he already held a BPharm degree. ‘They know that there was five of us. It was all over the news, for God’s sake.’

‘Still and all, if we say nothing—’