‘Oh, cop on to yourself, will you? Tadhg wouldn’t have been after calling himself the High Five if there was only one of him, would he? And now that they know who he was, and that he was studying here at the Cavanagh, they’re bound to put two and two together and realize that he was cooking his drugs up right here in this lab – and that he likely wasn’t doing it on his ownsome. Get serious, Eoin, you might think the guards are thick as bottled shite, but my brother Sean knows one of their detectives, and believe me, that fellow is the cutest hoor you could ever hope to meet. He’d know at once if you was wearing your grundies back to front, just because you was looking guzz-eyed.’

‘I still say we act schtum,’ said Eoin. ‘The cops can’t find any evidence here that we’ve been breaking the law, can they, because all the chemicals we’ve been using are one hundred per cent legit. And even if somebody grasses on us, like somebody we’ve been selling to, we only have to say that they’re spoofing, and it wasn’t us. If they was out looking to buy dope, the chances are that they were half-baked to begin with, so how they can swear on the Bible that it was one of us?’

‘I don’t think it’s the law we have to worry about the most,’ said Lorraine. ‘It’s whoever killed poor Tadhg. I can think of only one reason why he got himself stabbed, and that’s because somebody didn’t want him selling ket at the Zombie Lounge. I mean, that was something else they said on the news, wasn’t it, that the drugs gangs in Cork, they’re fierce territorial. I think we’ve been putting ourselves in much more danger than we know.’

‘Lorraine’s right, you know, Eoin,’ said Cormac. ‘We need to call it a day. If we don’t get ourselves lifted by the law we’re sure to get ourselves murdered by one of the mobs.’

‘Oh, come on,’ Eoin coaxed him. ‘I agree with you that we’ll have to be doggy wide for the next three or four weeks. But we’d have to be crazy to give it up altogether. You know how much grade we made last month – more than three thousand five hundred between us. And we’re already starting to build up regular customers. We could be millionaires by Christmas.’