‘I’ve no further comment to make to you at this stage, Mr Dineen. I’ll be holding another media conference later today to give you the names of all the victims of this appalling atrocity, once their next of kin have all been informed. If we’ve made any progress with our investigation, I’ll be able to give you an update on that, too. I want to conclude by offering our heartfelt condolences to the families and friends of those deceased, and our prayers for the survival and rapid recovery of those injured. That’s all.’

‘Do you reckon it was the High Five they were after?’ shouted Owen Dineen. ‘They’ve gutted one of them, after all, so maybe they were going for the rest. Could you not have found a way to warn those daft young eejits that their lives were in imminent danger?’

Katie lifted her hand to show that she wasn’t going to say any more, despite the clamour of questions from the other reporters. She turned around and crossed back over the road with her heart beating hard. She was even angrier than she had been before.

Detective Sergeant Begley said, ‘What’s wrong with that fellow, eating the head off you like that? You’d think that you’d spat in his drink or something.’

‘You know what really makes me mad? He’s probably bang on, and it was one of the gangs that did it. You say the Riordans. I reckon the O’Flynns.’

‘What’s the plan now, then?’

‘I’ve already asked Sergeant Murphy to start combing through the CCTV footage. We can question any students here who knew the deceased and see if we can find out for certain if they were this High Five. We can ask around the clubs, too, when they open up tonight. And we can only hope that Bill Phinner can identify whoever put that bomb together. If we can find the bomb-maker, we can find out who paid him to make it. I might even talk to Frank Magorian and see if he’ll agree to us offering a reward for any information that leads to a conviction.’

She looked back at the reporters, some of them returning to their cars, others talking on their phones with one finger stuck in their ears.

‘They don’t get it, do they? They don’t understand that it’s almost impossible to get people to come forward with evidence when they’re ten times more afraid of the gangs than they are of the law.’

‘It depends what you offer them,’ said Detective Sergeant Begley. ‘Years ago, when I was the only guard on patrol up in Castletownroche, some gouger was stealing sheep and I couldn’t find anybody to grass on them till I offered a year’s free scoops at the RockForest Bar. I was able to haul him in the very next day.’