‘You don’t have to answer, Doireann,’ said Sionha. ‘You’re entitled to say nothing at all. In fact, my advice to you is to hold your peace.’

The interview room was silent for almost three minutes while Doireann studied the list of people she was charged with drowning. At length, she laid the sheet of paper flat on the table and tapped one of the names hard with her finger.

‘I never drowned seven of them. Only six. This one I never.’

‘Which one, Doireann?’

‘This one here. This what’s-her-name.’ She leaned forward to see the name more clearly. ‘This Roisin Carroll. It says here that I pushed her into the river off The Marina at a quarter to five on the Tuesday. Well, I never did.’

‘An eyewitness saw you. He not only saw you, he jumped into the river and saved Roisin Carroll’s young wain from drowning.’

‘He couldn’t have seen me because I wasn’t there. I was back in my room on St Nessan Street because I had the cramps. I didn’t go out all day. You can ask Mrs Haggerty, she’ll tell you.’

‘Very well, we will. But let’s put Roisin Carroll aside for a moment and ask you about the others. Are you admitting that you deliberately drowned all of them?’

Sionha shook her head so vigorously that her glasses almost dropped off. ‘Now, you don’t have to admit to anything, Doireann. It’s up to them to prove to the satisfaction of a judge and jury that it was you.’

‘But they deserved it. Can’t I say that?’

‘You can, sure,’ said Detective O’Donovan. ‘But maybe you can explain to us why they deserved it. They’d upset you in some way, but how?’

Doireann sat up straight and banged both her fists on the table. ‘Of course they’d upset me! There they were, strolling beside the river, the very picture of happy! And when the feck have I ever been happy? Not once! Not once for one minute for the whole of my life! Not once for one second, from the moment the midwife lifted me out my dead mother’s womb until today! Upset me? Are you codding me? Upset me?’

Now Doireann was almost screaming, and banging the table again and again to emphasize every word. ‘They might just as well have been throwing peanuts and biscuits at me, and laughing, and dancing around me like the girls did at school, saying that I was the last surviving maypole in Ireland! And you’re asking me what they’d done to deserve it?’

She sat back again, her flat chest rising and falling under her jumper. Sionha laid her hand on her arm to calm her down.

Very gently, Detective O’Donovan said, ‘Did you know any of them personally – these people you pushed?’