‘No more than twenty minutes, this time of night. I have to take my dogs out for their last hurrah when I get back, although they can’t expect anything more than a short high-speed hod when it’s bucketing like this.’

‘We had a dog, when I was a boy. You’ll never guess what we called him.’

Katie looked up at him. His height and his masculinity made her feel physically protected, but he was so relaxed and so amiable, and that was why she found him attractive – that, and his understanding that all she needed so soon after losing Conor was support, and friendship, and somebody with whom she could occasionally become tearful.

‘So what did you call him, this dog?’ she asked him – but before he could answer she saw two men crossing the street towards them from the entrance to Dan Lowrey’s pub, directly opposite.

It was the quick, jerky way that these two men were walking that caught her attention. Both wore black nylon puffer jackets and baseball caps. One had spectacles and the other had wraparound sunglasses, and both had scarves covering the lower half of their faces. When they were halfway across the road, she saw that the one with spectacles was pulling something out of his pocket.

‘Kieran!’ she screamed, and she kicked at the back of his legs with an ashi barai foot sweep. He fell heavily backwards on to the cobbles underneath the arch and Katie dropped on top of him to make sure that he didn’t lift his head. As they fell, she heard two sharp cracks, and the framed Greenes’ menu on the wall beside them was shattered, showering them with sharp fragments of glass.

She heard one more crack, and a man shouting, followed almost immediately by the slithering sound of a car pulling up. The car’s doors were slammed, and then it roared away. It must have driven through a red light at the junction with Summerhill because she heard an angry barrage of horns blowing.

She looked up cautiously, and then sat up. Kieran sat up, too, rubbing the back of his head where it had knocked against the cobbles. Two of the waitresses came out of Greenes, followed by the manager, and several passers-by came across the street to see if they had been hurt.

‘Are you all right?’ Katie asked Kieran.

Kieran brushed bits of glass from the front of his coat. ‘I think so. Jesus – those fellows were trying to kill us, weren’t they?’

They both climbed awkwardly on to their feet. A young man came up to them and said, ‘I seen it all, like. That feen was only shooting at you. You was dead lucky you fell over like that, or else you could have been dead, like.’