When he answered, she said, ‘Robert? Have you heard about Billy Hagerty being hit? You have? And you’ve heard that one of the witnesses was your old pal Thomas O’Flynn? I know, unbelievable. You couldn’t make it up, like, could you? No. So how do you fancy a scoop with him, up at Eugene’s?’

Brendan waited for a few moments while Katie was talking to Detective Inspector Fitzpatrick, but then he quietly turned around and left her office, raising his hand as he walked out of the door like Lieutenant Columbo, as if to say, Do your worst, Katie – do your worst.

5

The rain clouds had cleared away now, but it was growing dark, so Roisin was pushing Ita’s go-car as fast as she could along the path beside the river. She hadn’t wanted to come out, but Ita had been sick twice, and had a temperature, and so she had taken her along to the Dundanion Medical Centre in Blackrock. The doctor had given Ita a dose of phenobarbitone and now she was sleeping.

Roisin felt exhausted. Ita had woken up five or six times in the night, crying, and she had been grizzling all day, but Roisin had still had to go to Buckley’s Dry Cleaners to pick up the latest bundle of dresses and jeans that she had to alter. When she had been expecting Ita, she had given up her job as a ground hostess for Ryanair. Now she survived on the money she made from sewing, her child benefit and her one-parent family payment.

She had celebrated her twenty-first birthday last week at the Pronto café, on her own. Her father and mother hadn’t spoken to her since she had told them that she was going to have a baby – neither had her two brothers. Her boyfriend, Colm, had disappeared without trace as soon as her pregnancy test had proved positive. She didn’t look twenty-one: more like sixteen. She was small and skinny with long dark-brown hair that was bundled up untidily under her beret. In her green woollen coat, she could have been a foundling or a schoolgirl on the hop.

She had almost reached Church Avenue when she saw old Peadar Ó Dálaigh walking towards her with his straggly white wheaten terrier, Póg. Peadar lived in the bungalow opposite hers in Sunnyside. His hair was as white and straggly as Póg’s, and he was wearing a crumpled raincoat with sloping shoulders that made him look as if he had been clumsily wrapped up in brown paper. He even had knotted sisal string for a belt.

He stopped and whistled to Póg to stop, too.

‘Roisin, how’re ye going on, girl? I don’t never normally see you out this time of the day.’

‘Ita’s been poorly, like, Peadar. I had to take her to the doctor.’