‘I had the driver drop me off on Lover’s Walk, that’s why, so he wouldn’t know where I was going, and Mrs Quinn let me in by the side door so the neighbours wouldn’t clock me.’

‘But you didn’t tell her that you weren’t going to drive the judge’s car into the dock?’

‘I’m not thick, like. If I’d done that, I knew there’d be too much evidence left in his car once the guards had fished it out of the docks. I know what you lot can do these days. You would have found the dope in his body and my DNA on the door handles and fibres from my kecks and all that kind of shite. I mean, that’s why we always torch cars when we’re through with them.’

‘Pity you forgot about footprints,’ said Katie.

‘I had too much on my mind, like. It was a hell of a job dragging your man out of the passenger seat and sitting him down behind the wheel, because he was so fecking floppy. But as soon as I’d done that, this run-down pick-up truck came past, didn’t it, with this old knacker at the wheel. He even give me a wave and “how’re ye?” I’d seen him around a few times before, this old feller, and I think he knew me, too. So as soon as I’d lit up the second petrol tank and the Jag was well alight I went after him. I guessed that he was on his way back to the halting site at Water Lane.’

‘What was your intention when you went after him?’ asked Katie.

‘Feargal—’ said Sheenagh, but Feargal ignored her.

‘I don’t know. I suppose I was meaning to have a word with him, like, and tell him that he never saw me.’

‘And what if he’d said that he had seen you, and wasn’t going to deny it, if anybody asked him? Like the guards, for instance?’

‘It didn’t turn out that way.’

‘So how did it turn out?’

Feargal now began speaking in a monotone, as if he were describing a film that he had seen. ‘I turned on to the Ballyhooly Road by The Bridle and I saw his pick-up truck in the car park there. I was going to go into the pub myself and talk to him there, you know – maybe buy him a couple of gatts and tell him to catch a dose of amnesia. But then I saw that there was a two-bulb parked there, too, and he was standing outside, and a couple of guards were giving him down the banks by the look of it. I waited on the opposite side of the cross, by the petrol station, like, to see what was going to happen next.