Owen swallowed some more Wicklow Wolf, and nodded. ‘You wouldn’t have thought it, looking at him when he was Billy, but he was not bad-looking when he was a girl. He showed me photographs of him and Barry together and there’s even one of Barry shifting her. I mean, she wasn’t a beour by any stretch of the human imagination, and she was on the chubby side, but I’ve seen a lot worse struggling to try on a size twenty-two sweater in Penneys.’

‘But what do you think Barry’s motive was, for having Billy shot?’

‘I reckon it was my story… or rather my story that never was. Barry knew that after Neala had become Billy, he started to hang around with Tommy O’Flynn and his boys, but that had never seemed to bother him. Somehow, though, he found out that Billy had been talking to me, and that I was planning to write a story about their time together as lovers, and I’m sure that did it.’

‘Do you know how he found out?’

Owen shrugged. ‘It could be that one of his gang had seen us together, although we’d been careful only to meet in pubs where we knew that the Riordans never drank, like An Fear Dubh up at Ballincrokig. But Billy had taken all of their photos into Budget Print in Washington Street to be copied, and it could be that one of the staff recognized Barry in the pictures and tipped him off. Who knows?

‘As it was, Billy was warned off by one of Barry’s gang – as he says in my interview – and the day after that interview I had a phone call myself at about two o’clock in the morning. It was some Norrie telling me in no uncertain terms that if I wrote a story for the Sun about Barry’s former lover turning herself into a man, that would be the last story that I ever wrote. Barry Riordan the hard gang leader was not going to be the butt of every transgender joke that ever was.’

Katie said, ‘That makes sense. I’ve only run into Barry Riordan once or twice, and he’s always struck me as prickly, and extra-prickly with women.’