Thomas O’Flynn was sitting on the left of the table and Barry Riordan was sitting on the right. Barry Riordan was holding a cigarette, although it had burned almost all the way down to the filter and left a caterpillar of grey ash on the tabletop, so he clearly hadn’t been smoking it.

Standing behind Barry was Megan, still with a plaster across the bridge of her nose. Close behind Thomas was Muireann, all dressed in black – black roll-neck sweater and black jeans and boots. Both of them were holding Glock automatics, pointed at the heads of their respective partners.

Muireann glanced quickly at Katie, but neither she nor Megan lowered their pistols. The muzzles were less than seven centimetres away from the back of the men’s heads. Thomas and Barry were staring at each other and Katie had never seen expressions like theirs on anybody’s faces before. It was an extraordinary mixture of fatalism and contempt.

‘Muireann, Megan, come on now… put the guns down,’ Katie coaxed them.

Muireann vigorously shook her head. ‘There’s no way, Kathleen. No way at all. This is what I’ve been building up to for months. If I’d been able to lay my hands on a gun sooner I would have done it sooner, believe me. You know why I got myself involved with this bastard… why I put up with his putrid smell and the disgusting taste of him and let him have his way with me when he wasn’t so polluted that he couldn’t stand up, let alone get his langer up.’

There were tears in her eyes but she continued to speak firmly and angrily. ‘God alone knows what my poor young sister Bryanna saw in him when she first met him. Whatever it was, it wasn’t enough to make her stay with him long. She tried to get away from him but he dragged her back and got her addicted to the crack so that she’d never leave him again. And within three months she was dead of an overdose.’

‘That was her own stupid fault,’ put in Thomas. ‘I wasn’t even home at the time. You can’t fecking blame me for it.’

‘What do you mean, you toad? Who got her on to the stuff in the first place?’

‘It was her that wanted to try it out, like, and you can’t say that she wasn’t old enough to make up her own mind. So curiosity killed the fecking cat. But don’t you go pointing the finger at me.’

‘Holy Mary, Tommy,’ said Muireann. ‘This world is going to be a far better place to live in once you’re gone. I thank Megan here for fetching me this gun because I’m going to have sweet dreams for the rest of my life about blowing your head off.’

‘Muireann—’ said Katie.