‘Tell – me – the – fecking – truth!’ Thomas screamed, slamming the door again and again on Eamonn’s head to emphasize every word. The third slam brought a sharp cracking noise, and the four slams that followed it a crunching sound, and when at last Thomas flung the door wide open in disgust and stepped away, he could see that he had smashed Eamonn’s skull. His face was no longer round but a lopsided ellipse and blood was streaming out of his nostrils. His right eye was closed but his left eye had burst out of its socket and was staring at his cheek, as if in surprise.

Milo and Darragh and the other two men dropped Eamonn on to the wet pavement.

‘It could be that he was telling the truth, like, Tommy, and that it wasn’t him that did it,’ Darragh suggested, in a cautious tone of voice. He had seen Thomas mete out his car door punishment once before, in the week before Christmas. His victim that time had suffered permanent brain damage, even though it had turned out that his punishment had been completely unjustified. Once Thomas lost his temper, justification went out of the window. It was justification enough that his victim had riled him by not doing exactly what Thomas had told him to do.

‘Of course he fecking did it,’ Thomas snapped back. ‘And if he didn’t do it, he deserved what he got anyway. Two hundred and fifty yoyos I paid him to put the fear of God into Judge Quinn and did he? He did in my gonkapouch. Judge Quinn told him to go and stick his fear of God where the sun doesn’t shine. I mean, Jesus – I could have gone down to the courts myself and heard him tell me that for nothing.’

‘What are we going to do with him?’ asked Milo, cautiously prodding Eamonn’s lifeless shoulder with his shoe. ‘Sling him in the river, like?’

‘There’s just one thing I have to do first,’ said Thomas. Still sniffing and twitching with temper, he went back to the front door of Eamonn O’Malley’s house and knocked at it with his knuckles. After a few moments the kitchen door at the end of the hallway was opened just a crack and the woman stared out like a terrified squirrel.

‘Come here to me, love!’ Thomas called out to her. ‘Eamonn’s off away to see his sister in Waterford and it’s likely that he won’t be back for a while. And when I say a while, I mean a fierce long while. Like, for ever.’

‘What have you done to him? You haven’t hurt him at all, have you?’