‘No, true as I’m stood here, boy. He offered me a gram for sixty yoyos, then said he’d go down to forty.’

‘Did ye reck him?’ asked Doran O’Flynn. He was pale and chiselled and even more skeletal in appearance than his younger brother, and his hair was whiter and finer and more flyaway. His left eye was blind and milky, and there was a deep scar underneath it where he had been slashed, twenty years ago, in Portlaoise. ‘Was he one of Riordan’s scummers?’

‘He was nobody that I knew, Doran. I reckon he was one of those young bowsies we’ve been seeing around lately. I lamped a bunch of them outside Havana Brown’s last week and they was definitely selling. They wasn’t Riordans and they wasn’t any of them Romanians, neither. Like I say, they was only young bowsies, I haven’t a baldy where from.’

‘They’re not this High Five mob I’ve been hearing about?’ asked Thomas. ‘Like they’re college students who’ve been getting together to sell Special K and Skippy and G. They’ve been cooking it up themselves in their chemistry lab and dealing it in the discos to help them pay their way through the university.’

‘If that’s true, I’d say that was fierce ill-advised of them,’ said Doran, in his raspy, hollow voice. He almost sounded as if he were speaking from beyond the grave. ‘Don’t they understand whose toes they’re treading on? You need to be pulling the plug on that one, Tommy, and sooner rather than later.’

‘They’re not hurting your business that much, are they, Tommy?’ asked Muireann. This evening she was wearing a shiny emerald-green dress cut so low in the front that it showed the tattoo of a moth, deep down in her cleavage. ‘They’re only a few students trying to make a bit of grade so that they can get themselves a good education. You don’t begrudge them that, do you, surely? You know, live and let live, like.’

‘Don’t you be deludifying yourself, girl,’ said Doran. ‘They may be starting off full of shining bright intentions, but you wait until they cop on how much grade they’re pulling in for how little effort and how little outlay. They’re university students, and that means they’re not thick. They’ll soon forget all about their fancy degrees, you mark my words, and they’ll be on the lang from their classes and setting themselves up as full-time dealers.’