One change he had noticed was how some thoughts and feelings had intensified. If he’d already been questioning his place in the force, those questions had become louder. He’d accepted that detective inspector was as high as he would rise. Sharon said he was too clean to reach the top, and while he’d like to believe that was true, it wasn’t the full story. In his experience, most people saw themselves in a way that would surprise others. He was different. He knew that friends and colleagues considered him dogged, diligent, enthusiastic – but lacking in flair. He agreed. Oh, he could ham it up for guys like Warren Burke. He was a solid interrogator. The problem was, he lacked panache. He was missing the extra layer of guile that separated the regular detectives from the top tier. He was short on diplomacy too. When others were brown-nosing at retirement parties, he was with Sharon.

Once, he would have sneered at this defeatist attitude. Now, he saw the mid-forties as a cut-off point: if you weren’t sprinkled in stardust by then, it wasn’t going to happen.

Something else was pulling at Conor’s thoughts. The death of Father Galvin was on the internet now. It popped up on lists like ‘Eight Unsolved Irish Murders’ and ‘Ten Murders that Defined the 1980s’ (with the passage of time, any nuance had been lost, and the crime was invariably referred to as murder). Every once in a while, the story was revisited on TV. It featured on an archive show about 1982, a year of two general elections, the Falklands War and the death of Princess Grace of Monaco. As snow tumbled down around him, Conor’s father, looking scarily young, appealed for witnesses. The section on Kilmitten was at one with the rest of the programme. The Ireland of 1982 was thin, troubled and shrouded in a fog of cigarette smoke.

Officially the Leo Galvin case was unsolved, but if you asked anybody within a twenty-mile radius of Kilmitten, they would blame Noel O’Grady. Move slightly further afield and, while people mightn’t have a name, they would probably say, ‘Wasn’t it a politician’s brother who did that?’

To use a modern-day phrase, the accepted narrative was this: Noel O’Grady owed money to Leo Galvin. On the morning of the party, they were seen having an argument. That night, Noel O’Grady got drunk and, during another row, he hit the priest, causing him to lose his footing and bang his head. O’Grady then returned to the party, leaving Cora Crossan to find the body.