‘True. Although you know who did call in the other day? Nina. She rang to say she was in the area, so I invited her round.’

Tom thought of what Helen had said earlier. ‘How was she?’

‘Too cheery, like she was trying to convince me that everything was good. Or like she was trying to convince herself. She might be that way all the time. I don’t see enough of her to know.’ He paused for a mouthful of Guinness. ‘It’s mad to think that her daughters are grown-up. One’s doing the Leaving Cert this year, and the other girl’s at college. She said the elder girl, Alannah, was going to London for the summer.’

‘You’re bringing me back now. 1987: the year you joined the guards, Tess became a model and myself and Nina started going out. Those were the days.’

That’s what Tom should have said to the journalists. ‘Actually,’ he should have said, ‘there were four of us. There was me, Conor, Tess, and Nina Minogue. You can’t forget Nina.’

He bought two more pints, and somehow Conor steered the conversation around to Father Galvin. It wasn’t Tom’s favourite subject, everybody knew that. When he’d first been elected, the priest’s death had been raised again and again. He’d fallen back on his old line. ‘I was only a child,’ he’d said. ‘There’s not much I can tell you.’

Mostly, Tom allowed people to think what they wanted to think. They’d needed someone to blame, and they’d alighted upon Noel O’Grady. Good luck to them.

‘You don’t reckon O’Grady did it, do you?’ asked Conor.

‘Sure what do I know?’ he replied.

The honest answer was no. He didn’t think O’Grady was to blame. He never would.

Tom’s round-the-world trip had lasted for more than three years. After Asia, he’d spent twelve months working on a sheep station in New South Wales. Next, he’d moved on to Africa and then to America. Those had been wild, eye-opening years. They’d also been the years in which he’d come to terms with what he knew. He’d decided he couldn’t allow one memory to scar his life. He couldn’t recall if, back in the early nineties, people had used the word ‘closure’. But the focus on Noel O’Grady had given him closure of sorts.

That didn’t mean the memory had vanished. You could live so much, yet one decision, one night, would always be there.

Now, for the second time in a couple of months, one of his friends was suggesting that O’Grady mightn’t have been the killer. Nina’s doubts were one thing; Conor’s had to be taken seriously.