The time ticked by. Conor remained on the floor, sorting through his own memories of 1982. In the days after the priest’s death, Tom had walked around in a trance. He’d gone from insisting that the back door was locked to saying that maybe it was just stiff. The two of them had fallen out over the best way to explain the trail in the snow. Had Tom behaved like that because of what he’d seen? Had he been hiding something?

Get a grip, thought Conor. You’re kidding yourself. Here he was, trying to attach meaning to a child’s behaviour. To twist and mould it to fit his own theory. A man had been killed in Tom’s house. His mother had discovered the body. The village had been ablaze with rumour. Of course he’d been shocked and distracted.

Apart from Nina, no one from Kilmitten supported Conor’s interest. Sharon was increasingly impatient. Perhaps Tom was right. Perhaps this was a vanity project, a way of soothing his conscience over what had happened in the Avondhu. He’d seen three men shot dead and been powerless to intervene. The feud between the Burkes and the McPartlands rumbled on. The night before, one of Liam McPartland’s nephews had been shot and seriously injured. The crime had knocked Cyril Dinan from the front pages. Cyril had resigned or, as one of the papers put it, been dispatched to the dinosaur graveyard.

Whatever Conor’s motivation, he’d reached a dead end. For all his theories, he had nothing tangible. He was reminded of a case he’d worked on many years earlier, when he’d been stationed in Aghaflesk. A young woman named Rena Courtney had gone missing. While the official version of events was that her disappearance remained a mystery, local people were adamant that her boyfriend was to blame. The guards agreed. Unfortunately, the boyfriend’s mother had provided him with an alibi. On the sixth anniversary of Rena’s disappearance, her sister took her own life. All that was needed to break the chain of lies was one person courageous enough to say what they knew. Appeals didn’t work. Neither did threats. Conor thought of Rena and the Courtney family now. The Galvin investigation was essentially the same. Even if no one was willing to tell the full story, there must be someone who could tell part of it.

He still believed Tom was that person.

For an hour, maybe more, he sat there. He thought over the case, his mind swinging one way then the other. He’d been arrogant enough to think he could roll back the years. That he could march in and – hey presto! – Tom would crumble, and all would be revealed.

How wrong he’d been.

Chapter 36

Dublin, December 2016