So, that was great then. Everything was in place.

Except it wasn’t.

Tom didn’t want to move to the Department of Justice. He wasn’t certain that he wanted to stay in his current job either. He didn’t want to spend his days fighting fires and chafing against bureaucracy. He didn’t want to traipse from meeting to function to photo opportunity. He disliked the way everything had become regimented, sterile, formulaic. He couldn’t stand how the deference was sucking him in. He’d enjoyed being a constituency TD. But this? Jesus, he hated it. And it was only going to get worse. The more he saw, the more he appreciated his limitations. He was a figurehead. A guy who looked and sounded convincing on the telly. But what about the power? people would ask. Tom had no power. If he proposed anything radical, his colleagues and his civil servants would squash him like an ant under a size-twelve boot.

The problem was, he’d left it too late. He’d played the game too well. Dropping out of the cabinet wouldn’t be like dropping out of UCD, as tough as that had been. His parents would be upset. Vanessa would be incandescent.

He couldn’t back out now.

The kettle clicked off. Tom made his tea and settled into the squeaky leather sofa. From the black suite to the outsize lamps to the chrome and glass table, the furnishings were completely soulless. The pictures – grey and purple abstract prints – looked to have come from a bankrupt hotel. Nothing about the apartment was to his taste, but he was paying only a token rent and couldn’t complain.

His whirlwind day – and depleted brainpower – had left him with insufficient time to think through Tess’s revelations. It had never occurred to him that Ginny might have been raped. He remembered hearing about Noel O’Grady’s death, all of them sitting in that miserable London pub, bickering about home. How little they’d known. Familiar as Tom was with political scams and strokes, he was stunned by the way Flan and Ginny had got their revenge. ‘I suppose we’ll never know who did kill Father Galvin,’ Tess had said. At that point, Tom should have come out with a bland statement of agreement. Instead he’d come close to telling the truth. One more drink and he might have done. It had been years since he’d felt a compulsion to talk about the night of the party. Even with Vanessa, he’d never been tempted to tell the full story. There was something dangerous, though, about getting drunk with an old friend, especially one who’d just revealed a huge secret. The urge to say, ‘Me too,’ was overwhelming.