‘“Mental reservations”: that’s it. I convinced myself that no good would come of telling the truth. That in this case a lie wasn’t really a lie. Nina was very close to her mother, not so close to her father. By pointing the finger at Helen, I’d be hurting Nina.’

‘The time you came close to telling her, was that when you were splitting up?’

‘How did you know?’

‘She told me.’

‘For truth? Why did she—’

‘Obviously, she had no idea it was her mother you’d seen, but she got the impression you knew more than you were saying.’

‘Look … whatever else you think about what I did … you’ve got to accept that I wanted to protect Nina. I loved her.’ Tom was having difficulty with the words, his sentences coming out in fragments. ‘Afterwards … after we’d broken up, I mean … I realised I couldn’t speak. People would … They’d suspect that I was trying to harm the Minogues because of the way Nina had left me. They’d claim I was settling a score. In other circumstances, that’s … that’s what I would have thought.’

‘Did you have any idea why Helen might hurt Leo Galvin?’

‘At the start, not a notion in the world. That’s one of the reasons I was so confused. Later, it did occur to me that there could have been something between them, that this was the most likely explanation. But, straight up, I thought of other motives too. Like, I wondered if Father Galvin might have interfered with Hugh – or with Nina.’

Tom’s words were punctuated by rattling breaths. Conor was surprised by how dirty he felt. Although accustomed to being there on the worst day of people’s lives, he was usually at one remove. He interviewed reluctant witnesses, comforted victims, came down hard on suspects. But on those occasions he always maintained some detachment. Strangely, even getting shot had felt less personal than this. In the Avondhu, he’d been an unlucky bystander. An observer who’d got in the way. Here, he was a participant. Tom was his friend. As was Nina. What he decided to do might shape the rest of their lives.

‘Don’t take this the wrong way,’ he said, knowing even as the words left his mouth that there was no right way to take them, ‘but did you ever think your parents deserved to know what you’d seen? That if the crime had been solved it would have made their lives easier?’