She hadn’t wanted to go away to school. Her parents had insisted. For the first couple of weeks, Nina had tried her best. She’d thought about Malory Towers and St Clare’s and done everything possible to fit in. But the truth was, her new school was awful, awful, awful. She missed her parents, her little brother and her friends. She missed the chancers and the characters who knocked about the village. She even missed silly things, like the giddy women boarding the Templemorris bingo bus and the way mist clung low to the grass on fine mornings.

Tess and Nina fell into another conversation about Father Galvin. Nina remained scared that her parents would find out what she’d been doing on the night of the party.

‘You shouldn’t worry,’ said Tess. ‘Everybody’s got enough to be going on with. They won’t be thinking about us.’

But Nina did worry. She was a bundle of worries. That somebody could be killed in Kilmitten frightened her. Violence didn’t belong here. It belonged in Dublin and Belfast where people killed each other over money or drugs or whether they were Irish or British. Okay, bad things happened for other reasons too: men killed their wives, and fathers their sons. But not in Kilmitten. She couldn’t imagine why anyone would want to hurt Father Galvin. She hadn’t read any of the papers because her father wouldn’t allow them into the house. ‘Bloody vultures,’ he’d said, about the journalists who’d approached him on the street. Nina didn’t think they looked like vultures at all. They were too well padded.

They were deciding what to do with the rest of the afternoon when the front door creaked open and Tess’s mam came fizzing in. With her black leather jacket, glittery scarf and stretch denims, she didn’t look like any other mother. To be fair, she was quite a lot younger than most mothers. She was thirty-two, which meant she was also younger than Debbie Harry and Olivia Newton-John. Tess said that when her mam got depressed, she lay in bed moaning that her best years were behind her. Then Tess would have to sit on the floor and list all the famous people who were older than her. Usually this helped to perk her up again.

‘Hi, Mam,’ said Tess. ‘What has you home?’

‘Uh, hi … Ginny,’ said Nina. Addressing Tess’s mother was awkward. Technically speaking she was Miss Fortune, but that made her sound like a teacher. Besides, she always insisted that Nina use her first name.