He’s not fazed. ‘In that case, perhaps you both did me a favour. I’m not sure when I would have got up the momentum to knock on your door.’

His accent is educated English, with something else overlaid on top – Nordie, maybe Belfast. He hasn’t spent the last thirty-two years in a palace in Egypt or a nightclub in Brazil. He’s spent them a train ride away.

‘Have a good look around,’ I say. ‘You want the full tour?’

He’s examining my face, intensely enough that I twitch, wanting to smash in his nose with the gun butt to make him stop. He says, ‘You’re very like me. Do you understand that?’

‘I’m not blind,’ I say. ‘And I’m not stupid.’

That gets a tiny satisfied smile, like me not being an idiot is to his credit. ‘I never thought you would be.’

All that maths homework I saved up to drop at his feet. There’s a silence, while he waits for me to say something, or maybe throw myself into his arms. I don’t.

‘This is a very strange moment for me,’ he says. ‘I’ve been looking for you for almost a year.’

‘Wow. A whole year, yeah?’

‘I did consider making contact at the beginning. I give you my word, I did. But I didn’t know your name, and your mother had gone off the radar really very effectively. And at the time, given the various complications in my life, in many ways I felt you would be better off without—’

‘And now, what, you need a kidney?’

A thin smile. ‘The year before last, my mother and father died, within months of each other.’ A smaller pause, for me to say sorry for his loss or feel bereaved or fuck knows what. ‘Losing one’s parents causes an immense shift in perspective. It brought home to me the value of their presence within my life, on a much broader scale than I had ever understood it before: the value of being rooted within a greater story than one’s own. I became acutely aware, for the first time, just what I had deprived you of. As soon as I reached that realisation, I began looking for you.’

Those dark eyes, all intense and urgent and meaningful. No wonder my ma fell for it; she was only twenty. I’m not. The truth is he was feeling vulnerable all of a sudden, what with being next in line, and he needed someone who could make him feel like he wasn’t gonna vanish into nothing. ‘At one point I actually hired a private detective,’ he says, ‘but all I could give him was your mother’s name, and—’

‘You’ve found me now.’

‘As soon as I knew how to find you, I came. I booked a hotel in Dublin and drove down that very day.’