She found herself walking straight to Michael’s bedroom, an uneasiness on her that evaporated when she saw the bed was empty and he was not up on his elbow, mounting a woman. Yet she wondered what it would be like to watch him with someone else, going at her with his mouth and fingers like he did with her. The bed was straightened rather than made, an empty tumbler on the nightstand. The air in the room was cool and she took his Aran cardigan from the arm of the velvet chair and put it on over the dress.

On the dining table another tumbler, a swallow of whiskey glowing in the bottom of it, twists of tissue browned by tar from his pipe. Documents in stacks, a scrap of paper on top of each one with a name or word in inky capital letters. Beyond the window the night was still, the branches on the old trees barely trembling. She stepped away, afraid of seeing something horrible. The Ottilie Patterson record was still on the turntable. She lowered the needle. A boom, then, low and deep, that she felt in her lungs. It was nearby, huge; bombers had begun using hundreds of pounds of explosives. Fear came on her with terrible clarity, that something had happened to Michael. She drank the dregs from his glass, pouring more.

She sat at the table. The stack nearest to her was thick; the names Kelly, McAleavey and Coyle written on the slip. She pulled it to her, tracing the curls of Michael’s handwriting with her finger. There were copies of statements they had refused to sign, the paper reeking of cigarette smoke. Photographs, mugshots the police had taken, stark yet grainy. Their faces were unmarked, but all three were limp-haired, hollowed-out. Terrified. Polaroids of their naked bodies, torsos blotched with sprawling bruises, thighs slit with whip marks. One image was a close-up. She turned it upside down and sideways, unable to tell what she was looking at. Each boy had written an account of his arrest and custody. Doors battered down. The line-up, two policemen holding a grey blanket in front of a woman in crinkly leather boots, the surprising youth of her voice as she called out their positions: one, four, seven. Hoods. White noise. Electrical cables. She looked at the photograph again. It was a shrivelled penis, the sac behind it sagging where a testicle had been kicked up towards a stomach. She laid it face down on the table and slopped more whiskey into her glass. How could anyone deal with this every day?