He had split a custard cream and was gouging the filling from it with his bottom teeth. Is your mummy sick? he said.

Something like that, said Cushla.

He crammed a rectangle of dry biscuit into his mouth. Cushla poured him a glass of milk and he dunked the remaining piece. How the other half live, he said. He said it a second time because he made her laugh.

A hundred yards from Cushla’s house was a bend – around which Michael Agnew had disappeared the previous night – that led to a road that ran above the town. For half a mile there were grander houses amidst grounds like parkland and then fields that sloped up to the left, the fairways of the golf club. The carry-on with Gina had taken so long there were teenagers standing at the entrance to the estate Davy lived in, dressed in the uniform of the high school. Boys, their trousers at half-mast, denim jackets over regulation jumpers; girls, who looked years older, lids bruised with blue eyeshadow, strips of blusher on their pallid cheeks. Cushla indicated and waited for a line of armoured cars to pass on its way to the British Army barracks further out the road. A boy was approaching from the opposite direction, in the black blazer of the Catholic grammar school on the outskirts of Belfast. He was neat in himself, hair brushed, shoes polished. There’s our Tommy, said Davy. As he spoke, the others began closing in on his older brother. Tommy took a step away from them but one boy raised his hands and pushed them into Tommy’s chest. He stumbled off the pavement and on to the road. Cushla turned the corner and slowed beside him, opening her window.

Do you want a lift? she said.

His face was flushed crimson – with shame, she thought at first – but he said, No. He was glowering with rage.

Davy was almost on top of her. Water off a duck’s back, he said.

She pretended to adjust her wing mirror to get a look at Tommy. He was walking along the pavement slowly, his head high.

Davy directed her through the grid of beige houses, past kerbstones still smudged with the previous summer’s red, white and blue paint. The McGeowns’ house was at the very back, a field of gorse rising behind it. Three coal bags were slung by the front door, net curtains shrouding all the windows. The words TAIGS OUT were dribbling down the low wall that contained their front garden.

Davy insisted she come in. They waited on the doorstep while a series of locks turned. A slim, peroxide-blonde woman answered and bent to plant a kiss on Davy’s forehead. She was younger than Cushla expected, still in her thirties, but the blue and orange nylon tabard she wore over her clothes gave her the look of someone older. What did I tell you about wearing a coat? she said.

My head’s like a sieve, said Davy. Miss Lavery gave me a lift, but.