It wasn’t, though. All the people at the exhibition, the party, the neighbours who had seen her coming and going, people she couldn’t even name. Mrs Coyle. Maybe even Mr Reid. How stupid she was. The police would be tracing Michael’s movements, interviewing his friends. During Cushla’s last year of teacher training, a classmate of hers was arrested for her part in a bombing campaign in London. The RUC went to the home of every student. The policeman who visited the Laverys drank in the bar sometimes and didn’t search Cushla’s room, saying it was just a formality. Her family had laughed about it afterwards: Imagine our Cushla making a bomb; she can’t change a plug. But this was different.

What are you looking at me like that for? she said.

Jimmy said something about you and Agnew being in cahoots. If that gormless eejit noticed, the whole lot of them did.

Jimmy keeps a raw egg in his breast pocket, she said. Nobody heeds a word that comes out of his mouth.

They heard Gina’s footsteps on the stairs. Are youse right? she called. I hate being late for that lot.

I am warning you, Cushla, said Eamonn, his finger in her face. No tears. Not one fucking drop.

Outside, they got into his Capri. Gina made a show of dusting the passenger seat, tossing something over her shoulder. A legless Sindy doll. The news came on the radio.

A twenty-one-year-old man was shot dead by the British Army while attempting to booby-trap a bar in south Armagh.

A twenty-two-year-old man was shot dead in front of a mobile chip shop in the west of the city. It is believed the killing was part of an ongoing Republican feud.

The funeral of murdered Belfast barrister Michael Agnew is taking place this morning.

Eamonn flicked the radio off and briefly glared at Cushla in the rear-view mirror. She turned away, resting her cheek against the window.

Jesus Christ, said Gina. Bloody mortifying, so it is, having to walk into a funeral when one of our ones did it.

Our ones. A Catholic.

It had said in the newspaper that the killing had all the hallmarks of an IRA assassination. Cushla thought of the documents on Michael’s desk. She had only looked in one folder, the brutality case, but he’d told her he took on all kinds of work; who knew what was in the others.