He twisted her elbow and pushed her back towards his car.

Gina was standing very still by the passenger door as Eamonn shoved Cushla into the back seat. No one said a word on the way to the pub.

Cushla had forgotten how good Gina could be behind a bar, finding the right words, drawing the most dejected of drinkers around her. Poor Joanna was drugged to the eyeballs, she was saying, the young fella trying to keep her on her feet. A neighbour told the paper they didn’t hear the shots, but heard her screaming, three doors away.

The newspaper was on the counter, the print smudged from being passed hand to hand. Cushla picked it up. At the centre of his obituary there was a photograph of Michael in his wig and gown, a little younger, his jaw defined, the jagged lines around his eyes shallow.

I’m glad not to have gone to the cremation, Gina went on. The big red curtains closing. The coffin disappearing into the floor. Like Sunday Night at the London Palladium, if you ask me. Lovely music, though. Someone sang a song as he was carried out. ‘When I Move to the Sky’. There wasn’t a dry eye.

Jimmy was blotting Guinness froth from the counter with the sleeve of his jacket. He licked his cuff and gave Cushla a sad wink. Eamonn was behind her, at the till. Look, you don’t need to stay on, he said over his shoulder. Just get the chief mourner out of here. She’s nearly drunk me out of Gordon’s.

My car is at home.

Fuck, I forgot about that. Can you wait an hour or so for a lift?

She told him she would walk to the house and drive back down to collect Gina.

Eamonn handed Minty his change and frowned. What was that carry-on about with Victor McCusker? he said. How do you know him?

Cushla had forgotten Victor was well known. He was at the Irish classes, she said.

Is there anything you’re not telling me?

No.

I’ve no food in, said Gina, from the larder. She emerged with a tin of tomato soup in her right hand and flicked on the radio with the other.

The Provisional IRA have claimed responsibility for the murder of Michael Agnew, alleging the barrister was a ‘willing agent of a most corrupt, rotten and evil judicial system’.

Our ones, I told you, said Gina. Bad bastards.

Mummy, please, said Cushla. She sat at the table, watching her mother totter between the cooker and the sink. When the bowl of soup was placed in front of her, her stomach lurched. There were pieces of bread suspended in it that had bloated into fleshy lumps.

Cushla forced in a spoonful and held it in her mouth until the nausea passed, before daring to swallow. She averted her eyes from it to keep it down.