‘Thorazine,’ said Ryan. ‘That’s so last-century. You get Clorozil and Serdolect these days.’ He sighed. ‘No doubt you have it all sewn up, a nod and a wink and it’s like the story never existed.’

I tried not to show my relief. I mean, we might have been able to keep a lid on it, but the thing about a secret conspiracy is that it never stays secret for long. Tyburn was right about one thing – I didn’t think the status quo was going to be an option much longer.

‘What led you down there in the first place?’ I asked.

‘To the Whisperers you mean?’ he said. ‘Oh, family tradition. We may have all been a proper bourgeois Catholic family of lawyers and doctors, but we kept alive the memory of my Great-Great-Grandfather Matthew Carroll. Old Farmyard Digger himself.’

Who, like Eugene Beale and the Gallagher brothers, had headed for England and worked on the canals, tunnels and railways.

‘So I was hearing stories about the whispering men from an early age,’ said Ryan. ‘Not that I believed any of it.’

‘Is that why you came to London?’ I asked.

Ryan leant back in his chair and laughed in a way that reminded me of Ten-Tons. ‘I’m sorry, no,’ he said. ‘No offence, but it’s not everyone’s dearest wish to come to London. I had a perfectly serviceable career in Dublin.’

‘And yet here you came,’ I said.

‘You have to understand what it was like riding the Celtic Tiger,’ said Ryan. ‘For so many years we’d been this joke of a country and suddenly we were it, Dublin was where it was happening. All at once there were coffee shops and galleries and more than one kind of pub. People were immigrating to live in Ireland and not just by accident either.’

Ryan looked at me and may have detected a distressing lack of sympathy on my part because he leaned forward and said, ‘The thing about the international art market is that the market part of it is essentially dictated by the super-rich and the people that suck their dicks for a living.’ He mimed sucking a dick and it was funny – I laughed.