“See, Rock’s name is engraved on it. The Guards never recovered Rock’s medals after the robbery. I found them in a drawer in the spare bedroom of your husband’s house in Mountjoy Square.”

Sandra Howard thrust the medal into my hand, flung herself off her chair and vomited into the fireplace.

“I heard Brock Taylor admit to killing Audrey O’Connor and Stephen Casey tonight. And then his wife killed him.”

Finnegan was squirming in his chair, but he seemed to have lost the power of speech. Sandra got to her feet and breathed deeply.

“Keep going, Ed,” she said. “Tell it all.”

“So then, having set you up for marriage with Dr. Rock, Denis goes off and completes his legal training and starts his practice, representing many of the prominent criminals of the day including, of course, his boyhood pal, Brock Taylor. But he keeps a hand in on the Southside, the bit of coaching for Castlehill, the bit of attention paid to Sandra, and a spot of rugby sevens on a Saturday morning with the guys. Including Dr. Rock. And then one Saturday morning, Dr. Rock collapses, a suspected heart attack. Maybe he hasn’t taken his insulin, maybe he’s hung over and the exercise is getting to him. And Denis says he’ll take him to hospital, which he does. Now I can’t be sure-the only one who knows is Denis-but I think what happened was, Rock asks him to inject him with insulin. And Denis does, only he gives Rock an overdose. By the time they get to hospital, Rock is slipping into a coma, and Denis neglects to mention that Rock is a diabetic, and Rock is treated as if it’s a regular myocardial infarction, a heart attack, and he dies in a couple of hours.”

Finnegan was shaking his head.

“I didn’t know he was a diabetic,” he said. He appealed to Sandra. “I swear I didn’t.”

Sandra wouldn’t look at her husband’s face.

“I spoke to the doctor who admitted him. He remembers you. He’ll be happy to make a complaint to the Guards.”

Finnegan got to his feet.

“I don’t have to stay here and be subjected to this-”

Shane Howard pushed him back into his chair.

“Yes you do, Dinny, yes you fucking do.”

“Along with the medals in Finnegan’s house, I found one other item,” I said, and produced the silver ID bracelet from my pocket. Again I gave it to Sandra for inspection. She let loose a howl of pain and sank to the floor.

“What does it say?” a shrill voice asked. It was Jonathan O’Connor, in black coat and baseball hat and wraparound shades. I didn’t know how long he had been in the room. Long enough, it looked like. Jonathan crossed the room toward his mother, who held out her arms in an embrace he avoided. He took the bracelet and examined it.

“It says ‘Diabetes Type 1,’” I said. “If your father had been wearing it-”

“He took it off for the game,” Finnegan said. “He took it off whenever we played sevens. He was in his gear when we went to the hospital.”

“How do you have his bracelet then? Where did you get it? Why did you keep it?”

“I had nothing but respect and admiration for Rock O’ Connor,” Finnegan said. “He was my friend, he was everything to me.”

Jonathan laughed, a forced, mirthless sound like static from a badly tuned radio.

“Your friend? Yes, but who are you?” Jonathan said. “You’re not who you claimed to be at all. You’re a fraud, a fabrication. You’re not fit to be a part of this family.”

“Everything I’ve done, I’ve done for the Howards’ sake. For Sandra’s sake.”

Finnegan’s voice was thick with a sincerity I’d never heard in it before. He looked pleadingly at Sandra, and I saw the Northside boy he’d been, and the dream that had sustained him, and the ties of history and of blood that had laid him low.

“You killed her husband,” Jonathan said, his voice shrill with excitement. “You killed my father. If that was for the Howards’ sake, then so is this.”

I still don’t know if Jonathan was too quick for me, or if I just stood back and let it happen. Both, perhaps. He had been inching toward Finnegan gradually, and Finnegan had risen to his feet again, and then Jonathan was upon him. The blade whipped out of his coat and sparkled in the drear and then buried itself in Denis Finnegan’s chest, twice, three times, straight in the heart. By the time the Sig was in my hand, Finnegan was as good as dead. Jonathan sprang back, still holding the knife; I waved the gun at him, and he tossed the bloody weapon on the floor. The knife was a Sabatier, the same as the knife that had killed David Brady; the method was the same as that used to murder Jessica Howard; the knife was probably the second of the two I had found missing in Denis Finnegan’s kitchen. I wondered whether Finnegan was Jonathan’s fourth victim. But the knife used to kill Jessica had not been found.

And then Shane Howard crouched by the body, and felt for a pulse, and turned to me and shook his head. It reminded me that he had a medical training, that he would have known there is very little blood when someone was stabbed through the heart, that the bleeding was largely internal. He wouldn’t have asked where his wife’s blood was. He would have known.

Jonathan stepped back from us all and pulled his shades off; his eyes blazed with what could have been fear but looked like triumph. He cast around for his mother, but she was hanging one-handed on the mantelpiece now, her breath coming in quick bursts, her worn face drained of life, of hope.

“He killed my father,” Jonathan cried, as if there had been no other route open to him. “He was nothing. Nothing but scum.”

He seemed exhilarated, almost gleeful. What I had thought was weakness in his eyes now looked like something else: a delirium of violence, a killing rage.

“How many others did you kill, Jonathan?” I said.

“No one,” he said, unable to suppress the grin that spread across his face.

“What did you say to Shane Howard when you rang him on Halloween morning? What did you tell him?”

“Nothing. I didn’t ring him.”

“I have phone records that say you did.”

“You couldn’t, my phone is-”

“Untraceable, I know. And now I know for sure you made that call. You told him his wife was having an affair with David Brady, didn’t you?”

“No.”

“You’d already killed Brady by then. And you must have thought you were clever dodging the CCTV camera in the lobby. But there’s a camera across the road, and it’s got footage of the Reillys and their accomplice. That’s you, Jonathan.”

Jonathan shook his head.

“And after that, you went around to Jessica Howard, whom you also rang that morning, you went around and stabbed her to death too. Just the way you stabbed Denis Finnegan, straight through the heart. And then you went back to Honeypark, took a shower, dumped your clothes in the house, just the way you tried to make out Emily had had a shower and dumped her bloody clothes there-which is why you set fire to the place yesterday. Now this is what I think you were doing, Jonathan. You were working with Denis Finnegan, listening to his plans, the great Howard name, the construction of the fourth tower, the grandiose achievements that separate the likes of you, great men, from the likes of the rest of us, the little people who don’t have any castles or towers in our names, or portraits of ourselves on every wall. Denis knew all about the blackmail scheme involving the porn film-David Brady had sent it to him by e-mail attachment, so he may have felt it was a way of persuading Shane Howard to play ball on the development front. But then the Reillys were involved with their crude demands for cash, and the whole thing just became too much grief. Finnegan told Brady, and Brady tried to back out-but the Reillys weren’t having that. This was their chance for some long-term income, blackmailing Shane Howard. So between you and Wayne and Darren, the plot was hatched to get rid of David Brady. You didn’t like him anyway, did you Jonny? All the things Emily did with him. It should’ve been you, shouldn’t it?”