"Now you go along with this, and behave yourself, and you do your thing in the parade ring, and you talk nice to the TV people with Patrick afterward if he wins, do you understand?"

Tyrrell nodded, whimpering in pain.

"And you don't call for help, and you don't tell anyone, especially not the Guards?"

"No!"

Steno let Tyrrell's arm go, and the old man dropped to his knees. I don't know if the hoarse sound he made was breathing or weeping, but I know that all the other men in the room turned away. When I looked at Regina Tyrrell and Miranda Hart, however, I saw that they could not take their eyes off his suffering. Brian Rowan helped Tyrrell to his feet and began to talk to him in a low, quiet voice as he led him out. Tyrrell's face was haggard with pain and confusion.

Steno summoned Tommy and gave him what looked like another warning. Then Steno nodded at Miranda, waved the SMG at us all and followed Tommy out.

Miranda Hart trailed after Steno. While she was gone, I thought about various ways of getting free of my bonds, but the chair was too solid to be wrenched apart, and I didn't carry a blade as a matter of course, and short of launching myself out the window, nothing else occurred to me. If I could maneuver my way to the couch, I could maybe get hold of the Glock, although how I'd aim it at anything worth shooting was another matter. Just as this thought was forming, Miranda came back. She brought a tray with a pot of coffee, cups and milk with her and offered it round.

"That'd be nice if we had our hands free," Regina said.

Miranda looked at the grips tying our wrists to the arms of the chairs and nodded and apologized, then poured a coffee for herself.

In the silence, I heard a muffled voice coming from down the hall. It was the voice of a child.

"Mummy? Mummy? Mother? I can't open the door!"

"Karen…oh my God, let me go to her," Regina said.

Miranda looked anxious and shook her head.

"Just reassure her, all right? Shout from here."

"Mummy? I'm locked in!"

Regina took a deep breath to compose herself, then raised her voice to a yell.

"It's all right, sweetheart. The lock's broken."

"Just find the key."

"The key won't work. We have to find a locksmith."

"Mummy!"

The child was wailing. Miranda held her face in her hands.

"It's all right, sweetheart. Just…find a book and get back into bed. Or do some drawing. We'll get you out soon. Okay?"

There was silence then. Miranda looked shamefaced, and shook her head at me, as if to say that she wasn't in fact responsible for this. I shook my head right back and looked her in the eye.

"One thing I don't understand, Miranda," I said. "Well, that's not true, actually, there are many things I don't understand about this case, but best to take them one at a time. What's in it for Steno?"

"You have to understand," Miranda began. "You have to try and track this from the beginning. It's all because of Patrick. And Patrick will have what he's dreamed of today, after all this time. He's been training, he's in good condition. It's the least he deserves."

"And what? Are the other horses just going to sit back and let him win?"

"You'll just have to wait and see. Live on television."

"And what then? He takes the fall? He has his Tyrrellscourt tattoo, he has no tongue, he's perfect for a clogger like Myles Geraghty. Best of all, you probably have him so he wants to confess. He's the Omega Man, he acted alone, and you all walk away scot-free? But what about Steno, what does he get? I mean, Regina here is in the way, isn't she? Maybe the Omega Man needs to claim a fourth victim. Get rid of Regina and Miranda hits the jackpot. Karen Tyrrell is the heiress, Miranda is reunited with her daughter, and Gerald Stenson gets paid off until his dying day."

Miranda shook her head.

"You're looking at everything the wrong way round. Start with Patrick, living half-wild up on the Staples place, a bunch of scrap and a fistful of memories, some sweet, many bitter. The private detective Don Kennedy found his birth certificate. It wasn't in Lombard Street, it was at the registration office in Naas, I remember that much. Maybe because I was trying to remember anything but what he was telling me. See, Kennedy didn't come to me first, like he was supposed to. From the word go he had wanted to go and see Folan, he kept saying since Folan and Patrick were contemporaries, and in many ways had a shared history, he was a crucial witness. I kept making excuses not to go-I don't think I could have handled it. Anyway, I think he suspected Folan was Patrick, and now he had a foolproof way of finding out. He went up to the Staples place and showed Patrick the birth certificate, right there in black and white: Mother: Regina Mary Immaculate. And I can't remember what Patrick was working on at the time, I think he might have been putting up some fencing. Anyway, he had a pair of metal snips in his flight suit pocket. I don't know why, he took to dressing in flight suits when he went to live up there. Kennedy confronted him with the birth cert, and asked him what he thought. And Patrick took snips and pulled his tongue out and snipped a good half of it off."

Regina screamed at this, and began to shake her head, wailing. While I listened to that sound, and to Miranda talking, I was aware again of Karen calling for her mother, over and over again, sometimes through tears, sometimes angrily, rattling the door or banging on it. I hoped the sash windows in her room were too stiff for her to open, and if they weren't, that she didn't do anything foolish. Regina was still wailing, keening like a banshee. Miranda leant across and slapped her hard across the face, and she stopped.

"Listen to me," she said. "This is the beginning. This is just the beginning. Don't forget what you did to him, Regina. Don't forget you dumped your son into an orphanage, no, a torture chamber, then took him into your house while never acknowledging him. Do you know what that did to him when he found out? That you were his mother, but you had never treated him like a son?"

It couldn't have been much after nine in the morning then, but that was the point where I thought: I could really do with a drink.

"Kennedy got Patrick a doctor he knew, avoided a hospital situation where the police would have been involved. Setting me and Patrick up, getting us to trust him, so he could blackmail the fuck out of us. But you know what Patrick told me? He wrote it down, he couldn't speak at all back then. Because I kept asking, in the days and weeks after, pleading with him to tell me why he had done it. And eventually he took a piece of paper and he wrote two things on it. The two things were: 'Tell No One,' and 'Say Nothing.'

"I knew what that meant. When Patrick had been in St. Jude's, he'd been raped twice. He didn't know who the rapists were. He wasn't even sure there were two, but he thought there were, he said they smelled different. He said sometimes he thought it might have been Vincent Tyrrell, sometimes Leo, sometimes even Steno. I asked Steno and he swore he hadn't touched Patrick."

I intervened at that point.

"You didn't believe him, did you? I know you didn't believe him. Leo Halligan always thought it was Steno who raped Hutton."

Miranda looked at me and swallowed, and continued from where she left off.

"And Patrick said, they'd each said that. Each of the perpetrators-and the other boys who were victims were told the same thing too. Tell no one. Say nothing."

Tell no one. Say nothing. The secret history of Irish life.

"I asked you what was in it for Steno. Looks like you won't answer. Explain something else to me, Miranda," I said. "I can understand Folan-a row, or a brawl, or some messy accident that got covered up. I can understand Kennedy, the blackmailer. What I don't get is Jackie Tyrrell. She was your friend, in many ways your champion. You clearly revered her. Why did she have to die?"