Then Fintan moved over, saw how low I’d sunk and set about breaking me out of my bad routine. But not before first establishing himself as a cut-throat tabloid hack.

Within months of his arrival in London, under the expert tutelage of the Sunday News, he’d sunk to the challenge of becoming one of Fleet Street’s most lethal ‘operators’. Both his drinking capacity and expenses account appeared bottomless, as he set about getting half of Scotland Yard well-oiled and onside. His connections didn’t end there. When I’d had my fill of labouring, he told me to go see Seamus Horan, manager of the Feathers pub, near St James’s Park underground station in central London. I jumped at the chance: every organ within me felt like it needed a change.

In Seamus, I found another immigrant turned to granite by hardship. He explained bluntly that he employed Irish staff because they expected a pub to stay open till three or four in the morning, every morning.

I quickly discovered that the Feathers had become the favoured watering hole of officers working at nearby Scotland Yard. Boy could they drink. And, because it was patronised by the law, it was above the law.

We never closed before three a.m. No wonder there was a permanent vacancy. It helped that I could take a room upstairs.

The insomnia that had tormented me since I arrived in London finally proved useful. By the time I talked the last drunks down from their stools each morning, only medicated mini-cab drivers and demented birds were still up. I never heard a bird singing at night until I came to London. Those nightingales on Berkeley Square must be fucking knackered.

Gabby laughed. But I had an acute boredom sensor. It was time to wrap up.

‘So I got to know a few of the officers and they persuaded me to join up,’ I said, skipping the murky truth about how I became a cop. That would have to wait for another day.

‘Do you have ambitions, you know, to make detective?’

‘Yeah, you could say that. I’m desperate, to be honest.’

‘Don’t you worry that your insomnia will eventually catch up with you, make you ill?’

‘Of course. I’ve seen specialists. I’ve read books. No one seems to have an answer.’

‘I’ve got a friend about to begin her final year of a psychology degree. I remember her saying she’d like to specialise in sleep disorders. She’s looking for a case right now …’

‘Oh I don’t know,’ I laughed, ‘it’s all a bit embarrassing.’

‘I tell you what,’ said Gabby, ‘if you agree to help Lily, I’ll go stay with my parents.’

‘Seriously?’

‘Seriously,’ she said, holding out her hand.

‘Deal,’ I smiled, shaking her hand and hoping I was the only one lying.

I pulled open the phone box door, sampled the air inside and nodded gratefully. It couldn’t have been pissed in for at least three days.

I shovelled in three pound coins and poked those digits you never forget. On the third ring, I realised I hadn’t planned what to say. I slammed the receiver down and heard the three coins clatter down to the tray.

‘Hi, Mum,’ I said to the stale air, ‘how are you?’

Chapter 10

King’s College Hospital, South London

Thursday, July 11, 1991; 09:55

The following Thursday morning – ten days after Marion’s murder – I clocked the sign that read King’s College’s Institute of Psychiatry and winced.

Psychiatry sounded so judgemental, so incurable. But I’d come here voluntarily. They wouldn’t shoot a dart in my arse and cart me off indefinitely for the good of society. Of that I felt almost certain.

Besides, Lilian Krul hadn’t yet qualified. And this face-to-face with the wannabe shrink had been slated for just sixty minutes: barely enough time for her to knock the shine off my well-polished veneer of sanity, let alone scratch it.

Of course, I’d fully intended to renege on my deal with Gabby as soon as she’d moved back to her family’s home in Kent. But I hadn’t counted on her academic friend’s tireless perseverance. I was left in no doubt that Lilian could give Dom Rogan a real run for his money in the stalking stakes. She must have left ten messages over two days to make this happen. I caved in because, if this was all it took to keep Gabby out of harm’s way, then it had to be worth every second.

I told Aidan I had gone to a vinyl sale; I couldn’t bring myself to admit I’d found professional help outside his place of work, the pre-eminent Maudsley . He’d been on at me for months about ‘seeing someone’ there. I tried to explain that every time I’d visited a specialist, I wound up prescribed some sort of medieval haymaker sleeping tablet that turned me into a slack-jawed halfwit.

Aidan had even described my case in detail to a leading sleep specialist, which put me right off. For one thing, he was prone to exaggeration. God knows what he’d told them. On top of that, when confronted by shrinks, I reserved the right to edit my own symptoms and lunacy.

I would never admit to any fully qualified member of the medical establishment the true extent of my insomnia. I dreaded being labelled schizophrenic or bi-polar and carted off to some screaming Gothic madhouse where – drugged, drooling and helpless – I’d get arse-fucked daily by some sick, cackling chaplain.

As an Irish male, I had a scientific right to be scared. Studies have found that four per cent of the Irish population are schizophrenic; that’s four times higher than any other nation in the world.

They looked for historical reasons behind Ireland’s reluctant success in producing champion nutters. In-breeding turned out not to be a factor, thankfully. After all, over the centuries all manner of imposter – Viking, Norman, Spanish, English, to name a few – had turned the Irish gene pool into alphabet soup. Our women have a proud record of welcoming exotic strangers. It felt reassuring to know that our inadequacy in the eyes of the Irish female was historical.

Another theory had been the traditional ‘emigration of the strongest’, but they found similarly high levels of schizophrenia in Irish emigrant groups across the US.

The experts eventually agreed that it came down to a combination of three historical reasons: maternal malnourishment during pregnancy, alcoholism and ageing sperm. In at least two of these disciplines, my auld fella Martin scored top marks.

He’d already turned fifty by the time my older brother and I came along. Like so many men in rural Ireland, that was the price he paid for inheriting the family farm a couple of decades earlier. It came equipped with his mother, May Lynch – a ringing bitch still spoken about in tones of mild terror and awe. And, like most of these narcissistic matriarchs, she wouldn’t tolerate another woman in the house so he had to wait for her to die.

That was the ‘ageing sperm’ condition covered. As for ‘the drink’, Martin insisted he did so only socially. But being a local politician, auctioneer and IRA facilitator, he tended to be social every evening of the week. And he’d always wrap up the night with a few whiskies on the couch, considered so anti-social by the rest of us that we’d feel the need to hide.

So, no one could accuse Martin Lynch of not doing his bit to sire a schizo. Maybe he wanted one to join him fighting for ‘the cause’. Thankfully, no matter how knackered and godawful I felt, I never heard voices. But I still felt a little paranoid about that particular prognosis, so strenuously avoided the only people who could help me. Today’s ‘consultation’ with Lilian was an aberration, and I planned to make sure of that by telling her fuck all.

‘Donal?’ came a soft voice. ‘Hi, I’m Lilian.’

I was expecting someone sterner with less make-up and more gravitas.

I tried not to look too shocked: she looked surprised enough for the both of us. Her hair was scraped back into a ponytail with such severity that her eyebrows were arched, making her seem permanently startled. Gigantic, thick-rimmed black spectacles made her already large pupils look like a pair of well-polished conkers. Her pronounced cheekbones glowed pink beneath war paint.