It was a well-doing family. In the parents’ room, I found a drawer crammed tidily with documents and bills. I lay on the bed and read through them. On one demand note, her father had put a date and quoted as a reminder to himself part of his reply: ‘never welshed on a bill in my life’. He had underlined ‘never’ with three heavy slashes of a pen. From the kinds of stuff he bought, I thought he must be a builder, a slater perhaps, and imagined him as being on his own and wondered how much he made: enough anyway to let Margaret be at university and holiday abroad and have that shiny gloss on her skin. Even in the photograph on the wall, she glowed. I wondered if the proud father noticed how highlights and shadows conspired around those incredible breasts. The photograph beside it was of a little girl dressed for first communion. She looked bridal but familiar. I guessed Margaret must be an only child. Her mother would say to her in a few years: ‘We sacrificed but never grudged it – to give you a chance.’ I thought she might grudge it ahead of schedule if they found who she was with at the moment. I took it for granted now that Kilpatrick was hiding for some reason and that she was with him. I remembered what I had said to Muldoon. People did kill – it happened all the time. A friend of mine in the first term had been stabbed to death one Friday night outside a pub. A fifteen-year-old had stabbed him with a sharpened screwdriver and it had forced a way between two ribs into his lung so that he drowned in blood.

Margaret in the photograph on the wall glowed and smiled. I thought if I was her father I would keep her locked up. I would buy a machine gun – no problem for a man who settled his bills – and mow down all the men who lusted after her.

In their hearts, I thought, and scratched myself.

A bang echoed round the house and quivering into the middle of the floor I translated it as a front door closing. From the hall came the sound of a woman’s voice and the deeper mutter of a man in reply. In a silent frenzy I straightened the spread on the sheets and gathered up bills and letters to lay them back in the drawer. Two fat envelopes spilled on to the floor. I scuffed them under the bed. It had gone quiet. I considered escaping out of the window; and had a vivid picture of being arrested half over the sill.

The door eased open under my hand more slowly than I would ever have imagined. Through the crack I studied the empty hall, suspecting shadows. There was no reason why they should go into Margaret’s bedroom. They would be in the kitchen. Hungry after travelling.

In the bedroom I wasted no time. I found my socks in different places and crammed on my shoes barefoot. Stick in one hand, socks in the other, my jacket over my arm – the tie had vanished, a casualty of the night – I recrossed the hall. I was going to be lucky. With one finger I hooked the handle and the front door opened – it wasn’t properly shut.

A squat bullet-headed man, old enough to be my father, was reaching up to push the door. He had a case in his other hand and a holdall tucked under the same arm. He blinked at me and then put the hand that had been reaching for the door on to my chest and propelled me back into the hall.

‘Now don’t let’s be hasty, Mr Briody,’ I said. He wasn’t big, six inches less than me, but he was broad and with my shoelaces undone and holding one jacket and two socks I wasn’t feeling at my best.

‘Don’t tell me,’ he said. ‘I can guess. Where’s Margaret?’

I shook my head.

‘Through there.’ He pointed to the room Muldoon and I had been in the previous night. I found myself sitting in the same chair.

‘Stay there!’ he said and went back into the hall.

I put my socks on and got my shoelaces tied. I buttoned my jacket and then unbuttoned it, thinking Mr Briody might get over-excited. My tie remained among absent friends.

He came back and shut the door quietly. The other chair was too far away apparently, for he pulled it up close to me and when he sat down leaned forward.

‘She’s not in the house,’ he said. ‘But I can see her bed’s been slept in. Is this yours?’

My tie had turned up again.

I put my hand up to my neck, not claiming the tie but as if to indicate the benefits of an open collar in summer, while, under the circumstances, avoiding any suggestions that the practice might be associated with virility.

‘Where’s she got to? I want a word before,’ he jerked his chin in the direction of the kitchen, ‘the wife realises what’s been going on.’

A set of responses clattered through my head like lemons in a fruit machine.

‘Look now,’ he said. ‘Let’s be straight. I know these things happen. There aren’t many young saints around. But I don’t want needless hurt. You tell me where Margaret’s got to – and then we’ll get you out of here before the wife has a chance to see you.’

He was so reasonable I wondered what Margaret got up to usually. I had been too timorous perhaps about delving into that cornucopia.

‘Ah,’ I said wittily, ‘she’s not here.’

‘I told you that,’ he said.

The accent was not just Irish but southern Irish. He was a man from Eire, and one who signalled to a lad born at the sharny end of a country lane that he was a bloody peasant like my father, uncles and so forth.

‘You did,’ I said. ‘You did surely,’ I heard myself say with just the fatal hint of an inadvertent brogue.

‘So?’

‘Yes. Well, I was . . . at a party. At a party here. Very nice – well behaved. No nonsense. A party – with records and . . . soft drinks. Yes, well. My foot – I injured it—’

‘At the party.’

‘No–no, to be honest with you, shifting a wardrobe. A while ago. But someone stood on it last night. And Margaret said, you’re in no state to go home. My parents are away. You sleep in their bed – my bed. You sleep in my bed, she said, and I’ll sleep in their bed,’ I finished hopefully.

‘She’s not in their bed,’ he said.

‘No, she wouldn’t be. She’s at work.’

‘Where? Work?’

‘A summer job. She got it yesterday. That’s what she held the party for – to celebrate getting the job.’

‘And she’ll have made up the bed before she left.’ He nodded seriously. ‘She was always a tidy girl.’

He stood up and I took a grip on the stick.

‘You won’t mind going before the wife comes.’

Nodding enthusiastically, I levered myself up.

Softly, at the front door, still with that serious look, he said, ‘It’s best that you’re away before the wife comes through. You wouldn’t want to go through all that stuff again about the job and the party – not to speak of the wardrobe on your foot. That’s a cruel thing – a wardrobe.’ I edged away from him down the steps. ‘It must,’ he said solemnly, ‘have leaped like lightening.’

As a father, he struck me as being on the eerie side.

In daylight, being lost and without money presented no problems. After a sleep I could walk from now till tomorrow even if I had to hop the last hours one-legged. If I kept going I might spot a taxi and he could wait at the Kennedys’ while I fetched the fare. Three notes were tucked in the toe of a shoe under my bed so I wasn’t flat yet. There was a bye-law too, someone had told me, to the effect that you could ride a bus as long as you gave your name and address so the fare could be collected later. Or was that only children? Anyway the chances were that nobody would ever have told the hard-faced bus conductress.

‘Who’s boss!’

I glanced up and there was an old lady before a gate smiling complacently at a woman lugging a howling child up the steps. What I’d heard was the splash of the old lady shoving her oar in: Show him who’s boss: don’t let him dominate you. Him looked about three years old. As they struck a tableau on the top step, you could see her underskirt was grubby, and her legs just legs with the usual taut strings behind the knees, but still it never failed to be interesting how far up they went. Bent over, she let her irritation get the better of her and smacked the boy’s face. The howl shrilled up from assertion to outrage. And at that second he writhed round and saw my grinning face. It was the kind of straw that might help set a character for life. How could I explain to him that I wasn’t joining in the female conspiracy against him but only looking up his mother’s skirt?