He stopped, breathing hard, the muscles in his thick neck swelling. ‘Lucky, isn’t it,’ he asked putting his face into mine, ‘that we’re in a bleeding civilised country?’

‘Like the cavalry,’ Brond said to me in the car. ‘I came over the hill for the second time.’

And he had. At that moment, the cavalry image seemed exact to me – pennants and a brave show of horsemen to the rescue. My Cockney Indians had frightened me more than any of the tough cops who had surrounded me during the night. I said that to Brond.

‘Their technique would have been different.’ His plump cheeks crinkled in a smile.

‘The tall man with grey hair, he asked them if it was a new technique to have me standing there while they argued. Is that what you mean – some psychological technique?’

Brond laughed. I thought it was the only genuinely amused sound I had heard him make.

‘They’d have beaten it out of you. Either here or at the house in Chelmsford. What was going on last night would have seemed a waste of time to them.’

I felt sick. There was no question of not believing him. Everything he said carried authority.

‘But why did they let me go? Was there new evidence? Has someone confessed?’

Brond looked at me carefully.

‘ “Let go.” I don’t think we could say that, not exactly “let go”.’ I watched Primo’s hands turn the wheel. The sun had gone behind a cloud.

‘Are you going to take me back to them?’

‘I hope not. Think of yourself as being in my custody. Not let go, I’m afraid.’

‘Are you a policeman?’

‘We seem to have arrived,’ Brond said.

I hadn’t recognised the streets, although I should have. We were at Margaret Briody’s house.

Primo got out of the car and came with us which surprised me. I couldn’t think of him as being any kind of policeman. He hadn’t been with Brond at police headquarters or even later at the hotel, although when we came out he had been sitting in the car waiting for us. Maybe it was because the first time I had seen him he had been a workman. I remembered the removal man Davie with his snot-yellow grin and the thud of Primo’s blows beating into his flesh. Perhaps no one was what he seemed. (Except Andy surely – how else would he have got the knack?) Now Primo stood a step or two behind us in a grey suit which was an imitation of Brond’s, only since it was less expensive the cheaper cut made the brute width of his shoulders seem disproportionate, like a parody.

‘Can I help you?’ the woman who opened the door asked.

As soon as I heard the Irish lilt, I knew she must be Margaret’s aunt who had to be kept in ignorance of the facts of life. If it had not been for her, we would not have spent the night at the yard or been there in the morning when Brond came to search the place. I might have been lying now on my bed thinking idle thoughts of Jackie as the sun idled lasciviously down the stag’s horns in the picture on the wall.

‘Margaret’s not here,’ she said when Brond asked. ‘But she’ll be back soon, God willing. Is it something to do with the University?’

‘That’s it,’ Brond said soothingly.

He exerted on her the charm of authority.

‘Would you want to wait?’

We sat in the living room where Muldoon had bluffed me such a long time ago. When she called, the uncle came through drying his hands on a towel.

‘Well, now,’ he said. ‘I’m Liam Briody. And you’re from the University?’

But, even as he was speaking, those quick eyes had run over us. Considering us, he wiped the towel over his knuckles slowly.

‘Would you leave us for a bit,’ he asked his wife, ‘while I have a word?’

She looked flustered but got up. At the door, she asked, ‘Would you be wanting some tea?’

Before we could answer, Briody told her, ‘No. We’ll have our chat first.’

He waited until the door had closed and then, in a different tone, wondered aloud, ‘The University? Is that what you told my wife?’

It seemed to me Brond deliberately waited to let him take the next step.

‘I know the young fellow there. According to him, he’s a friend of Margaret’s. He’s here and then yesterday Margaret appears looking as if the world had stopped. Now three of you. What’s it about?’ He made a calculation then, like a light switching on as the notion took him. ‘Police! Is it police, you are?’

Brond waited appreciatively.

‘Not ordinary police,’ Liam Briody said. It wasn’t a question.

‘We’re interested in Margaret,’ Brond said at last.

‘She’s done nothing wrong.’

I admired that. The tone was very different from what I had taken to be his casual mocking attitude towards her.

‘I’m very willing to believe that,’ Brond said. ‘Although, of course, it’s not something that’s settled – not at this stage – not yet.’

‘She’s a good girl,’ Briody said sturdily, but he was no kind of match for Brond, who pressed people into the shape he wished.

‘This wouldn’t have anything to do with Michael Dart?’ Briody asked. Suddenly he looked like the old dealer in horses who came over from Cork to the market my father took me to as a boy; he would spit on his hand and shake with the man he was getting the better of to show the deal was made. He was a great one, that old man, for trading to and fro – giving to get, what you wanted for what he needed.

That was how I heard the story of Kennedy, who Briody told us was in reality a Southern Irishman called Michael Dart.

‘His father had been a hard core man who’d taken the gun with De Valera against the Free State. But that was a long time earlier – and this was before the new troubles and the new deaths. Then, in the North they went quietly collecting their welfare benefits and unemployment money; while in the Republic most of us were too busy trying to live to worry about the Border. But Francis Dart, Michael’s father, would still be arguing and living the old battles. Michael took in the talk of dead heroes with his mother’s milk. I think he must often have been with the Hound of Culann sitting at the knees of Sencha and Cathbad instead of labouring in the mud of a poor farm. When he was fifteen it came to be known that he was one of four that had boobytrapped an RUC post on the far side of the border. They blinded a fellow of twenty or so – a man with a young family. Both the hands on him were blown off by the same bomb. Michael was marked from that time on, and it’s true that some of the foolish young men thought he was a hero . . . It must be hard to be a hero when you’re only fifteen.’

‘How long did it take him and who did he kill?’ Brond asked.

Briody blinked at him.

‘You’ve worked it out. The last day I saw him I met him in the street. I wasn’t sure if I should speak with him for he and my brother had had hard words. I asked after his father – poor man, he was dead within the month, and I wouldn’t say Michael’s trouble wasn’t the larger part of it. Two days later the news was all over Ireland. Michael Dart and two others had raided a bank in Dublin. Something went wrong. The chief of them – an old fellow the boy looked up to – got into a panic. He made a hash of it somehow and they couldn’t get to the car and then he took a bullet in the leg. The third fellow threw down his weapon and ran for it. Michael stood over the old fellow and fought it out. He got to the car – God knows how for he had to carry the old one. Before night they’d recovered the car – with the old one sitting up dead in it for he must have taken another wound while the boy was carrying him. Michael Dart was away and one Garda dead and another fit for nothing after that with a bullet in his lung. I’ve heard tell the third fellow, the one who ran for it, was found dead later and that might have been Michael’s work too.

‘It must all have been planned the day I spoke to him, yet you would never have known for he was so merry and talkative. He was a reckless boy who could call birds down from the trees with the charm of him.’