Nora laughed and did it again. “I am, amn’t I?”

“Yep. Like a duck to water. I always knew there was a bad girl in there.”

After a moment she said, “Did you and Rosie use to meet out here?”

“Nah. I was too scared of your da.”

She nodded, examining the glowing tip of her smoke. “I was thinking about you, this evening.”

“Yeah? Why?”

“Rosie. And Kevin. Is that not why you came here, as well?”

“Yeah,” I said, carefully. “More or less. I figured, if anyone knows what the last few days have been like…”

“I miss her, Francis. A lot.”

“I know you do, babe. I know. So do I.”

“I wouldn’t have expected… Before, I only missed her once in a blue moon: when I had the baby and she wasn’t there to come see him, or when Ma or Da got on my nerves and I’d have loved to ring Rosie and give out about them. The rest of the time I barely thought about her, not any more. I’d other things to be thinking about. But when we found out she was dead, I couldn’t stop crying.”

“I’m not the crying type,” I said, “but I know what you mean.”

Nora tapped ash, aiming it into the gravel where Daddy might not spot it in the morning. She said, with painful jagged edges on her voice, “My husband doesn’t. He can’t understand what I’m upset about. Twenty years since I saw her, and I’m in bits… He said for me to pull myself together, before I upset the baba. My ma’s on the Valium, and my da thinks I should be looking after her, she’s the one lost a child… I kept thinking about you. I thought you were the only person who maybe wouldn’t think I was being stupid.”

I said, “I’d seen Kevin for a few hours out of the last twenty-two years, and it still hurts like hell. I don’t think you’re being stupid at all.”

“I feel like I’m not the same person any more. Do you know what I mean? All my life, when people asked had I any brothers or sisters, I said, Yeah; yeah, I’ve a big sister. Now I’ll be saying, No, it’s just me. Like as if I was an only child.”

“There’s nothing to stop you telling people about her anyway.”

Nora shook her head so hard that her hair whipped her face. “No. I’m not going to lie about that. That’s the worst part: I was lying all along, and I didn’t even know it. Whenever I told people I had a sister, it wasn’t true. I was already an only child, all that time.”

I thought of Rosie, in O’Neill’s, digging in her heels at the thought of pretending we were married: No way, I’m not faking that, it’s not about what people think… I said gently, “I don’t mean lie. I just mean she doesn’t have to vanish. I had a big sister, you can say. Her name was Rosie. She died.”

Nora shivered, suddenly and violently. I said, “Cold?”

She shook her head and ground out her cigarette on a stone. “I’m grand. Thanks.”

“Here, give me that,” I said, taking the butt off her and tucking it back into my packet. “No good rebel leaves behind evidence of her teenage kicks for her da to find.”

“It doesn’t matter. I don’t know what I was getting all worked up about. It’s not like he can ground me. I’m a grown woman; if I want to leave the house, I can.”

She wasn’t looking at me any more. I was losing her. Another minute and she would remember that she was in fact a respectable thirty-something, with a husband and a kid and a certain amount of good sense, and that none of the above were compatible with smoking in a back garden at midnight with a strange man. “It’s parent voodoo,” I said, putting a wry grin on it. “Two minutes with them and you’re straight back to being a kid. My ma still puts the fear of God into me-although, mind you, she actually would give me a clatter of the wooden spoon, grown man or no. Not a bother on her.”

After a second Nora laughed, a reluctant little breath. “I wouldn’t put it past my da to try grounding me.”

“And you’d yell at him to stop treating you like a child, same as you did when you were sixteen. Like I said, parent voodoo.”

This time the laugh was a proper one, and she relaxed back onto the bench. “And someday we’ll do the same to our own kids.”

I didn’t want her thinking about her kid. “Speaking of your father,” I said. “I wanted to apologize for the way my da acted, the other night.”

Nora shrugged. “There were the two of them in it.”

“Did you see what started them off? I was chatting away with Jackie and missed all the good part. One second everything was grand, the next the two of them were setting up for the fight scene from Rocky.”

Nora adjusted her coat, tucking the heavy collar tighter around her throat. She said, “I didn’t see it either.”

“But you’ve an idea what it was about. Don’t you?”

“Men with a few drinks on them, you know yourself; and they were both after having a tough few days… Anything could have got them going.”

I said, with a harsh sore scrape to it, “Nora, it took me half an hour just to get my da calmed down. Sooner or later, if this keeps going, it’ll give him a heart attack. I don’t know if the bad blood between them is my fault, if it’s because I went out with Rosie and your da wasn’t happy about it; but if that’s the problem, I’d at least like to know, so I can do something about it before it kills my father.”

“God, Francis, don’t be saying that! No way is it your fault!” She was wide-eyed, fingers wrapped round my arm: I had hit the right mix of guilt-tripped and guilt-tripper. “Honest to God, it’s not. The two of them never got on. Even back when I was a little young one, way before you ever went out with Rosie, my da never…”

She dropped the sentence like a hot coal, and her hand came off my arm. I said, “He never had a good word to say about Jimmy Mackey. Is that what you were going to say?”

Nora said, “The other night, that wasn’t your fault. That’s all I was saying.”

“Then whose bloody fault was it? I’m lost here, Nora. I’m in the dark and I’m drowning and nobody will lift one finger to help me out. Rosie’s gone. Kevin’s gone. Half the Place thinks I’m a murderer. I feel like I’m losing my mind. I came to you because I thought you were the one person who would have some clue what I’m going through. I’m begging you, Nora. Tell me what the hell is going on.”

I can multitask; the fact that I was aiming to push her buttons didn’t stop me from meaning just about every word. Nora watched me; in the near dark her eyes were enormous and troubled. She said, “I didn’t see what started the two of them off, Francis. If I had to guess, but, I’d say it was that your da was talking to my ma.”

And there it was. Just that quickly, like gears interlocking and starting to move, dozens of little things going right back to my childhood spun and whirred and clicked neatly into place. I had thought up a hundred possible explanations, each one more involved and unlikely than the last-Matt Daly ratting out one of my da’s less legal activities, some hereditary feud going back to who stole whose last potato during the Famine-but I had never thought of the one thing that starts practically every fight between two men, specially the truly vicious ones: a woman. I said, “The two of them had a thing together.”

I saw her lashes flutter, quick and embarrassed. It was too dark to tell, but I would have bet she was blushing. “I think so, yeah. No one’s ever said it to me straight out, but… I’m almost sure.”

“When?”

“Ah, ages ago, before they were married-it wasn’t an affair, nothing like that. Just kid stuff.”

Which, as I knew better than most people, never stopped anything from mattering. “And then what happened?”

I waited for Nora to describe unspeakable acts of violence, probably involving strangulation, but she shook her head. “I don’t know, Francis. I don’t. Like I said, nobody ever talked to me about it; I just figured it out on my own, from bits and bobs.”

I leaned over and jammed out my smoke on the gravel, shoved it back in the packet. “Now this,” I said, “I didn’t see coming. Color me stupid.”