Call me twisted, but I loved that month we spent planning. I had some hassle sleeping, every now and then, but a big part of me was having a blast. It felt like being an architect, or a film director: someone with long-range vision, someone with plans. For the first time ever, I was engineering something huge and complex that, if I could just get it right, would be utterly, utterly worthwhile.

Then all of a sudden someone offered Da two weeks’ work, which meant that on the last night he would be coming home at two in the morning with a blood-alcohol level that would stop any cop’s suspicions in their tracks, and there were no excuses left for waiting. We were on our final countdown: two weeks to go.

We had run over our alibi till we could have recited it in our sleep. Family dinner, finished off with yummy sherry trifle, courtesy of my new domestic streak-sherry not only dissolved the Valium better than water, it masked the taste, and individual trifles meant personalized doses. Up to the disco at the Grove, over on the northside, in search of a fresh pool of lovely ladies to fish in; getting thrown out by midnight, as memorably as possible, for being loud and obnoxious and for sneaking in our own cans; walking home, stopping along the way to finish off our contraband cans on the banks of the canal. Home around three, when the Valium should have started wearing off, to the shocking sight of our beloved father lying at the bottom of the stairs in a pool of his own blood. Then came the much too late mouth-to-mouth, the frantic banging on the Harrison sisters’ door, the wild phone call for an ambulance. Just about everything, except the stop for refreshment, was going to be true.

Probably we would have got caught. Natural talent or no, we were amateurs: there were too many things we had missed, and way too many that could have gone wrong. Even at the time, I half knew that. I didn’t care. We had a chance.

We were ready. In my head, I was already living every day as a guy who had killed his own da. And then Rosie Daly and I went to Galligan’s one night, and she said England.

I didn’t tell Shay why I was pulling the plug. At first he thought I was having some kind of sick joke. Slowly, as it dawned on him that I meant it, he got more frantic. He tried bullying, tried threatening, he even tried begging. When none of those worked, he got me by the neck, hauled me out of the Blackbird and beat the shite out of me-it was a week before I could walk upright. I hardly fought back; deep down, I figured he had a right. When he finally exhausted himself and collapsed beside me in the laneway, I could barely see him through the blood, but I think he might have been crying.

I said, “That’s not what we’re here to talk about.”

Shay barely heard me. He said, “At first I thought you just chickened out: didn’t have the guts, once it started getting close. I thought that for months, right up until I got talking to Imelda Tierney. Then I knew. It had nothing to do with guts. The only thing you ever cared about was what you wanted. Once you found an easier way to that, the rest wasn’t worth a damn to you. Your family, me, everything you owed, everything we’d promised: not a damn.”

I said, “Let me make sure I’ve got this straight. You’re giving me shit for not having killed someone?”

His lip pulling up in pure disgust: I’d seen that look on his face a thousand times, when we were little kids and I was trying to keep up. “Don’t get clever. I’m giving you shit because you think that puts you above me. You listen to me: maybe your cop mates all believe you’re one of the good guys, maybe you can tell yourself the same thing, but I know better. I know what you are.”

I said, “Pal, I can promise you, you do not have the foggiest clue what I am.”

“Do I not? I know this much: that’s why you joined the cops. Because of what we almost did, that spring. How it made you feel.”

“I had a sudden urge to make amends for my wicked past? The sappy streak is cute on you, but no. Sorry to disappoint.”

Shay laughed out loud, a fierce burst that showed his teeth and made him look like that reckless bad-news teenager again. “Make amends, my arse. Not our Francis, not in a million years. No: once you’ve got a badge to hide behind, you can get away with anything you like. Tell me, Detective. I’m only dying to know. What’ve you got away with, along the way?”

I said, “You need to get this through your thick skull. All your ifs and buts and almosts mean bugger-all. I did nothing. I could walk into any station in the country, confess every single thing we planned that spring, and the only thing I’d get in trouble for would be wasting police time. This isn’t church; you don’t go to hell just for thinking bad thoughts.”

“No? Tell me it didn’t change you, that month we spent planning. Tell me you didn’t feel different, after. Come on.”

Da used to say, a few seconds before the first punch, that Shay never knew when to stop. I said, and my voice should have made him back off, “Surely to sweet baby Jesus in heaven you’re not trying to blame me for what you did to Rosie.”

That twitch of his lip again, halfway between a tic and a snarl. “I’m only telling you. I’m not going to sit in my own home and watch you give me that self-righteous look, when you’re no different from me.”

“Yeah, pal, I am. We may have had some interesting conversations, you and me, but when you get down to the actual facts, the fact is that I never laid a finger on Da, and the fact is that you murdered two people. Call me crazy, but I’m seeing a distinction there.”

His jaw had set hard again. “I did nothing to Kevin. Nothing.”

In other words, sharing time was over. After a moment I said, “Maybe I’m losing my mind here, but I’m getting the sense you expect me to just nod and smile and walk away. Do me a big fat favor: tell me I’m wrong.”

That glitter of hate was back in Shay’s eyes, pure and mindless as heat lightning. “Take a look around yourself, Detective. Have you not noticed? You’re right back where you started. Your family needs you again, you still owe us, and this time you’re going to pay up. Only you’re in luck. This time, if you don’t fancy sticking around and doing your share, all we need you to do is walk away.”

I said, “You think for one second that I’m going to let you away with this, you’re even crazier than I thought.”

The moving shadows turned his face into a wild animal mask. “Yeah? Let’s see you prove it, pig. Kevin’s not here to say I went out that night. Your Holly’s made of better stuff than you, she won’t squeal on family; and even if you twist her arm, you can take everything the child says as gospel, but other people might not feel the same way. Fuck off back to your cop shop and get your little pals to blow you till you feel better. You’ve got nothing.”

I said, “I don’t know where you got the idea that I’m planning on proving anything.” Then I slammed the table into Shay’s stomach. He grunted and went over backwards with the table on top of him, glasses and the ashtray and the whiskey bottle thudding everywhere. I kicked my chair out of my way and dived after him. That was the moment when I realized I had come into that flat to kill him.

A second later, when he got hold of the bottle and aimed for my head, I realized that he was trying to kill me too. I ducked sideways and felt it split my temple open, but through the burst of stars I got a grip on his hair and banged his head off the floor till he used the table to shove me off him. I went over hard, flat on my back; he leaped on top of me and we rolled, jabbing for soft spots with everything we had. He was as strong as me and every bit as furious, and neither one of us could let go of the other. We were wrapped together tight as lovers, pressed cheek to cheek. The closeness, and the others downstairs, and nineteen years’ worth of practice, muffled us almost silent: the only sounds were hard straining breath and the fleshy thuds when something hit home. I smelled Palmolive soap, straight out of our childhood, and the hot-steam smell of animal rage.