‘You shot the accountant?’

He laughed, said, ‘That’s more like it son. Let me put it this way, Quinn won’t be a problem, I know you were concerned there.’

‘Jeez, you didn’t top a cop!’

‘Naw, they just broke his legs. If I’d another few hundred they’d have completed the job. But fuck, the readies are tight. Anyroad he won’t be playing for the Police Reserves this season.’

‘You’re a piece of work Doc, you’re a real fuckin’ class act. I better buy a lorry load of strawberry delights.’

‘What?’

‘For the Noble savage, he’s fond of his bikky he is.’

When Doc had gone, I thought about funerals. The way things were shaping, I’d soon be arranging my own. In prison, Doc had waxed eloquent and long about the Irish rituals for it, mainly he’d waxed long.

At a loss after Doc left, I flicked through the paper. Read an article on Patricia Highsmith and liked her saying, ‘I find the public passion for justice quite boring and artificial, for neither life nor nature cares if justice is ever done or not.’

‘Amen,’ I said.

Time to move, I’d an accountant to see, Doc and I had force back-pedalled from out and out war. Not so much a sheathing of weapons as an option for other battlefields. But that didn’t mean I couldn’t bounce somebody’s head off a wall.

Heard the post come through the box, didn’t think it would be news to cheer. The handwriting on the envelope was now familiar. Could be worse I thought, the loony bitch could be phoning. Opened it with a heavy heart. In large clear writing she began,

‘O Happi-Mou,

Why do you refuse us, we are destined to be one and, so it shall be. Time to wake up and smell that coffee – you hear what I’m saying.

A woman described my beloved MacNeice as having the looks of a fallen angel. Like you, he believed himself to have become, as a result of his childhood ‘in a strange way hollow’. And he remained ‘always terrified of his father’.