Autumn. A farmer’s wife in Tipperary had stabbed her husband thirty-seven times on the previous Saturday night. He had not struggled.

“He was terrible drunk and him coming home from the pub,” Kilmartin said. “She might have hit him dead on with the first one. No wonder he didn’t stir.”

“They have five children. She has, I mean,” said Minogue.

Chief Inspector James Kilmartin looked to the front of the report. “Five is right. The oldest is nine and there’s an infant just a year old.”

“She never reported him at all. Not even to her own family,” Minogue continued.

“And that may be what’ll sink her in court, I don’t mind telling you, Matt. She’s in dire need of someone to corroborate the beatings. Even a record of a complaint, a remark to a friend. But sure you saw yourself where they live. A pigsty.”

Kilmartin and Minogue had gone the previous Wednesday to Cahir, Co. Tipperary, where the woman, Marguerite Ryan, was held in jail, and had been driven out to the Glen of Aherlow by two local Gardai. The farmhouse was a squat, whitewashed affair with cement floors. Minogue walked through it, appalled. Clothes lay scattered in the bedrooms, as though a violent storm had moved through the house. The blood had dried to a chocolate colour on the bedclothes. The woman’s sister had taken the children. Minogue, a farmer’s son, had been unnerved by the filth of the place, the rusted pieces of scrap iron and refuse which had gathered in small mounds by the front of the house over the years.

“She admitted that he just came in and fell into bed: he didn’t lay a hand on her,” Kilmartin said. He turned two pages and searched for lines he had noted.

“ ‘He was in a terrible drunken state’-this is her statement-‘and he was muttering and cursing and I didn’t know what he was saying. He got into the bed and he was asleep almost straight away. I was in a humour of great despair and fear for several weeks, seeing as my husband had been drinking heavily and threatening myself and our oldest, Sean’,” Kilmartin intoned.