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took a bottle of wine out of his bag, unscrewed the cap and took a long swig from it. Then he offered it to me.
    I said, ‘No thank you,’ in a voice that suggested I wouldn’t dream of drinking at such an ungodly hour.
    He said, ‘Oh, hang on a second,’ and he rummaged around in his bag again. This time, he brought out a crumpled paper cup into which he poured a good measure of wine. He set it on my table top, thrust one of his enormous hands towards me and said, ‘Cunningham. Thomas Cunningham.’ His accent was midlands. Cavan, maybe. Or, worse, Monaghan.
    I said, ‘Kavanagh. Kat Kavanagh.’ Not even Katherine.
    He said, ‘What decade are you on?’
    ‘I beg your pardon?’ Was this some new way of asking people their age? The cheek.
    He said, ‘Of the rosary. There’re four of them. Or five. I was just wondering which one you were on.’ I had forgotten about the rosary beads threaded round my fingers. I do that sometimes. On planes. And trains. In queues. They’re a great deterrent.
    ‘Oh.’ I stuffed the beads into my handbag.
    He said nothing then and I’d say that would have been that, which would have suited me fine. But then I said, ‘Is that one of those Declan Darker books?’ And, just like that, I turned into one of those people I have spent my life avoiding. People who strike up conversations with strangers on planes and trains and in queues.
    He nodded and picked up the book. He said, ‘Have you read them?’
    I nodded. He opened the book. Inside the jacket was a photograph of Killian Kobain. Well, a photograph of an actor posing as the reclusive Killian Kobain.
    Thomas looked at the photograph. ‘It’s funny, you know . . .’
    ‘What?’
    He shook his head and smiled. ‘I read this one years ago. A friend gave it to me. It didn’t have the author’s photograph on the jacket and I just read the book without really paying any attention to who wrote it and I just assumed that the book was written by a woman.’
    ‘Why?’ Nobody had ever questioned Killian Kobain’s gender. His sexuality, yes. Of course. You don’t get to have bone structure like Kobain’s without the occasional allusion to sides and which one you might be batting for.
    Without skipping a beat, Cunningham-Thomas-Cunningham said, ‘Because of the hands.’
    ‘The hands?’
    ‘The way he describes people’s hands. He’s always at it. Men don’t describe hands. And certainly not fingers. Here, try me.’
    He clamped the book over his eyes and said, ‘Go ahead.’
    ‘What?’
    ‘Go ahead and ask me.’
    ‘Ask you what?’
    ‘Ask me to describe your hands.’
    It was obvious he wasn’t going to let up so I said, ‘Er, what do my hands look like?’
    And he said, ‘No idea,’ and he lowered the book from his face. ‘See? Now it’s your turn.’
    And there I was, sitting on a plane that was squatting on a runway at Dublin airport on a wet, dreary Friday evening in August, with my hand over my eyes and, beside me, a man I’d just met saying, ‘Go on, go on, give it a go, sure.’
    I said, ‘Big. Hairy. Gold band on the little finger of the left hand. Long scar running down the palm of the right hand.’ I lowered my hand.
    He examined his hands. Then looked at me, shaking his head. ‘That’s un-bel-eeev-able,’ he said and I almost felt a sense of achievement, the way he said it.
    ‘It’s not. It’s easy. Especially with your paws. No offence.’
    He smiled. ‘None taken. Hands like shovels. That’s what the mammy says.’
    He took out the wine bottle, refilled my cup. He said, ‘I mean, Kobain once described a man as having smokers’ nails.’
    I remembered the character. Luka Brown. Second victim of Malcolm Beeston, a serial killer with a fondness for strangulation by washing line. If Malcolm hadn’t killed Luka, the fags would have got him. Sooner rather than later, I’d say. He was a two-pack-a-day man.
    ‘So . . . do you . . . ah . . . like the Declan Darker books?’ I couldn’t