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with me forever. There were voices outside, but the music stilled them. There was a moment of silence as Kelly finished—then a brick came in through a window. Tod pulled a Smith & Wesson revolver out of his pocket and pushed it into my hand. I’d done a training course on the use of weapons on stage.”
    “Which was your only experience of handling a gun?” Sara said.
    “Exactly. Father Murphy shouted, You know the way out, boys. Don’t worry about me. They wouldn’t dare to harm a priest. The church door swung open, men burst in, the first one already firing a pistol,” Dillon continued. “He hit me in the left shoulder. I staggered back, firing blindly, and caught him in the throat. Tod shot the man behind them, driving the others back, then got an arm around me, hustled me into the vestry, Kelly following, down some steps to a cellar. There was a manhole in a corner, they opened it, and we scrambled into a sewage tunnel, big enough to walk along, all the way down to the docks.”
    “And obviously, you got away,” Sara said.
    “That part of the city is an underground network of similar tunnels. I remember us surfacing in some sort of large garage full of trucks and vans, and then I blacked out, so I can only tell you what I was told later.”
    “And what was that?”
    “The Provos had the trick of using ambulances they’d got their hands on, manning them with their own people wearing hospital uniforms. Tod told me they had a real nurse pump me full of morphine, then he and Kelly scrambled in the back wearing hospital scrubs and we were away, sailing through every roadblock.”
    “To where?” Sara asked.
    “Over the border into the Republic, to a charity hospital called St. Mary’s Priory run by the Little Sisters of the Poor, a nursing order.”
    “Strictly speaking, that was illegal.”
    “Of course, but how far do you think they’d get putting nuns in court in Ireland? Tod and Kelly left me to it, then came back three weeks later when I was fit to leave.”
    “An amazing story, the whole business, changing your life like that. You were forced into killing that UVF man, I can see that, but why did you join the PIRA and set foot on such a course?”
    “It was nothing to do with the death of that UVF man, everything to do with what happened to Father Murphy. He and the sexton buried my father as he had promised. A week later, somebody ran him down one night, left him dead in the road.”
    Sara was distressed. “It could have been an accident, Sean.”
    “You don’t believe that any more than I did at the time. But never mind. You’ve been so gripped by my story that you’ve lost sight of why I told it to you.”
    “What are you saying?” she asked.
    He showed her the photo on his phone. She examined it, frowning. “Who on earth are these two?”
    “Supposedly their names are Jackson and Hawkins, two Americans visiting Nantucket in a sportfisherman out of Long Island. I got that photo of them from a nice kid named Henry working out of the harbormaster’s office. Remember I went for a walk on the beach down to the harbor? I found Henry checking boats and showed him the Chechen photos. He recognized them as having had a row with Jackson and Hawkins the previous evening, told mehe was surprised to find that they had already left in their boat, which was booked to stay until Friday.”
    “Are you trying to say you know these men?”
    “I certainly don’t recognize them, but beards and bushy hairdos are a very successful disguise, so I’ve always found. But some things can’t be disguised. What if I told you that Henry’s a jazz enthusiast and heard Hawkins, the one with the white hair, playing the finest clarinet he’d ever heard but didn’t recognize the music. When he asked what it was, Hawkins told him it was an old Irish folk song called ‘The Lark in the Clear Air,’ which he’d played in the style of George Gershwin.”
    Her eyes widened as she stared at him, stunned. “Oh, my