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excited because she didn’t know why it mattered or what would come of it or if after she’d seen him again the feeling would go away. From the top landing Sylvie looked back down the stairs. The iron banister was wound as tightly as the coil of a dynamo and far below the boy gaped up at her, open-mouthed.
    She stepped forward and knocked on Fran Hagarty’s door.
    â€˜It’s open,’ he said.
    There was no handle, only a thumb-latch.
    She pressed the latch and went into the room.
    It was a very small room, square-shaped, neat and spartan. On a small table by the window were a typewriting machine, a pile of copybooks, a shaving lamp and a bottle of whiskey, half full. On the bedside table were a ewer and basin and a candle in a tin holder. There were two chairs in the room, both wooden, both upright. The bed-end pointed at the door.
    Fran was lying on the bed on top of a brown patchwork quilt. He wore only trousers and a white cotton undershirt. His feet were bare. He was propped up on a bolster flanked by two feather pillows. His left hand, bandaged, was behind his head and he was smoking a cigarette.
    He looked at her for a moment without moving then rolled on to his hip and dabbed the cigarette into the base of the candleholder. He rolled back and put both hands behind his head.
    â€˜Well, Sylvie,’ he said, ‘that didn’t take you long.’
    â€˜What didn’t?’ Sylvie said.
    â€˜Finding me again,’ Fran Hagarty said, and grinned.

Chapter Three
    There was a time when Sylvie would have considered the appearance on her doorstep of three plain-clothes detectives as something of a joke.
    Before Bodenstown, before Fran, she remained ignorant of the threat she posed to law and order. It hadn’t occurred to her that the Shamrock had become a meeting place for subversives, mainly because the subversives were relatives. It was impossible to regard her father-in-law as much more than a comic opera Irishman, big-bellied and bluff and none too agile in the brains department, difficult to imagine Turk or Charlie grasping the reins of power with the same enthusiasm with which they reached for a glass of stout; yet there they were, Detective Inspector Vaizey and two other detectives from the Special Crime Branch framed in the doorway in the mid-morning light.
    Jansis opened the door. She was a tall, angular woman, not much more than thirty, but with a long, sallow, horsy sort of face and a lugubrious expression that suggested she was already reconciled to spinsterhood. Though the men weren’t in uniform Jansis recognised their trademark raincoats and snap-brimmed hats immediately. ‘We’re full, so we are,’ she said. ‘Sorry.’
    She made to close the door but a heavy welted brogan slapped down on the draught-rod to prevent it. She stepped back into the hall, stuck her fists on her bony hips, spread her elbows and with a truculence honed by years of serving breakfasts to commercial travellers, snapped, ‘Cards.’
    The moist moustache that clung to Vaizey’s upper lip twitched. He raised a hand, clicked his fingers. One of the men, a head taller than Vaizey, thrust an identity card under Jansis’s nose.
    â€˜Metropolitan Police,’ he growled. ‘If you know what’s good for you, woman, you’ll be lettin’ us enter wi’out makin’ a fuss.’
    â€˜Oh, so you’re a copper, are you?’ Jansis said.
    She turned her head and spat drily over her shoulder.
    Vaizey said, ‘Get rid of her, Ames, please.’
    The burly copper strode into the hall, lifted Jansis up by the elbows as if she were a large flowerpot and placed her clear of the doorway. Before her feet touched down, Jansis was shouting, ‘Raid, it’s a raid, Missus ’Culloch. Raid. Raid.’
    From the stairs came the cry, ‘Brutes,’ followed by a shower of stale water from a ewer, followed by the ewer itself, then a packet of