The kid still looks wary. “I would say you can leave the door open in case you want to run,” Cal says, “but it’s too windy for that. Your call.”

After a minute Trey makes up his mind. He moves into the room, shuts the door behind him and thrusts the egg box at Cal. There’s one left.

“Thanks,” Cal says. “I guess. Stick it in the fridge.”

Trey does. Then he sits down across the table from Cal, chair pushed well back and feet braced, just in case. He’s wearing a dirty army-green parka, which is a relief; Cal has been wondering if the kid even had a winter coat.

“You want something to eat? Drink?”

Trey shakes his head.

“OK,” Cal says. He pushes back his chair—Trey flinches—takes his plate to the sink, then goes into his room and comes back with a notebook and a pen.

“First off,” he says, pulling his chair back up to the table, “most likely I won’t find out anything. Or if I do, it’ll be just what your mama already told you: your brother ran off. You OK with that?”

“He didn’t.”

“Maybe not. What I’m saying is, this might not go the way you got in mind, and you need to be ready for that. Are you?”

“Yeah.”

Cal knows this is a lie, even if the kid doesn’t. “You better be,” he says. “The other thing is, you don’t bullshit me. I ask you a question, you give me all the answer you’ve got. Even if you don’t like it. Any bullshit, I’m out. We clear?”

Trey says, “Same for you. Anything you find out, you tell me.”

“We got a deal,” Cal says. He flips open his notebook. “So. What’s your brother’s full name?”

The kid is straight-backed, with his hands clamped on his thighs, like this is an oral exam and he needs to ace it. “Brendan John Reddy.”

Cal writes that down. “Date of birth?”

“Twelfth of February.”

“Where’d he live, up until he went missing?”

“At home. With us.”

“Who’s ‘us’?”

“My mam. My sisters. My other brother.”

“Names and ages?”

“My mam’s Sheila Reddy, she’s forty-four. Maeve’s nine. Liam’s four. Alanna’s three.”

“You said before you had three sisters,” Cal says, writing. “Where’s the other one?”

“Emer. She went up to Dublin, two years ago. She’s twenty-one.”

“Any chance Brendan’s staying with her?”

Trey shakes his head hard.

“Why not?”

“They don’t get on.”

“How come?”

Shrug. “Brendan says she’s thick.”

“What’s she do?”

“Works at Dunnes Stores. Stacking shelves.”

“How ’bout Brendan? Was he working? In school? College?”

“Nah.”

“Why not?”

Shrug.

“When’d he leave school?”

“Last year. He got his Leaving Cert, he didn’t drop out.”

“He have anything he wanted to do? He apply to any colleges, any jobs?”

“He wanted to do electrical engineering. Or chemistry. He didn’t get the points.”

“Why not? He dumb?”

“No!”

“Then why?”

“Hated school. The teachers.”

The kid is shooting out answers like he’s on the timed round of a quiz show. Cal can tell, watching him, that it feels good. This—the two of them facing each other across this table, the notebook and pen—is what Trey has been working towards, all this time.

“Gimme a little more about him,” Cal says. “What’s he like?”

Trey’s eyebrows twitch together; clearly he has never tried to articulate this before. “He’s a laugh,” he says, in the end. “He talks a lot.”

“You sure you’re related?”

Trey gives Cal a blank stare. “Never mind,” Cal says. “Just joshing you. Go on.”

The kid makes a baffled what-do-you-want-from-me grimace, but Cal waits. “He can’t sit still,” Trey says, in the end. “Mam gives out about that. He got in hassle in school for it, and for messing.”

When Cal keeps waiting: “He likes motorbikes. And making stuff. Like when I was a kid, he made me little cars that actually went, and experiments out the back field to blow stuff up. And he’s not thick. He has ideas. In school he made a load of money buying sweets in town and then selling them at lunch, till the teachers found out.” He glances at Cal, checking whether that’s enough.

Cal is thinking that it sounds like Brendan takes after his daddy a lot more than Trey does, and look what Daddy ended up doing. “Good,” he says. “I like to get an idea who I’m looking for, see what direction it points me. Your brother have any medical conditions? Mental illnesses?”

“No!”

“It’s not an insult, kid,” Cal says. “I need to know.”

The kid is still affronted. “He’s grand.”

“Never went to the doctor for anything?”

“He broke his arm one time. Came off a motorbike. But he went to the hospital for that, not the doctor.”

“He ever seem depressed to you? Anxious?”

Clearly these aren’t concepts to which Trey has given a lot of thought. “He was well pissed off when he didn’t get into college,” he offers, after considering this.

“Pissed off like what? Like staying in his room all day? Not eating? Not talking? What?”

Trey gives Cal a look like he’s being a drama queen. “Nah. Like pissed off. Like he swore a lot, and he went out on the lash that night, and he was in a humor all week. Then he said fuck college anyway, he’d be grand.”

“OK,” Cal says. That doesn’t sound like a tendency towards depression, but family aren’t always the best observers. “Who’d he hang out with?”

“Eugene Moynihan. Fergal O’Connor. Paddy Fallon. Alan Geraghty. Some other lads as well, but mostly them.”

Cal writes those down. “Which one was he closest to?”