There's one good thing about losing three lovely little fellows to fire. At least their belongings are gone too. At least there's no home left that would have the shapes of their small lives imprinted on it.
There are only the burned walls, and the gaping window-spaces. The people who loved Richard and Mark and Jason - such carefully non-sectarian names! - will not have to see the boys' shoes or their toys or any of the things that would bring the reality of them back. There is nothing left. It is better not to think that they were real, warm, squirming boys. Because the neighbours heard them screaming as they were - Mo Mowlam's voice cracked at the two words - burnt alive.
If neighbours is the right word. They stood at the front doors of the estate under a sullen sky yesterday. Thin young women in jeans, smoking hard. Shaven-headed, thickset young men. They wouldn't say anything. A woman who begged not to have her voice recorded said that every night last week there has been shouting and running noises as the local Protestant hoods intimidated the few last Catholics out of the place.
She wouldn't even look out of the window, she said. If she was caught looking out of the window she wouldn't be safe. The mob got the boys' grandmother out last week. Yesterday they broke the family for ever. And it wasn't as if the Quinns were hated newcomers. They were among the longest-standing residents of this estate of transients, where big guard-dogs bay behind fences, and garden after garden is a patch of weeds.
How did they have the courage to live there at all? Where the Ulster flags don't just fly from the houses but are stretched across the windows of the houses from inside? It is the kind of place that has magic only for children. Three little boys, of much the same ages as the murdered ones, hung around in an alleyway behind the burned house. They had hair died blonde, like Gazza. Everyone would know them, just as the little Quinns must have been known. Children could move around the estate, half unseen. But most things would be seen. It is a very intimate estate - there isn't 30 feet from front door to front door - and no stranger could come in, especially on a night like the night of the murder, when the place was lit up by burning barricades. Someone knows very well who torched the little boys' house. Twelve hours after their bodies were taken out by firemen there were only a few bunches of flowers left for them, most of them unsigned.
"Safe in the arms of Jesus," one of them says; "Sleep Tight, Little Ones." You look around and think, they're better off! They're better off out of it! And then you see the three blonde kids, scampering past, full of life.
There are armoured cars and soldiers with guns in the hedgerows out the country road, where the boys will be taken past in their coffins to be buried in their mother's village, Rasharkin. The RUC and the British army are out there because bad trouble is foreseen at the Dunloy Orange march. The same Orange celebration has caused trouble in Dunloy every year.
As it has, every year, not just this year, on the estate the Quinns lived in. Undismayed, the loyalist flags fly and a triumphal Orange arch spans the road at Rasharkin. When the cortege gets to the Catholic graveyard it will be coming to join the other Quinns buried there. They sleep peacefully under their tombstones. As the boys were sleeping, the first half of their last night. But the boys will be safe in the graveyard. They'll be at last in the only place where the defenceless are safe in Northern Ireland: among their own.