The Trespasser

Chapter 8

We get back to an incident room full of nothing. Breslin is still out, presumably talking to Rory’s KAs; the floaters come in and out, fetching more nothing and dumping it on our big fancy desk. Stanton and Deasy turned up nothing at Aislinn’s work, no rumours of an affair with the boss or anyone else, no unrequited crushes either way, no office feuds, no stalkery clients. Meehan comes back from checking Rory’s route home to report that his times match the CCTV footage, meaning Rory didn’t take any major detours between Aislinn’s house and the last time he was caught on camera – although we’ve got no way of confirming what time he got home or what he did afterwards, so we can’t rule out a last-minute detour or a late-night excursion. Gaffney is running Aislinn’s KAs through the system, which spits out a load of traffic tickets, a couple of minor drug possession charges and one guy who smashed his brother’s windscreen with a Hoover. Reilly slouches in with more CCTV footage and a flat stare at me, settles down to watch some telly and occasionally lets out a noise halfway between a cough and a roar to remind us that he’s here and he’s bored.

I’m itching to look up Cueball Lanigan’s boys on the system, but I’m not gonna do it: I’d feel like a twat taking the gang thing that seriously, plus the search would be logged for anyone to find, just like we found the search someone ran on Aislinn last autumn. Instead I go through the statements from the door-to-door again, properly this time, looking for the little things that need following up. I’m not finding them – Gaffney went to town with the highlighter pen on one woman’s statement that she heard the guy in Number 15 roaring about killing someone a week or two back, but seeing as Number 15 has three teenagers, I figure we don’t need to break out the waterboarding equipment just yet. Steve cross-checks Aislinn’s phone records against her phone, and comes up with no discrepancies: no one’s been deleting texts or call logs, not Aislinn and not our guy. No calls or texts from unidentified numbers, either; every number is in her contacts list – and we’ll track down the contacts to make sure they are who the phone says they are – or else comes back to some customer service department. That has its good side – it’s a nice punch in the face for Steve’s cute little fantasy about an Aislinn-and-Daddy reunion – but I’d give a lot for just one text from an unregistered mobile saying Meet me for a shag by the heroin stash at 8.

Every investigation nets you plenty of nothing. You need that – it’s the only way you can narrow down your focus – and normally it feels good, slashing the dead ends off your whiteboard, leaving the live stuff to leap out at you big and bold. This time, though, there’s no slashing going on, just little bits of useless nothing splatting onto my desk like spitballs from some joker I can’t catch. That soaring buzz is turning to edginess, making me shift and knee-jiggle and rub away imaginary itches against the back of my chair. I need something, anything, that’ll zap away Steve’s great big fluffy cloud of if-based babble and leave me with the stuff solid enough to stand on. Incident Room C looks empty to the point of ridiculous, the half-dozen of us dotted around a room that would take thirty easily, the high ceiling and the shining rows of desks shrinking us to dollhouse size. I’m starting to wonder if Breslin was taking the piss out of us, getting the luxury suite for a two-cent case that would have fit in that ex-locker-room shithole with space left over.

At two o’clock we send Gaffney out for pizza, and Stanton pulls up one of the sob radio shows on his phone for lunchtime light relief. Sure enough, they’ve got a big segment about Aislinn, leading into a general outrage-fest about how the country is getting more dangerous for decent law-abiding citizens and the Guards don’t give a damn, complete with phone-ins from old ones who were mugged and left to die in pools of their own blood while uniforms stepped over them looking for a politician’s hole to lick. They even have Crowley on, being profound about how our cavalier attitude towards Aislinn’s murder and our oppressive bullying of geniuses like himself are both symbolic of the sickness of our society ‘on an almost mythic level’, whatever he thinks that means. For a minute there, while we all crease ourselves laughing, we forget what we think of each other.

‘My cousin went out with him for a while,’ Meehan says.

‘Your cousin’s got shite taste,’ Reilly tells him.

‘She does, yeah. She dumped him because he wouldn’t wear johnnies. He said they were a feminist conspiracy to suppress masculine energy.’

Everyone cracks up again. ‘Fucking beautiful,’ Stanton says, reaching to grab another slice. ‘I’m going to see if I can get away with that.’

‘Not a chance,’ I say. ‘If even someone thick enough to shag Crowley didn’t fall for it – no offence to your cousin, Meehan-’

‘Nah, you’re grand. She is thick. She lent the little bollix three grand so he could self-publish his autobiography.’ That sets everyone off again. ‘Never got a penny of it back.’

‘What’d he call it?’ Kellegher asks. ‘Johnny, I Hardly Knew Ye?’

‘Free Willy,’ I say. That gets a laugh with a startled edge, like half the floaters didn’t think I was able for it.

‘Here we go,’ Steve says, swiping at his phone. ‘Truth’s Martyr, by Louis Crowley- No, listen; there’s a review. Five stars. “A searing, towering dissection of one man’s odyssey to reveal the hidden shadows of Irish justice. If you care at all about truth…” Jaysus, it’s longer than the book.’

‘Anyone want to put money on who wrote that?’ Stanton says.

‘How do you reveal a hidden shadow?’ Kellegher wants to know.

‘You lot are just part of the conspiracy,’ Meehan tells us all. ‘I bet you go around trying to put johnnies on poor unsuspecting fellas on the street.’

Reilly beckons to him. ‘C’mere till I stick one on you.’

‘It’d take three of yours.’

‘Here,’ Stanton says, throwing a greasy paper napkin at Meehan. ‘Suppress your masculine energy with that.’ Meehan slaps the napkin away and it goes into Kellegher’s coffee, and all of them start telling me that I need to write up the rest for harassment and creating a hostile workplace environment and wearing crap ties and farting in the unmarked cars. For that minute, the incident room feels like a good place.

‘I’m sure many Guards are fine people,’ Crowley tells us, from Stanton’s phone. ‘But when one of them practically assaults me, simply because I want to keep you informed on what they’re doing about this beautiful young woman’s death, then I think we all have to ask ourselves why she – or he, of course – is so desperate to control what we’re allowed to hear. After all-’

Underneath the solemn voice, he’s obviously creaming his chinos with delight: his story is taking on a life of its own, parallel to reality and getting a lot more traction. Reilly is grinning. ‘That’ll do,’ I say. The laugh has worn off; Crowley is giving me the sick. ‘Yous aren’t a shower of schoolkids. Get some work done.’ Stanton switches off the radio and they all turn back to their computers, throwing each other sideways glances and eyebrow-lifts about what a bitch I am, and the incident room goes back to normal.

The only bit of actual something that comes in is the pathologist’s report. Cooper hates most people, but he likes me – probably out of pure contrariness, but you take what you can get – so he rings me when he finishes writing up the post-mortem, instead of making me wait for his report.

‘Detective Conway,’ he says. ‘I was sorry to miss you at the crime scene yesterday.’

Which is my cue to apologise for not making it in time. ‘We were sorry to miss you,’ I say, snapping my fingers at Steve to get his attention. ‘We got caught up in roadworks. I appreciate you ringing me, Dr Cooper.’

‘The pleasure is mine. I trust the investigation is progressing well?’

‘Not too bad. We’ve got a good suspect. I could do with a bit more hard evidence and a bit less if-then-maybe.’ Steve makes a face at me. ‘Any chance you can help me out there?’

‘I think I can promise you a minimum of if-then-maybe,’ Cooper says, with delicate disdain, like I used bad language. ‘It is hardly my stock in trade.’

‘That’ll be a nice change,’ I say, making a face right back at Steve. Cooper makes a small crunchy noise that could be a laugh.

‘As far as hard evidence goes, the vast majority of the post-mortem examination provided no unexpected information. The victim was in good health, showed no signs of injuries received prior to Saturday night, had not had recent sexual intercourse, was not pregnant and had never borne a child.’ Cooper takes a pause and clears his throat: with that out of the way, we’re getting to the good stuff. ‘As I suggested at the scene, she suffered two sets of injuries: one to the face, and one to the back of the skull. The pattern of the facial injuries is consistent with a punch. The salient fact about this punch is the degree of damage it inflicted: the victim’s jawbone was fractured, and two of her lower left incisors were broken almost out of their sockets. Considerable force was required. I think we can safely say that the blow was inflicted by a man of above average strength and fitness.’

I mouth Strong guy at Steve. He raises his eyebrows at me: That sound like Rory to you?

‘Those injuries, however,’ Cooper says, ‘would not have been life-threatening. The fatal injury was to the right rear of the skull. This injury is linear, approximately two and a half inches long, and made by an object with a sharp right-angled edge, consistent with the fireplace surround on which the victim was found. The blow caused a severe skull fracture leading to an extradural haematoma. In the absence of immediate medical attention, the increasing pressure on the brain resulted in death.’

‘The victim took the punch, went over backwards and hit her head on the fireplace surround,’ I say. ‘How long would it have taken her to die?’

‘Impossible to say. An extradural haematoma can cause death within minutes, or within hours. Given the severity of the injury, I would have expected this one to progress fairly rapidly; precisely how rapidly, however, there is no way to know. One possible indicator, however, may lie in the second injury to the right rear of the skull.’

‘Whoa,’ I say. ‘Second injury?’ Steve’s eyebrows go up. I kick my chair closer to him, switch on speakerphone and put a finger to my lips. Cooper hasn’t made up his mind about Steve yet; one wrong word out of him could end the conversation right there. I feel a weird, idiotic twitch of triumph, like the bad kid seeing her golden little brother in the doghouse while she gets the pats on the head for once. I slap it down.

‘Restrain your excitement, Detective,’ Cooper says. ‘This second injury is minor – a slight contusion. Apart from that, it is practically identical to the first: linear, two inches long, made by an object with a right-angled edge. The two injuries are parallel, lying approximately a quarter of an inch apart, which explains why the second was not immediately obvious at the scene.’ He sounds miffed at the thing for hiding out on him.

I say, ‘So after the victim went down, either she lifted her head and then dropped it again, or else the killer did.’

‘Mmm,’ Cooper says. Steve is scribbling something in his notebook. ‘Either is possible. The killer could certainly have lifted her head to check for signs of life, or she could have attempted to get up but been unable to do more than raise her head. I would expect the initial injury to cause unconsciousness – there was some intraparenchymal bleeding, which generally has immediate neurological consequences – but it is plausible that she briefly regained consciousness before death.’

Steve passes me his notebook. Steve is about the only cop I know who has legible writing – nice writing, full of definite, old-fashioned loops and dashes; I think he practises in his spare time. The page says, Or: first a push – then the punch when she’s down?

I ask, ‘Could the injuries have come the other way round? The killer initially pushed our victim, rather than punching her; she went over backwards, hit her head on the fireplace, but not hard. Then when she was down and stunned, he went after her and punched her in the face?’

‘Ah,’ Cooper says, enjoying that. ‘Ah-ha. Interesting. And possible; certainly possible. Impressive, Detective Conway.’

‘That’s why they pay me the big bucks,’ I say. Steve mouths Hey! and points at his chest. I turn up my palm and grin at him: Nothing I can do, man, hate that.

‘Hmm,’ Cooper says, and I hear pages flicking. ‘In light of this new theory, I must revise my estimate of the killer’s strength. If the punch occurred when the victim’s head was already lying on the stone surround – rather than when she was free-standing, so to speak – it would have required considerably less force to inflict these injuries. Some strength would still be needed, but any healthy adult of normal muscular development could have done it.’

I’m giving Steve the eyebrows right back: that does sound like Rory Fallon. ‘Sorry to make you rewrite your report,’ I say. Cooper handwrites; none of us have the nads to invite him into the twenty-first century, so we get floaters to type up his reports.

‘I would forgive worse sins for the pleasure of hearing an alternative theory that fits the facts so neatly,’ Cooper says. ‘The rewritten report will be with you as soon as possible. I wish you the best of luck in finding hard evidence,’ and he hangs up.

Me and Steve look at each other.

‘That’s not manslaughter,’ he says.

‘Nope. Not if that’s how it went down.’ People get knocked down all the time, get up and hit back; no one expects that to kill. But if you punch someone in the face while the back of her head is up against a sharp stone edge, it takes some cojones to claim you thought she’d get up and walk away.

‘And Breslin likes it being manslaughter.’

His voice has dipped low. He’s right: Breslin jumped straight on the manslaughter scenario. Maybe because that’s a better fit with Rory Fallon, and Breslin wants this to be Rory, just to make everyone’s life simpler; maybe because he knows well that it isn’t, but he thinks we’re more likely to bite on the manslaughter story. ‘Yeah,’ I say. ‘Let’s see what he thinks of the murder version.’

‘Do you see Rory Fallon doing that?’ Steve asks. ‘One wild swing, yeah. But going after her like that?’

‘Whoever did this was raging,’ I say. ‘He snapped. We already knew that. And we’re not looking for King Kong. Rory could’ve done it, no problem.’

‘Could’ve. But we still don’t have a good reason why he would’ve snapped, and as far as we can find, he’s got no experience with violence. Something as vicious as that punch, it’s not easy; not for someone who hasn’t touched another person since he was nine and gave his brother a dig. It’d come more naturally to someone who was in practice.’

‘Nah nah nah.’ I give my chair a shove back to my end of the desk – even the wheels on the Incident Room C chairs work better. ‘You heard Rory. All the most intense shit in that guy’s life goes on inside his head. People like that, you can’t go by what you see. We don’t know what he’s been practising in there; for all we know, he’s spent years rolling out a whole alternative life where he’s a cage fighter. When the pressure was on, it came popping out, and bang.’

The thought of that punch, bone crunching against stone, flashes through both our heads. Steve is right, it’s hard to see Rory on the end of that, but that could be because neither of us wants to. ‘This is why I keep telling you to quit the “if” crap,’ I say. ‘Hazardous to your health.’

‘Don’t worry,’ Steve says, going back to his paperwork. ‘In my fantasy life I’m the super-detective who never misses a solve.’

‘Deadly. Now all we have to do is get you under enough pressure that he pops out.’

Steve glances over, and the abrupt, wry snap of the look startles me. For a moment I think he’s going to say something, but then he shakes his head and starts running his Biro down a line of phone numbers.

Just to be clear: I know, and what with Steve not being a certified moron I assume he knows too, that we should be on our knees praying Rory Fallon is all there is to this case. If we find any evidence that Breslin is bent, we’re in deep shite.

If you catch another cop breaking the rules, or the law, or both, your first-line option is to keep your mouth shut. This is what practically everyone does about the pissant stuff like squaring traffic tickets and running private background checks: you look the other way, because it’s not worth the hassle and because sooner or later you could be the one who needs someone to blink. But even if we want to go that route – which I’m nowhere near sure I do – it’s not gonna be that easy this time, not if whatever we find is tangled up with our murder case.

Your second option, the one you’re supposed to take, is a visit to Internal Affairs. I’ve never tried it. I hear sometimes it gets the job done. Maybe once in a while it even gets the job done without word getting around and turning you into radioactive waste, and without you spending the rest of your life feeling like a rat.

Your third option is to have a chat with the guy, tell him he needs to knock it off, for the sake of his conscience or his career or his family or whatever. Maybe this one sometimes works, too. I can just see the look on Breslin’s face if I go finger-wagging at him about what a bold boy he’s been. If I don’t drown in the spill of self-righteous outrage, I’ll spend what’s left of my career trying to look over both shoulders at once.

Your fourth option is to go to your gaffer, who’ll presumably give you wise fatherly pats on the shoulder, tell you you did the right thing, and do either Option 2 or Option 3 for you. Seeing what my relationship with O’Kelly is like, and what his relationship with Breslin is like, I’m gonna go ahead and figure that – even if I wanted to go running to Big Daddy for help – this one is off the table.

Your fifth option is to drop a couple of hints and get in on the action. Maybe you actually want to join in the fun; maybe you just want a little off the top of the other guy’s kickback, in exchange for keeping your mouth shut. I don’t like money enough to sell myself for it, and I don’t like anything enough to tie my life to some scumbag who’s already proven he can’t be trusted.

Your sixth option is to find yourself a journalist, one who has balls the size of watermelons and doesn’t mind being pulled over for drink-driving every other day for the rest of his life, and go full-on whistleblower.

None of those sound good to me. I’m loving this chase, every second of it. I don’t give a damn whether that means I’m a bad person. But I know if we actually catch what we’re hunting, it’s probably gonna rip our faces off.

I’m having a hard time sitting still. Every few minutes I turn my head to look at Steve, sprawled over his desk like a student, fingers dug into that orange hair, frowning down at his whirlpool of paper. I can’t tell what’s going on in there. A couple of times I actually have my mouth open to ask him: If. What do we do if? Every time, I end up shutting my mouth again and going back to work.

The energy in an incident room usually dips in the middle of the afternoon, same as the energy in any office, but today it stays running high. Partly it’s the room, making us all want to prove we’re up to its standards, but partly it’s me. The mood comes from the top, and that dare is whirling in my mind like a bad-boy lover, speeding up my heartbeat every time it bobs to the surface, beckoning and menacing. The wicked grin of it keeps me working flat out, and when I finish fine-tooth-combing reports it keeps me up and moving around the room, adding to the whiteboard, grabbing tip-line sheets – some anonymous guy is positive he’s seen Aislinn on a very specialised website, stamping on bugs, which sounds unlikely but which the lucky people in Computer Crime will get to investigate anyway. I check out what the floaters are doing, toss out snippets of well-done and try-this – I can do the managerial shite just fine, when I feel like it. I have a laugh with Kellegher, tell Stanton and Deasy how their interviews with Aislinn’s colleagues were bang on. Breslin would be proud of me. The thought of him – he should be back soon – sets me circling again.

Steve’s caught it too: he’s on the phone, trying to light a fire under his Meteor guy for the full records on that unregistered phone. We could go out, burn off that fizz interviewing witnesses, but I don’t want to go anywhere. I don’t want to miss Breslin.

Gaffney has finished his list of Aislinn’s evening classes – which if I wasn’t in a good mood would be depressing as hell: Aislinn genuinely paid actual money for a class called ReStyle You!, with the exclamation mark, also for one on wine appreciation and something called Busy Babes Boot Camp – and he’s ringing round for lists of students. I take the financials off him and go through them for anomalies, while Breslin’s not there to look over my shoulder.

No unexplained sums of money into or out of Aislinn’s current account. The only thing that sticks out is that Lucy was right, Aislinn had a fair bit of cash: she opened a savings account the same month she started work, back in 2006, and most of her salary went straight in there. In the last couple of years she cut back on the saving and spent the extra on chichi clothes websites, but she still had over thirty grand stashed away. She wasn’t carrying any debt – the Greystones home paid for the Stoneybatter cottage and for her crappy second-hand Polo, and she paid off her credit card by direct debit. If she wanted to go travelling or go to college, she would have been well able to do it. She would also have been well able to lend someone a few grand, if someone had asked.

Rory’s financials are more complicated than Aislinn’s, what with the bookshop, and nowhere near as healthy. Nothing remotely dodgy-looking – if there are gangsters in this case, they aren’t laundering their cash through the Wayward Bookshop just to make our lives more interesting – but the business is barely keeping its head above water: in the five years Rory’s owned it, sales have dropped by a third and he’s had to let his part-timer go. The salary he’s taking would look scabby to a burger-flipper. Breslin wasn’t wrong about that Pestle dinner blowing the budget.

We’ve already seen how hard Rory takes humiliation. If he went begging to Aislinn and she slapped him down, his inner Hulk could well have burst his good going-out jumper.

I’m about to call Steve over for a look – he’s up at the whiteboard – when a skinny kid with tufty fair hair and a crap suit sticks his head round the incident-room door. ‘Um,’ he says. ‘Detective Conway?’

‘Yeah.’

He edges between the desks to me like he expects someone to grab him in a headlock halfway. ‘Detective O’Rourke sent me, from Missing Persons? Sorry it took so long; I’ve been downstairs for a while, actually, but some guy – um, I mean, another detective? – he told me you were out. He said I could give it to him, but Detective O’Rourke told me just you, so I was waiting? And then I thought maybe I should check, like just in case-’

‘I’m here now,’ I say. ‘Let’s have it.’

He vanishes again. I catch Steve’s eye as he turns from the whiteboard, jerk my head to say Over here. None of the floaters seem to be paying any attention, but I’m not gonna bank on that.

‘What’s up?’ Steve asks.

‘The file on Aislinn’s da. Don’t make a big deal of it.’

The kid reappears lugging a cardboard box that probably weighs more than he does. Steve leans over his half of the desk and messes with paper, ignoring him.

‘Oof,’ the kid says, dumping the box by my chair and staggering backwards. ‘And this.’ He pulls an envelope out of his pocket and hands it over.

‘Thanks,’ I say. ‘The guy who thought I was out: what’d he look like?’

The kid tries to disappear into his suit. I wait him out. ‘Um,’ he says, in the end. ‘Like, late forties? Five ten, average build? Dark hair, kind of curly, some grey? Stubble?’

Which sounds a whole lot like McCann.

There’s no good reason why McCann should give a damn what anyone’s sending me.

‘Great,’ I say. ‘I’ll have to let him know I’m in here this week. Thanks.’

The kid hovers hopefully, waiting for his pat on the head. ‘I’ll tell Detective O’Rourke you did a good job,’ I say. ‘Bye.’

He edges off. Steve says, ‘What guy who thought you were out?’

‘Someone tried to intercept this stuff.’ I know I sound paranoid. I don’t care. ‘McCann, by the sound of it.’

I watch Steve’s mind go through the same steps mine did. ‘Breslin doesn’t know we’re looking into Aislinn’s da.’

‘Right. McCann wasn’t after this, specifically; he was just going for it because it was there.’

Steve says, ‘Breslin’ll be back soon. You want to take this lot somewhere else?’

‘Fuck that.’ It won’t do any good – if Breslin gets in while we’re gone, someone’s gonna tell him we disappeared hauling a great big box of paper. And besides, this is my incident room. I’m fucked if I’m gonna scuttle off to some closet. ‘We’ll read fast.’

I’m already ripping open the envelope. Steve pulls his chair towards mine – casually, checking his phone for messages at the same time, nothing important going on here.

The note says, Hiya Conway, file on your missing guy. Word of advice as a mate, no back seat driving OK? You don’t like anything keep your big gob shut. I did a bit on the case so any questions give me a ring. GO’R

‘Huh?’ Steve says. ‘Keep your gob shut about what?’

‘No clue.’ I stick the letter in my pocket, for the shredder. ‘Might make sense once we’ve had a look through that lot.’

We read the initial report together, me keeping one eye on the room to see if any of the floaters are looking interested. The lead D was a guy called Feeney; I saw his name on old paperwork when I was in Missing Persons, but he retired years before I came on board. He’s probably dead by now. If we need the inside scoop, we’ll just have to hope Gary’s got it.

In 1998, Desmond Joseph Murray was thirty-three years old, a taxi driver, living in Greystones and working out of Dublin city centre. The photos attached to the file show a slight guy, medium height, with neat brown hair and a sweet, lopsided smile. I barely clocked him in Aislinn’s photo albums. So busy staring at her and hoping her face would trigger my memory, I missed what was right in front of me.

There’s one family shot in there. The wife was small, dark, groomed and good-looking; very good-looking, in the big-eyed, pouty, helpless way that makes me want to heave. And there’s Aislinn, with her too-tight plaits and a big grin, snuggled into the circle of her father’s arm.

‘You know who he reminds me of?’ Steve says. ‘Our boy Rory.’

I tilt the photo my way. He’s right; they don’t look alike, exactly, but they’re definitely the same type. ‘For fuck’s sake,’ I say. ‘What a bleeding cliché. How badly did that stupid bitch need to get a grip?’

‘She was trying to. Give her credit for that, at least.’

Clouds are building up, making the light at the windows shift and heave; the incident room feels precarious and at risk, a ship on a bad sea or an island house with a storm coming in. Something – that light, maybe, or Steve’s quiet voice dissipating out through all the empty space, fading to nothing before it can reach the walls – something makes the words sound, out of nowhere, massively sad. I don’t feel like giving Aislinn credit for anything, or like giving a fuck about her except in terms of basic professional pride, but just for that moment everything about her seems dense enough with sadness to drop you like a sandbag.

I say, ‘What I think of her doesn’t matter. Read.’

Just after three in the afternoon of the fifth of February, Desmond left home in his taxi to follow his usual Thursday routine: pick up his nine-year-old daughter Aislinn from school, drop her home, then head into Dublin to work until the closing-time crowds died down around one in the morning. He picked up Aislinn and dropped her off according to plan. That was the last his family saw of him.

Around four in the morning his wife Evelyn woke up, realised he wasn’t there and started to worry. Desmond had a mobile phone, but he wasn’t answering it; at six she rang the taxi company he worked for, but he didn’t answer their radio either. At ten in the morning she rang the local uniforms. The initial report said ‘informant was distressed’, which is code for ‘freaking the fuck out’. The local guys checked hospitals and stations, found nothing, and told her Desmond was probably taking a bit of time to himself and would be back by evening. When he wasn’t, and the informant had got distressed enough that her doctor had to come round and give her a sedative, they called in Missing Persons.

‘Matches Lucy’s story,’ Steve says. He scoops a thick wad of dusty paper out of the box, hands half of it to me and slides over to his own side of the desk.

‘So far,’ I say. ‘Remember: go fast.’

Steve starts skimming. I swing my feet up on the desk and have a quick discreet scan of the room, over paper, but none of the floaters are looking our way; all of them are working away, busy as good little schoolkids, in the uneasy light.

Evelyn’s statement swore the marriage was wonderful, childhood sweethearts living their happy-ever-after; the paper is gooey with how he still brought her red roses and told her every day that she was the love of his life. It sounds like bollix to me, but the neighbours didn’t contradict her – no one had ever heard them arguing, nothing like that. The financial records came up clean: Desmond and Evelyn weren’t rich, but they weren’t broke, either. Their parents had left enough, between them, to pay off most of the Murrays’ mortgage and Desmond’s taxi licence – and those went for anything up to a hundred grand, back then. There were no other debts; the current account had no suspiciously large deposits and no weird withdrawals to say someone had been buying coke or hitting the betting shops. Desmond had no history of mental illness. He had no criminal record – a few speeding tickets, few parking tickets, what you’d expect from a taxi man. His friends said he was a happy guy, outgoing, worked hard and liked his work, had no enemies and wasn’t the type to make any. Their version of the marriage didn’t match Evelyn’s – according to them, Evelyn basically kept Des prisoner, never wanted to do anything but cried for days if he did anything without her, freaked out if he didn’t answer his mobile fast enough – but none of them had ever heard Des say anything about leaving her, although most of them figured he was just sticking around for the kid and would be out of there the day she left home. This case isn’t sounding like a full box’s worth of mystery to me. I spot Gary’s signature, neater and younger-looking than the one I’m used to, at the bottom of a sheet.

‘Statement from Aislinn,’ Steve says. ‘Look.’

It’s signed in careful, round kid-writing. The day Desmond went missing, he and Aislinn didn’t talk much on the drive home from school; she had a homework assignment that she didn’t understand and she was worried about getting in trouble if she couldn’t do it, so she was mainly thinking about that. She didn’t notice anything odd about her da, but it sounded like she wouldn’t have anyway. The only thing that stood out to her was his goodbye, when he pulled up in front of their gate and she opened the car door to get out. He told her he loved her and to be a good girl, same as always; but then he pulled her over to him, gave her a hug – not part of their routine – and told her to look after her mammy. He watched her to the house and he was still there, waving, when she closed the door.

‘There’s your answer right there,’ Steve says. ‘The guy did a runner.’

‘Yeah, he did. So what’s the rest of this shite?’ I nod at the cardboard box, which is still maybe a third full. This is where I would expect the file to end. Grown man, no reason to kill himself, no history of mental illness, no enemies, a pretty obvious goodbye to his kid: normally you would send one last press release to the media and assume he’s gone because he wants to be and he’ll come home in his own good time, or not.

Only Missing Persons didn’t stop there. They pulled Desmond’s mobile records – which took a few weeks: mobiles weren’t big back then, Ds didn’t have contacts in the phone companies, so they had to go through the official channels – and tracked down everyone he’d contacted in months. Most of the numbers turned out to be either his mates or his regular taxi customers, ringing Desmond direct instead of going through the dispatcher, and they were all able to account for their whereabouts at the time of his disappearance.

The question was why anyone had asked them to. Missing Persons is chronically short on manpower, same as every other squad; normally they put it into the custody-dispute toddler or the walkabout Alzheimer’s granny, not the midlife crisis. I say, ‘The way they worked it. Does that seem off to you?’

Steve says, ‘They were very bloody thorough.’

‘Yeah. Getting alibis off his customers? They worked this like they thought it was a murder.’

‘If Des Murray was on the radar for gang-related activity, even minor stuff, they would’ve pushed the case all the way. In case he was getting to be a liability, and someone gave him two in the back of the head and dumped him up the mountains.’

‘I haven’t found anything that points to gangs. You?’

Steve shakes his head. ‘Me neither. They might not have put it in the file, though.’

Which is true enough. If Feeney didn’t feel like handing over his case to Organised Crime, he would have kept any gang-related ideas to himself, same as we have. I say, ‘Keep reading.’

Des Murray’s cab showed up on a side street in Dún Laoghaire, which moved suicide a couple of notches up the list – Dún Laoghaire has nice long convenient piers – except that there was no note in the taxi. No signs of a struggle, either, and no robbery: there was thirty-four quid, which matched the afternoon’s fares on the meter, tucked down by the gearstick. If Des had done a runner, he had left his wife and kid every penny he could.

The tip line rings; Stanton dives for it, listens, and explains that we don’t think Aislinn Murray was ordering a vodka and diet Coke in a club in Waterford last night, on account of her deadness, but thanks for calling. A couple of the other floaters snort, down at their desks. No one looks up.

‘Whoa,’ Steve says – quietly, but the note in his voice snaps my head up. ‘Here we go.’

I shove my foot off the desk, spin my chair over to his side. ‘Let’s see.’

It’s a report on another of the contacts off Desmond Murray’s phone. The number was a mobile registered to a Vanessa O’Shaughnessy, but it took the Ds a while to track her down. This turned out to be because she had left the country. She had taken a boat to England, on the sixth of February.

‘Oh yeah,’ I say. ‘Bet that got everyone’s attention.’ It definitely gets mine. The ferry to England leaves from Dún Laoghaire.

Steve flips pages: report on Vanessa O’Shaughnessy. We skim fast. She was twenty-eight, a dental nurse, sharing a house in Dublin with a couple of other women. The photo shows a freckly redhead with a wicked, vivid grin – nowhere near the looker Evelyn was, but I’m betting you’d get a lot more crack out of Vanessa. Almost two years before Desmond Murray went missing, she had started ringing or texting him every Sunday afternoon. According to her flatmates, he had brought her to visit her ma, who had Parkinson’s disease and was in a nursing home somewhere in West Dublin with no bus service, and they had agreed to make it a regular gig. The actual texts, once they came in from the phone company, bore that out: Hi des, vanessa here, just checking are you still ok to pick me up at 3?… Hi vanessa, yes i’ll be there, see you then.

After a few months, the phone calls and texts started getting more frequent – twice a week, three times, then almost every day. The flatmates said Vanessa’s ma had been getting sicker, so Vanessa had been visiting her more often. There was still nothing incriminating in the texts. Hi, are we still on for tomorrow evening? and Yes please, I’ll be ready at 7. The odd smiley face; nothing more intimate than that.

‘All business,’ Steve says.

‘It would be, either way. The wife knew he had a mobile. And she sounds like the type who’d check it.’

On the second of January, five weeks before Des Murray went missing, Vanessa’s ma died. After the funeral, she told her housemates and her boss that she was ditching her job and moving to England, for a fresh start. On the sixth of February, she was gone and so was Des.

Report from the nursing home, saying Vanessa’s ma had died unexpectedly, hadn’t been getting worse over the last while, and Vanessa had never visited more than twice a week. Missing Persons called in a favour from someone’s pal in England, who found out that Desmond Murray had applied for a taxi licence in Liverpool. Then they called in another favour from someone’s pal in Liverpool, who went to Murray’s address and verified that he was alive and well and shacked up with Vanessa O’Shaughnessy. And that’s the end of the file.

‘Surprise, surprise,’ I say. ‘Some guy got bored of his wife and swapped her for a newer model. No gangs there. And nothing to do with our case, either, as far as I can see.’

Steve says, ‘But why didn’t Missing Persons tell the family? Aislinn hadn’t a clue about any of this. Why didn’t they just say it to Evelyn Murray at the time?’

If you track down a missing person and he wants you to say nothing – and plenty of them do – then you’re supposed to keep your mouth shut. Normally, though, you make sure the general idea gets across, if only because you don’t want it on your conscience when some rent boy’s ma ODs on her Valium because she’s convinced a serial killer got him. This is exactly the kind of case that should have got a carefully worded hint – Obviously we can’t release details of the investigation, Mrs Murray, but I can tell you that we don’t expect to be asking you to identify a body … For some reason, Feeney and his boys decided not to go there.

‘Unless,’ Steve says. ‘Unless there was something dodgy going on, and the Ds were protecting the family.’

‘Or maybe they did tell the wife, and she didn’t pass it on to the kid.’

‘For fifteen years? Even when the kid was a grown adult? When she was desperate to find out what had happened to her da?’

I shrug. ‘People are weird. You heard Lucy: the ma was ashamed that her husband was gone. Maybe she was too ashamed to tell her daughter why.’

Steve is licking his finger and flipping back through his pile of paper, occasionally pulling out a page or two to add to a stack on his desk. ‘Nah. That note from your mate, about the back-seat driving? This is what he meant: the Ds didn’t tell the family, and if you think they should’ve, keep that to yourself.’

‘I do think the Ds should’ve told the family. It would’ve saved us a shitload of time and hassle.’

Steve glances up at that. ‘They should’ve told the family, full stop. Even if there was dodgy stuff in the background, they should have dropped a hint that he was alive.’

‘Maybe.’ I start tapping my half of the file back into a stack. ‘I’ll ring Gary, ask him what the story was.’

‘You don’t think they should’ve?’

‘I don’t know. Do I look like the Pope to you? Fancy moral decisions aren’t my job.’

‘What would you have done if it was your case? Would you have kept your mouth shut? Seriously?’

‘I would’ve transferred to Murder. Where this kind of shite doesn’t come up.’

‘I’d’ve told them,’ Steve says. I go to dump my paper back in the box; he takes it off me, adds it to his and keeps flipping. ‘No question. Aislinn’s own da? Your woman’s husband? They had a right to know. If they’d known what they were dealing with, it might not have messed up their lives, or anyway not as much.’

I’m pulling out my phone, but that brings my head round. ‘Yeah? Because what? Unless they know where Daddykins is, they’ve got no choice except to lock themselves in the gaff and sit around obsessing about him? There’s no way they could get on with their lives, no?’

It comes out with more edge than I meant it to. Steve stops messing with paper. ‘Come on. I didn’t say that. Just… if they’re spending half their time waiting for the da to walk back in the door, and the other half picturing him dumped someplace up the mountains, then yeah, their heads are gonna be wrecked.’

I dial Gary’s number and keep an eye on the door for Breslin. ‘Then they shouldn’t have spent their time like that. The Ds didn’t force them to. Get a hobby. Knit something.’

Steve starts to say, carefully, ‘I don’t think it’s-’ but I hold up a finger: the phone’s ringing.

Voicemail again. I refuse to start worrying about why Gary doesn’t want to talk to me. ‘Hey, Gary, it’s Antoinette. We got the stuff; thanks. We’ve had a look; your guy can pick it up any time.’ I’m not about to hand that box over to any of our floaters. ‘And give me a ring when you get a chance, yeah? I’ve just got a couple of follow-up questions, and I’d rather run them past you than go chasing anyone else. Talk then.’

I hang up. ‘If he doesn’t want me hassling the original Ds, that should get his attention. And if there was anything dodgy going on, he’ll let me know, to make me quit poking around.’

‘This is all the main stuff,’ Steve says, holding up the stack of pages he’s pulled out of the file. ‘I want photocopies. Just in case.’ He sweeps a handful of random paper off his desk, shoves the statements into the middle and heads off at a casual lope, no hurry, nothing worth noticing here.

I kick the file box under our desk, till Gary can send the crap-suit kid to pick it up. There’s no reason Breslin shouldn’t see it – there’s nothing to see, as far as we can tell – but I don’t want him to. I tell myself that’s just good sense, no matter what: if there’s nothing in the file, I don’t need Breslin giving us flak for wasting our time. Then I spread out Rory’s financials again and pretend to be fascinated by them, for the benefit of Breslin’s pocket poodle, whoever that is.

My instincts are good – not bragging: every D’s are, specially every D who makes it as far as Murder – and I know how to use them. They’ve come through for me when all the solid detective work in the world would have run me into a brick wall. But this time they’re being bugger-all use. Not that they’re out of commission – every sensor is firing wildly, red lights flashing, beeping noises everywhere – but they just keep sweeping, can’t pin anything down. Rory’s keeping something back, but I can’t tell whether it’s the murder or not; Breslin’s fucking with us, but I can’t figure out why. I feel like I’m missing the bleeding obvious here, but the harder I concentrate, the more all the signals turn to noise. Something is scrambling them.

Another D, one with more experience than me, would be well able to do that. The other thing Ds are good at, as well as using their own instincts: wrecking other people’s. Suspects don’t make mistakes because they’re morons, or at least not all of them. They make mistakes because we know how to baffle them into it.

Someone wants me to make a mistake. And I’m a couple of hundred miles out to sea with all my systems going haywire.

That doesn’t faze me too much, not in itself. Danger isn’t the thing scrambling my signals; it’s the only thing keeping me clear-headed enough that I have a chance of navigating my way out of this. I watch Steve, heading back between the desks with a brand-new blue folder sticking out from his handful of random paperwork, and I really hope he works the same way.