The Trespasser

Chapter 10

The next morning I lie in bed and think about staying there. I didn’t get a lot of sleep; after I rang my ma and told her about Aislinn’s mouthful of blood clots and smashed teeth (‘Huh’), I spent half the night leaping up to investigate random noises – in this weather, there were plenty of those – and the other half trying to lie still and trying to decide who deserves a punch in the gob more, Steve for coming up with the gang theory or me for actually going along with it. By six in the morning my body is one hard knot. I haven’t mitched off since school, but today I can’t remember why not. Two things stop me: if I don’t go to work, I’ll run till my legs give out and then sit at home driving myself mental; and if I don’t go to work, that’s one more day I’ll have to spend on this shitpile of a case.

I get into my running gear without turning on a light. Then I switch off the motion-sensor lights, slip out to my patio and go over the back wall. It’s dark, the flat drained dark that comes before dawn, when even the night things – foxes, bats, drunks and dangers – have finished their business and gone to sleep; even the wind has died down to an uneasy, feeble twitch. I move up the laneway without making a sound and flatten myself in shadows to peer around the corner and down the street. There’s no one hanging around at the top of my road; no one anywhere, in either direction, as far as I can see in the sick yellowish light. I go take a look down my road: no one there either.

Normally my run leaves me feeling like nothing but long muscles streaming with strength, able and beckoning for more, for anything, bring it on. That feeling is what gets me through my shift. Today the strength is nowhere. I’m lurching like a flabby first-timer; my legs drag like they’re wrapped in wet sandbags, my arms flop and my breathing can’t find a rhythm. I push harder, till my chest feels like it’s ripping and a thick red seethes up over my eyes. I hang onto a lamppost, doubled over, waiting for it to clear.

I make it home at a jog – some part of my head tells me that if I drop to a walk, I’m screwed in ways I can’t put my finger on. By the time I get back to my road, my legs have stopped shaking. The first layers of dark are starting to peel away, and windows are lighting up. There’s still no one there.

I told Fleas I’d get my locks and my alarm system looked at. I meant it at the time, but somewhere since then I’ve changed my mind. The guy casing my gaff is the only thing left in my week that has potential. If he sees locksmiths and alarm techs swarming over my house, he’ll know he’s been burned; he’ll find someone else to stalk, or get himself another hobby, or back off and wait a few weeks or months before he comes looking for me again. I need him now.

I take my shower, throw some cereal into me and head out for work. There’s still no one outside.

I make it to work without getting pulled over – even wankers take a while to gear up in the morning. Outside our building, in the strange unfocused mix of early light and thick halogens, McCann is leaning against the wall and having a smoke.

‘Howya,’ I say, without stopping. McCann lifts his chin, but he doesn’t bother talking, not that I expected him to.

He looks like shite. McCann isn’t slick to start with, not like Breslin; he’s one of those guys who always look like they’re fighting back their natural state of scruffiness – five o’clock shadow by noon, greying dark curls that won’t lie flat. Normally he wins the battle, because he obviously used to be good-looking not too long ago, before the jowls and the belly started loosening, and because everything he wears is always immaculate and ironed so smooth you could skate on it. This morning, though, he’s losing. The five o’clock shadow has turned into full-on stubble; his shirt is creased, there’s something brown and sticky on his jacket sleeve, and his eyebags are moving towards black eyes.

While me and Steve were sculpting our fancy twirly conspiracy theories, like a pair of mouth-breathers in an internet sinkhole, Breslin was telling the truth all along: McCann is in the missus’s bad books. He’s sleeping on the sofa and doing his own ironing. I could laugh, if the great big joke wasn’t on me.

I have my hand on the door when he says, ‘Conway.’

I stop in spite of myself. I want to hear, just for confirmation, what I already know he’s going to say. McCann is gonna drop me a nice juicy hint that him and Breslin are on the take.

‘Yeah,’ I say.

McCann has his head back against the wall, looking out at the winter-scrawny gardens, not at me. He says, ‘How’re you getting on with Breslin?’

‘Fine.’

‘He says good things about you.’

He does in his arse. ‘Nice to hear,’ I say.

‘He’s a good D, Breslin is. The best. Good to work with, too: he’ll look after you, whatever it takes. As long as you don’t fuck him about.’

‘McCann,’ I say. ‘I’m just doing my job. I’m not planning on fucking your pal about. OK?’

That gets one humourless twitch of his mouth. ‘You’d better not. He’s got enough on his mind already.’

And there it is. Took him all of twenty seconds. ‘Yeah? Like what?’

McCann shakes his head, one brief jerk. ‘Forget it. You don’t want to know.’

Yesterday I’d have been drooling down my suit. Now all I can feel is a small, bitter flare of anger, too exhausted to last. Whatever Breslin’s playing at, he’s decided his approach isn’t doing the job; so, just like he would with some slack-jawed suspect, he’s sent McCann in to try a different angle. The scatter of cigarette butts at McCann’s feet says he’s been waiting out here for God knows how long, just to feed me a few lines out of a B-movie. ‘Whatever,’ I say. ‘I’ll have him back to you in one piece, fast as I can. Believe me.’

I’m turning away when McCann says, through his cigarette, ‘Hang on.’

I say, ‘What.’

He watches ash scud away across the cobblestones. He says, ‘Roche nicked your statement sheet.’

‘What are you talking about?’

‘Your street fight from Saturday night. The last page of a witness statement went missing on you.’

I say, ‘I don’t remember telling you about that.’

‘You didn’t. Roche was having a laugh about it in the squad room, yesterday.’ McCann reaches a hand into his jacket pocket, pulls out a folded sheet of paper and passes it to me. I unfold it: my statement page. ‘With Roche’s apologies. More or less.’

I hold out the sheet. ‘I got the witness to redo it.’

McCann doesn’t take it. ‘I know you did. This’ – he flicks the paper – ‘isn’t the point. Shred it, stuff it up Roche’s hole, I don’t care.’

‘Then what is the point?’

‘The point is, not everyone on the squad is Roche. Me and Bres, we’ve got nothing against you. You’re not a waste of space like some of that lot; you’ve got the makings of a good D. We’d be happy to see you do well for yourself.’

‘Great,’ I say. It sounds so much like truth, matter-of-fact with just the faintest fleck of warmth, the gruff old dog who isn’t about to get sappy but wants the best for the young learner who’s earned his respect. If I hadn’t seen McCann do his shtick in a dozen interrogations, and if I didn’t know a million times better, I might even fall for it. ‘Thanks.’

‘So if Breslin tells you to do something, it’s for your own good. Even if you can’t see how; even if you think he’s wrong. If you’ve got sense, you’ll listen to him. D’you get me?’

McCann’s eyes are on me now, bloodshot from wind and fatigue. His voice has condensed, concentrated. This is the important part; this is what kept him waiting in the cold for me to walk out of the blurry, layered light, to the place where he wants me.

‘I get you just fine,’ I say. ‘I’m missing nothing.’ I crumple the statement sheet in my fist and shove it into my coat pocket. ‘See you ’round.’

‘Yeah,’ McCann says. ‘See you.’ He turns away again, dark sagging profile against the growing light. The dirty reek of his cigarette follows me into the building.

Me and McCann are both early. The cleaner is still hoovering the corridor; when I pass the squad-room door, the only sounds inside are patchy two-man chat and the perky squawking of drivetime radio. Incident Room C is empty except for Steve, sprawled at our desk, looking rumpled and hugging a cup of coffee.

‘You’re in early,’ I say.

‘Couldn’t sleep.’

‘Me neither. Any sign of Breslin?’

‘Nope.’

‘Good.’ I’m not in the humour for Breslin. There’s a stack of little plastic photo albums on Steve’s desk: mug books. I nod at them. ‘What’re those for?’

‘Gang lads,’ Steve says, through a yawn. ‘Lanigan’s lot, mostly. I want to run them past the barman in Ganly’s. Then I’ll show them to Aislinn’s neighbours, see if anyone recognises-’

I say, ‘The gang theory’s dead.’ It feels like punching a bruise.

Steve’s face looks slapped blank. He says, ‘Wait. What?’

‘Gone. Out the window. I never want to hear about it again. Is that clear enough?’

‘Hang on,’ Steve says. He’s lifted his hands and forgotten them in mid-air, trying to get his head together. ‘Hang on. No. Then what was Breslin playing at yesterday, ditching Gaffney? Don’t tell me you actually believe he stopped off for a shag.’

I toss my satchel on the floor and throw myself into my chair. It feels good, watching this hit Steve. ‘Maybe he was getting his nails done. Maybe he didn’t go anywhere special; he just wanted to show us he wasn’t going to take orders from the likes of us. I don’t care either way.’

‘And you saw him give Gaffney the cash for his sandwich, yeah? The roll of fifties? What was he doing with those?’

‘Did you not hear me? I don’t care. I don’t care if he wants to carry around his entire savings fund in his pocket so the Illuminati can’t get their hands on it. His problem. Not ours.’

‘OK,’ Steve says carefully. He’s looking at me like I might have rabies. ‘OK. What the hell happened last night?’

‘Last night,’ I say, ‘I had a chat with a guy I know. He knows the gang scene inside out, and he says we can rule out that angle. Aislinn had fuck-all to do with gangs. End of story. On the tiny off-chance he finds anything to contradict that, he’ll let us know, but we shouldn’t hold our breath. And we should be very bloody grateful that we found this out before we made twats of ourselves in front of the entire squad.’

Steve looks like a lorry splattered his hamster. He says, ‘How well do you know this guy?’

‘Well enough. We go back.’

‘Are you sure you can trust him?’

The face on him; like this can’t be happening, not to his very own special pet idea. ‘If I didn’t fucking trust him, would I have fucking asked him for his opinion?’

‘No. I’m only-’

‘No. And do I look fucking brain-damaged?’

‘No-’

‘No. So when I say we can trust him, it probably means we can trust him.’

‘Fair enough,’ Steve says. His face has turned neutral; he’s drawn back inside himself, which is what he does when he’s pissed off. ‘Let’s do that.’

I leave him to sulk it off and go back to work, or try to. It’s not clicking; I have to read every sentence three times before it sinks in. Normally I can concentrate through anything – squad rooms teach you that, specially the kind of squad room I’ve been working in – but what Steve said is pinching at me.

Fleas knows an awful lot about me and my career, for someone who’s been deep under for years. I thought that was nice, him bothering to keep up. Which it might well have been; or it might not.

All of a sudden I’m second-guessing every step of our lovely cosy conversation, looking for cracks where the hidden agenda might have shown through: Fleas getting me to back off in case I jeopardise a drugs op, or just because he doesn’t need my cooties all over whatever he’s doing; Fleas brushing me off because he’s gone rogue and he’s protecting his new boss. I’m second-guessing myself, too, wondering if I actually needed to talk to Fleas for investigative purposes or if deep down I was just looking for an excuse to have a sandwich and a chat with someone who doesn’t know I’m untouchable. I don’t believe in second-guessing and I don’t believe in introspective crap, and I’m not happy about catching myself doing both. I wish I’d given Steve more hassle while I was at it. I hope he’s feeling like shite.

I have a skim through my messages, the ones that have made it as far as my desk or my inbox. If someone’s swiped the good stuff, he’s been thorough. Cooper’s revised post-mortem report; a couple of tips that will need following up – someone saw a woman who might have been Aislinn in a nightclub, a few weeks back, having a drunken argument with a guy who looked like a rugby player; someone else saw three teenage guys hanging around the top of Viking Gardens on Saturday afternoon, looking suspicious, whatever that means. Bureau reports: the stains on Aislinn’s mattress aren’t semen, meaning they’re probably sweat. The techs are trying for DNA, but they’re not promising anything: Aislinn kept her place hot, mattresses aren’t sterile, warmth and bacterial action could have degraded the DNA till it’s useless. I have a hard time believing it’ll make a lot of difference, either way.

A massive stack of paper that turns out to be a year’s worth of Aislinn’s e-mail records, to cross-check against her account in case anything’s been deleted. That should keep someone busy until his brain – or hers – blows up. This kind of crap is why God created floaters, but if there’s one tiny worthwhile thing to find in this case, Aislinn’s electronics is probably where to find it. I split the stack in two and slide one half over to Steve, who says ‘Thanks,’ without looking up and shoves it to one side. I consider kicking the sulky little bollix under the table. Instead I spread out Aislinn’s e-mail records and the printouts of her mailboxes on my desk and start going back and forth between them, working backwards, making sure every e-mail is accounted for. 3.18 a.m. on Sunday, sale notice from some makeup website, still in the inbox. 3.02 a.m. on Sunday, spam from an imaginary Russian babe looking for company, still in the inbox. I want to put my head down on the paper and sleep.

The floaters show up one by one, snap out of their morning fog when they see me and Steve, and get stuck into the jobs they picked up at yesterday’s case meeting. I give Cooper’s report to Gaffney to type up – I’m still pissed off with him for not getting a voice ID off the Stoneybatter uniform. Breslin sweeps in singing to himself, throws the room a cheerful ‘Hi-diddly-hi, camperinos!’ and tells me and Steve, ‘Two of Rory’s lucky exes down, yesterday evening; two to go. Who’s the man?’

‘You’re the man,’ Steve says automatically, turning over a page. ‘Did you get anything good?’

‘No surprises. Rory’s a predictable little bastard. We’ll see if the other two have anything nice for me.’ Breslin leans against our desk and tries to read what I’m doing, upside down. ‘What’s all this, then?’

‘Aislinn’s e-mail records,’ I say.

‘Huh,’ Breslin says. ‘And?’

‘And if you want seventy per cent off a fabulous goddess gown, I can tell you where to go.’

‘Sounds like you’re having a blast.’ Breslin gives me his best movie-star grin, picks up Aislinn’s sent e-mails and has a flick through them. ‘Jesus, I see what you mean. This could get old. You want me to take over? You can have Rory’s exes.’

‘Nah.’ I’m not even gonna pretend to get all suspicious. He’s working hard for it, but I’m done playing Breslin’s game. ‘I’ve started; I’ll finish.’

‘Conway.’ Breslin switches the grin to mildly rueful. ‘This is me trying to show you that I do know who’s the boss of this investigation. If you need scut work done, I’m offering to do it.’

‘Thanks,’ I say. ‘I’m grand.’

After a moment Breslin shrugs. ‘Suit yourself.’ He has another skim through the e-mails, taking his time, and drops them back on my desk. ‘Moran? You need to get out of the office for a while?’ He turns Steve’s paperwork round to face him and has a good look. As far as I can tell, it’s Aislinn’s e-mail records, even though I would’ve sworn Steve was ignoring them up until Breslin came in.

‘Ah, no,’ Steve says. ‘I’m nearly done, sure. If I haven’t died of boredom by now…’

Breslin shrugs and shoves Steve’s stuff back to him. ‘Remember,’ he says, aiming a finger at me. ‘I made the offer.’

‘I will,’ I say. ‘Enjoy the exes.’

‘Yeah, I’m not getting my hopes up. You should see the first two.’ Breslin swings into his chair, makes oily phone calls setting up appointments, and sweeps out again. ‘And I don’t need backup today, either,’ he says, tossing me and Steve a wink on his way past. ‘If you catch my drift.’ We both pull out automated smiles.

‘What did he even come in for?’ Steve wants to know, when he’s gone. ‘He could’ve made those calls from anywhere.’

His voice still has some of that flat note to it, but he’s talking, which presumably should make me feel all warm inside. I say, ‘He couldn’t stay away from your pretty face.’

‘Seriously. He just wanted to check out what we’re doing. And try to take over the electronics. Again. What’s he scared we might find in there?’

I say, ‘I don’t care.’ And, when he opens his mouth again: ‘I don’t care.’

Steve rolls his eyes to the ceiling, shoves the e-mail records out of his way and goes back to whatever he’s really doing. I try to pick up where I left off, but my focus is shot; all the spam is blurring into one endless Viagra ad. My legs are twitching to get up and move.

The one thing that’s still kicking feebly inside my head: Lucy’s story about Aislinn’s secret boyfriend. That’s where all the gang bollix started, and now that we’ve cleared away the bollix, the story is still there and it still needs explaining. It occurs to me, which it should’ve done two days ago, that there are other reasons why Lucy could’ve been cagey. Maybe the boyfriend is a married guy she works with – Aislinn met Rory through Lucy, after all; if she met someone else too, there’s a decent chance it was the same way – and Lucy doesn’t want drama on the job if he finds out she dobbed him in. Or maybe, just like I thought at first, he never existed. I think about hauling Lucy out of her flat and going at her hard, so she can tell me the boyfriend story was revenge on one of Aislinn’s exes or a way to make sure we didn’t neglect any possibilities, and I can take this whole staggering wheezing sidetrack out back and put it out of its misery.

That’s when Steve’s head jerks up. ‘Antoinette,’ he says. He’s forgotten all about sulking.

‘What?’

He pushes a statement sheet across the desk. His eyebrows are halfway up his forehead.

I look down, where he’s pointing. The statement is one of his photocopies from the day before, an alibi from one of Desmond Murray’s taxi customers. The reporting officer’s signature is a scrawl, but the name typed underneath is Detective Garda Joseph McCann.

My eyes meet Steve’s. He says, very softly, ‘What the hell?’

Ireland is small, the pool of Ds is small, it would be weirder if there wasn’t at least one guy from the Desmond Murray case working Murder now. This explains why Gary was so keen for me to keep my mouth shut, anyway: if I go stirring up trouble, it’s gonna be close to home. Beyond that I can’t tell, through the last few months and the struggling light at the windows, whether this is another handful of nothing or whether it should set all my alarms screaming.

I say, ‘We need to check the rest of what you’ve got from that file. Give me half.’

We flip fast and with one eye on the door. That scrawl is everywhere. If we’d been in less of a rush, we would never have missed it yesterday: McCann, McCann, McCann. He didn’t get drafted in to give a hand with the initial push, like Gary did. He was right at the heart of this case.

Aislinn leaning over my desk, all big eyes and twisting fingers, going on about the detective who had patted her on the head and told her You have great memories of him; we don’t want to change that, do we? Sometimes these things are better left as they are … That could have been McCann.

Steve is holding out a thick sheaf of pages, easily a third of what he started with. He says quietly, ‘All of these.’

‘Yeah,’ I say. I lift my own sheaf, the same size. ‘And these.’

Steve takes them out of my hand, tucks them back into the file and locks it away in his desk drawer, nice and easy. I’m not sure whether to slag him for paranoia or tell him to hurry up.

‘Here’s the big question,’ he says. ‘Have McCann and Breslin copped that Aislinn’s missing da was McCann’s missing person?’

I clasp my hands at the back of my neck to keep them still. None of the floaters are looking our way. ‘I don’t know. I was watching Breslin, when I told him that box was the missing-persons file. I’d swear he was relieved. If there’s something he doesn’t want us finding, it’s not that.’

‘You told him we’d looked through the file and found nothing good. Maybe he was relieved that we’d missed McCann’s name.’

‘Why? How would they even make the connection?’

‘Breslin’s telling McCann about our case, mentions the vic’s name…’

‘Like we said before: there’s got to be dozens of Aislinn Murrays out there. You honestly think McCann would remember a name as common as that? After seventeen years? She wasn’t even the missing person, or the family contact; she was just some little kid in the background.’

‘He worked the Desmond Murray disappearance hard,’ Steve says. ‘It could have stuck in his mind.’

‘So what if it did? There’s nothing dodgy about the disappearance; there’s not even room for anything dodgy. Why would they care if we link it up with our case?’

Steve is shaking his head. ‘Nothing dodgy, except the Ds not dropping the family a hint. Say Breslin and McCann know McCann screwed up there, yeah? Maybe they think it played into Aislinn getting killed, somehow. Or maybe it’s not even that: they just don’t want the screw-up coming out. So they’re trying to shove Rory Fallon down our throats and hope we swallow fast.’

Maybe it’s the fatigue, the heat and not enough coffee, wrapping layers of fuzz around my brain; I can’t tell whether the story rings true, or whether it just sounds good because Steve is putting a nice shape on it. He says, ‘It probably would’ve worked, too – if you hadn’t been working the Missing Persons desk that day, or if you didn’t have that memory on you. We might never even have found out about Desmond going missing, never mind Aislinn trying to track him down.’

I would love to believe it. If Breslin is messing with this case, not with us – meaning me – personally; if there are no gangs involved, no bent cops, just some dumb screw-up McCann made seventeen years ago and doesn’t want coming out now; then we’ve got the pair of them in a headlock, with a great chance at working out a deal that will make everyone very happy. For a second I can feel it, right through my body: the weight of the room lifting off me, the rush of strength hitting every cell like oxygen, Let’s see you try and push me around now motherfuckers. Me finally holding the high cards, ramming them so far up Roche’s hole that he’ll be spitting aces for months, and the Murder squad unfolding at long fucking last into the place I’ve dreamed of coming in to every morning.

Only I don’t believe it, no matter how hard I try. The room clamps back down around me – thick hot air, Reilly typing like he’s beating the keyboard into submission. It squeezes that strength right out of me, squashes it into a wad and tosses it away.

I say, ‘Yeah, that’d be fun. Only why would McCann and Breslin care? Maybe it wasn’t nice of the Ds to keep Evelyn Murray in the dark, but they were going by the book. What’s the worst that’s gonna happen to them if it comes out now? “Here’s a copy of the policy on victim sensitivity, have a read sometime”? It’s not like they’re gonna get reverted back into uniform, specially not after all this time.’

‘Depends on why they kept Evelyn in the dark. I don’t care what your man Gary says: that’s weird, Antoinette. It is. When you worked Missing Persons, did you ever do that to a family? Get an answer and walk away from them without one single hint? Ever?’

Steve’s head close to mine, and the squeezed-tight urgency in his voice: they feel idiotic, make me feel like a kid playing cops, with a cardboard badge and a bunch of gibberish learned off the telly. I shift away from him. ‘So? McCann wasn’t even the lead D. Even if there was a dodgy reason behind them making that call, the buck wouldn’t stop with him.’

Steve says, ‘How long’s McCann been married?’

‘Bernadette sent round a card for some anniversary, last year. Silver one, must’ve been. So?’

‘So he was married back when he was working this case. Gary said a lot of the Ds were smitten with Evelyn. What if that went further, for McCann? What if he was stretching out the case so he had an excuse to keep seeing her?’

The heat and the clacking keyboards are piling more fuzz onto my mind, thick as insulation. I picture grabbing Reilly’s keyboard and snapping it over my knee. ‘Only the case didn’t stretch out. They closed it as soon as they found Desmond.’

‘They did, yeah, officially at least – and we even said it was weird they didn’t do it sooner, remember? But maybe McCann told Evelyn he’d keep investigating in his free time, stay in touch, give her updates. Maybe there was actually something between them, maybe not; but either way, McCann might not want that coming out. His marriage isn’t in great shape, right? And he’s got a bunch of kids, hasn’t he? If the wife finds out he was using his job to chase Evelyn Murray, she could use that to-’

I say, before I know I’m going to, ‘Stop. Just stop.’

It comes out loud. One or two of the floaters lift their heads. I give them a snarl that smacks them straight back down again.

Steve is staring at me. He says, ‘What d’you mean?’

I say, and it takes everything I’ve got to hold my voice down, ‘All this shite is imaginary. Do you seriously not get that? Just about every single thing you’ve said since we got this case has been pulled straight out of your hole. Gangs and affairs and sweet Jesus Christ I don’t even know what-’

‘I’m coming up with theories,’ Steve says. He’s still staring. ‘That’s our job.’

‘Theories, yeah. Not fucking fairy tales.’

‘They’re not-’

‘They are, Moran. That’s all they are. Yeah, sure, all of it’s possible, but there’s not one iota of hard evidence for any of it. Here you are talking my ear off about Aislinn being a fantasist, coming up with stories to make herself feel better about her shite life: you’re doing the same fucking thing.’

Steve is biting down on his lip, shaking his head. I lean in closer, feeling the edge of the desk jam into my ribs, mashing the words into his face. ‘Rory Fallon killed Aislinn Murray because they had some stupid spat and he lost his temper. Breslin and McCann are fucking with me because they want me gone. Desmond Murray has nothing to do with any of it. There’s no thrilling hidden story here, Moran. There’s nothing that’s going to turn you into Sherlock Holmes tracking down the master criminal. You’re a scut-monkey working a shitty little lovers’ tiff, with your shitty squad giving you shite because they’re shiteholes. The end.’

Steve is white around the freckles and breathing hard through his nose. For a second I think he’s going to walk out, but then I realise it’s not humiliation; it’s anger. Steve is furious.

He starts to say something, but I point a finger right in his face. ‘Shut up. And I should’ve known that right from the start – I did know right from the start, only like a fucking fool I let myself get carried away by you and your pretty little story. If there’d been even a sniff of anything good off this case, we’d never have got within a mile of-’

Steve throws himself back in his chair. ‘Ah Jaysus, not this. “Everyone’s out to get me, the world is against me-” ’

‘Don’t you fucking-’

‘It’s like working with an emo teenager. Does nobody understand you, no? Are you going to slam your bedroom door and sulk?’

I can’t work out how he’s managed to live this long, whether he injects bleach into his ear every evening to burn the day out of his head and keep himself innocent. I say, ‘You fucking spoilt little brat.’ That widens Steve’s eyes. ‘All the imagination you’ve got going on, and you just can’t imagine that other people might not have it quite as easy as you.’

‘I know you don’t have it easy. I’m right here, remember? I see it every day. There are people who give you shite. That doesn’t mean that everything that ever happens is just an excuse to throw you to the wolves. You’re not that fucking important.’

We’re forcing our voices into something like calm. From a few yards away, where the floaters are, this would sound like just a routine work discussion. That only makes it more vicious.

‘I get that you want me to be talking bollix, Moran. I get that. It’d make your life a whole lot easier if-’

‘All I want is to stop walking on fucking eggshells. I want to stop turning cartwheels trying to put you in a decent mood, so you won’t bite the head off anyone who comes near us-’

Steve cracking crap jokes when I’m in a fouler, till I give in and throw him the laugh he’s angling for. I thought it was just him liking things to be nice, maybe even him liking me and wanting me to be happy. It hits me like a mouthful of sewer water: he was chivvying me into happy-clappy moods so I wouldn’t kill his chances of buddying up with the lads. And I fell for it, time after time, had a laugh with him and felt better about the world. Steve doing his little dance and his jazz hands; me clapping right along, slack-jawed and grinning.

I say, ‘Now we’re getting somewhere. You’d love to believe you’re trying to save me from myself, but when we get down to it, it’s all about you being in everyone’s good books.’

His head goes back in exasperation. ‘It’s about not making everything ten times harder than it needs to be. For me or for you. Is that so terrible, yeah? Does that make me an awful person?’

‘Don’t do me any favours. You’re aiming for a big group hug and happy ever after, and you might even get them, but we both know it’s not going to happen for me.’

‘No,’ Steve says flatly, ‘it’s not.’ The anger compresses his words into hard chips, slamming down on the desk between us. ‘Because you’re so set on going down in flames, you’d make it happen even if the entire force loved you to bits. You’ll light your own bloody self on fire if you have to. And then you can pat yourself on the back and tell yourself you knew it all along. Congratulations.’

He tries to shove his chair back to his end of the desk, where he can sulk in peace about what a demon bitch I am, but I’m not letting him away with that. I get hold of his wrist, under the edge of the desk. ‘You listen to me,’ I say, barely above a whisper, and I grip hard enough to hurt and have to stop myself gripping harder. Reilly has stopped banging his keyboard and the silence is stuffing my ears, my nose, making it hard to breathe. ‘You arse-licking little fuck. You listen.’

Steve doesn’t flinch or pull away. He stares back at me, eye to eye. Only the line of his mouth says I’m hurting him.

I say, ‘You have no idea how badly I wanted this to be a gang case. You can’t even imagine. Because if it was a gang thing, then that would explain everything that’s been going on. Breslin shoving Rory at us, the gaffer giving us hassle, McCann trying to swipe the old case file, Gary not wanting to be caught anywhere near me: they were trying to protect a bigger investigation, or a bent cop, or the whole lot of them were in the gang’s pocket, I don’t even care. But my mate in Undercover says there’s not a sniff of a gang connection. Nothing.’

Keeping my voice down is hurting my throat, like something swallowed wrong and swelling. ‘Do you get what that means? Breslin and McCann pulled all their crap specifically, deliberately to fuck me up. There’s no other reason. All that bullshit with the roll of fifties and the secret appointments, you really want to know what that was about? Breslin and McCann are no more bent than we are. They wanted me to go chasing after them till I was in too deep to pull back, and then they’d haul me up in front of the gaffer – Look, gaffer, she’s been pulling our financials, she’s been bugging our phones, she’s a lunatic, she’s a danger to the squad … Job done: I’d be gone.’ Saying it twists my stomach. I swallowed that shite whole, gobbled it down. ‘And if it’s got that far, if it’s people like Breslin and McCann who I’ve never done anything on, if they’re this serious about getting rid of me, then I’m done, Moran. I’m done. There isn’t a way back. There’s only one way this ends.’

Steve says, quietly and very clearly, ‘Let go of me.’

After a moment I let go of his wrist. I was holding it so hard my fingers are cramped into position. They leave white marks on his skin.

Steve pulls his sleeve down. Then he puts on his coat, picks up his mug books and walks out.

A couple of the floaters lift their heads to watch him go and glance across at me, half curious. I give them a blank stare back and listen to the blood banging at my eardrums. As far as I can tell, I don’t have a partner any more. It feels like everything in the room is jumping and jabbering and mocking me, tiny tinny chants of ha ha ha, because I should have seen this coming all along.

I put my head down and flip paper without seeing it. Words pop out of the blur at random – inconsistent, sample, between – and vanish back into it before I can figure out what they’re for. The room reeks of cleaning fluid, rancid cigarette smoke off someone’s coat, half-eaten apple left to rot overnight.

It doesn’t hit me all at once. It comes like the slow cold of an IV crawling up a vein.

Steve, pushing from the start for us to gallop off chasing a nonexistent gang angle that could have cost me the case and turned me into a laughing-stock. Steve, who loves to be liked and is longing to belong in Murder, and who could have both in a heartbeat if only I was out of the way. Steve, in the car on the way to the scene, asking if I was going to take up my mate on the offer of the security job.

Steve, wandering off on his own into Aislinn Murray’s kitchen, where he could have texted Creepy Crowley anything he wanted to.

There are stories about Steve. Small stuff, from years back, but people remember. Way back when we were in training college, I heard things: Steve writing half the essays for some inspector’s kid, brown-nosing for good postings down the line. I put most of it down to the farm boys pouting about being beaten by a Dub one step from a skanger, and I didn’t know Steve well enough to care either way. But then, when we were working that first case together, I heard more. Steve screwing over the lead D on a case so he could put some shiny stuff on his own CV, earn himself a payback favour or two, haul himself out of the floater pool into a squad. The guy who told me had an agenda of his own; I took a chance, ignored him and trusted Steve. I was right, that time.

That time, Steve had plenty to gain by sticking with me. He was looking for a way into Murder, starting to panic he was never going to find one. One day of working together, and I found it for him.

We felt right together, I thought. I liked the way, when one of us knocked down the other’s idea, it always led into a new one, not a dead end. I liked how we were starting to know, without thinking, how to balance each other: what angle the other one would take in an interview, when I needed to ease back and let Steve do the work, when to come in and change the note. I liked the way he called me on my crap, not because his ego was tangled in his undies but because the crap was getting in our way. I liked the laughs. Once or twice – more – I caught myself daydreaming like a sappy teenager about our future together: about someday when we would get the decent cases, the genius plans we’d dream up to trap the cunning psychos, the interrogations that would go down in squad history. Big tough Conway going all misty-eyed; how the lads would have laughed.

I was a pushover. By the time I met Steve, Murder had already given me a good going-over; all it took was one bite of comfort, one scrap of loyalty, and I turned sloppy with relief, falling over myself to get Steve onto the squad. Of course working with him felt good; he had every reason to make sure it did. I knew Steve was the king of bending himself into whatever shape you want to see, I watched him do it every day, but I somehow convinced myself that this was different. I make myself want to puke.

He’s got nothing left to gain by sticking with me, not now, and plenty to lose. Keyboards yammering, wind banging the window back and forth in its frame. Every pore in my body is prickling. When I run my hands over my head, my hair doesn’t feel like mine.

I can’t think. I can’t tell if this is batshit paranoia or the bleeding obvious slapping me in the face. Two years of watching my back, watching every step and every word, in fight mode all day every day: my instincts are fried to smoking wisps. For a second I actually try to think of someone I could phone, ask what they think; but even if I wanted to do it, which I don’t, the option isn’t there. Sophie, Gary, Fleas: everyone I think of feels slippery and double, a picture flickering faster than my eyes can focus.

Reilly says something, and him and Stanton burst out laughing, big raw shouts like the lead-up to an attack. I can’t stay in this room any longer. I try Lucy’s mobile: switched off. I rake through paper till I find the contact info for two of Aislinn’s exes – no one’s tracked down the Spanish-student summer fling yet – and shove it in my pocket. Then I put on my coat and leave.