The Trespasser

Chapter 14

Waking up the next morning feels like waking up the morning after moving house, switching squad, dumping someone: you know the world’s changed, even before you remember how. The air has a different flavour to it, sharp and strange and resiny, a chilly bite at the edges. Even before you remember, you know to watch your footing with today.

I run like a machine, through the dark and the fine hanging haze of rain. This morning my body works like something separate from me, running itself perfectly with no need for any input. I push it, faster and farther than normal, and I’m not even winded. My mind can only see one step ahead: getting to Rory’s place. Beyond that there’s nothing.

Steve is early, quarter to seven, but I’m ready: caffeinated, fed, showered and dressed. I doubt anyone’s watching my gaff, but when Steve knocks I practically reef him inside all the same, just in case.

‘How’re you doing?’ I ask.

He nods. He’s even paler than usual, but there’s a going-over-the-top set to his jaw. ‘You?’

‘Yeah. You need anything? Coffee, food?’

‘Nah, I’m sorted. Thanks. How do you want to do this?’

I say, ‘Deasy’s meant to have organised surveillance on Rory’s gaff. I’d say he’ll be doing it himself; he’d be lucky to get authorisation for uniforms, plus he’ll want the pat on the head if anything good happens. And I don’t want Deasy knowing you and me are working Rory together. He could be Breslin’s bitch.’

Steve nods. ‘We’ll go in separately.’

‘Yeah. And we’re not in a good mood with each other.’

‘I made up a photo array,’ Steve says. He pulls a handful of thin card out of his bag. Eight clean-shaven middle-aged guys with greying dark hair, all caught full-face or almost, in stills pulled from video, against neutral backgrounds. Steve must have been up half the night finding the right shot of McCann and then combing the internet for good matches, making sure no one can say the array was skewed. McCann is third down on the left, wearing what looks like his court suit, staring darkly over my shoulder against thick cloudy sky. ‘Printed off a bunch of copies, just in case.’

‘Good,’ I say. It fries wires in my brain, seeing one of our own squad where a scumbag belongs; it looks like a joke birthday card. ‘You do one with Breslin? I might need it for Lucy.’

‘Yeah.’ He flips to another sheet, this one full of good-looking fair-haired middle-aged guys. Breslin’s smirk is in the top right corner.

If I start thinking about how fucked-up this is, I’m gone. We can’t look down.

I can see Steve thinking the same thing. ‘Nice one,’ I say. ‘Let’s do this.’ And I open the door to let him out.

There’s a black Mitsubishi Pajero with heavy tint parked opposite the Wayward Bookshop, in the dim stretch between streetlamps. Dawn is only starting and all I can see through the windscreen is a wide shape in the driver’s seat, but when I knock on the window – keeping my head low, and the car between me and the bookshop – sure enough, Deasy sits up and cracks it.

‘Howya,’ I say. ‘Any news?’

‘Not a lot.’ Deasy looks wrecked enough that I believe he’s been awake at least most of the time. The air in the car smells of fish and chips, too much breathing, and there’s probably a piss-bottle under the seat. ‘That there, the grey door next to the bookshop, that goes up to his flat; the windows over the bookshop, those are his sitting room. He went to the Spar on the corner around nine last night, came back with a pint of milk and a sandwich. The little bollix looked petrified; kept looking around like someone might jump him. I nearly gave him a blast of the horn when he passed me, just to watch him keel over.’

That gives us both a good laugh. ‘Lovely,’ I say. ‘That’s where we want him. Any other movement?’

‘He closed his curtains when he went in, but the light stayed on all night. Twenty past five, he came down and went into the shop. Hasn’t shown his face since. Are you bringing him in?’

‘Nah. Later. I just want to poke him a little bit, keep him on his toes. No reason why he should get a lie-in when I don’t.’

The thought pulls a yawn out of Deasy. ‘Speaking of which,’ I say. ‘Call someone to take over, and go get some kip.’

He looks startled. It strikes me that I may have been kind of a bitch to the floaters on this one, at least part of the time. When Breslin went looking for a stooge, I’d made it easy for him.

‘Thanks,’ I say. ‘For covering this.’

Before Deasy can find an answer, Steve rolls up, with his hands in his overcoat pockets and a look on his face that no one could call friendly. ‘Morning,’ he says. ‘What’s the story?’

‘No story,’ I say. ‘What’re you doing here?’

‘Just checking in. Wanted to see if Rory’s done anything interesting.’

‘He hasn’t.’

Steve raises his eyebrows at Deasy, who’s soaking all this up. ‘What’s he been at?’

Deasy opens his mouth, catches my eye and shuts it again. ‘Ah. Not much.’

‘Like I just told you,’ I say. ‘See you back at HQ.’

Steve doesn’t move. ‘Are you planning on talking to him?’

‘I might.’

‘I might join you.’

I jut my jaw up at the dark sky, but I manage to keep it together, what with Deasy being there and all. ‘Do you not have a tree to shake, no?’

‘Good one,’ Steve says. ‘Will we go in?’

After a moment I do a tight sigh. ‘Whatever.’ To Deasy: ‘See you tomorrow.’ And I head across the road without waiting for Steve.

He catches up with me outside the bookshop. The window is dim, just a faint glow coming from somewhere in the back. The display’s laid out with a perfection that stinks of desperation: bestsellers temptingly overlapping bright-coloured kids’ books, all those wacky cartoons and enigmatic heroines staring dementedly into the darkness. I shift away from Steve and lean on the bell.

Rory hasn’t slit his wrists, anyway. He opens the door fast, and we watch his heart rate skyrocket when he sees us. He’s wearing the same clothes he had on yesterday, jeans and the depressed beige jumper, and he’s getting wimpy stubble. Being a suspect has hit the pause button on his life; the poor bastard is paralysed.

He says, breathless, ‘I’m not ready. I wasn’t expecting-’ He gestures helplessly at his ratty grey slippers. ‘I haven’t eaten breakfast, or even…’

‘You’re all right,’ Steve says gently. ‘We don’t need you to come with us. We just have a couple of leftover questions to ask. Can we come in, yeah? It’ll only take a few minutes.’

Rory’s panic solidifies into fear. ‘I don’t think I should talk to you without a solicitor. Not now that I’m a…’

‘We’re not going to ask about Aislinn,’ Steve says, lifting his hands. ‘Nothing like that. OK? Just, I didn’t get a chance to talk to you yesterday, and you said something in the interview that got me interested.’

Rory blinks hard, trying to focus. Fatigue and fear are using up most of his bandwidth; his mind’s slowed down to a crawl.

Steve says – lower, leaning in like someone might be listening – ‘And I think we need to talk about it without Detective Breslin around.’

That gets Rory’s attention; anything that Breslin wouldn’t like has to be good. And there’s Steve, all rumpled and earnest, looking like your most harmless pal. ‘I suppose…’ he says, in the end, moving back and opening the door properly. ‘All right. Come in.’

The bookshop is two connecting rooms, not big ones. The front one is crammed with shelves – Rory’s not gonna be getting any fat customers. Hand-lettered signs say thriller and romance into the darkness; posters of old covers and illustrations hang from the ceiling, swaying restlessly in the sweep of cold air we’ve brought with us. The light is coming from the back room; through the doorway it looks jammed even tighter than the front, books piled on shelves instead of lined up, wavering stacks on the floor, covers curling.

‘That’s the second-hand section,’ Rory says, waving a hand towards the back. ‘I was organising it. I couldn’t sleep, and I couldn’t stand staring at my sitting room any longer, so I thought I might as well do something useful.’

‘Lovely shop,’ Steve says, looking around. ‘This is where you and Aislinn met, yeah?’

‘Yeah. Right over there, in the children’s section. She told me she loved bookshops. Magic, she said, specially small ones like this; you always felt like you might find the one book you’d been looking for all your life, at the back of some shelf…’ Rory rubs at the inside corners of his eyes. ‘If Saturday night had gone well, I was going to invite her here next time.’

And she could have helped him alphabetise the feng shui section. Jaysus, the romance. ‘I was going to do a picnic,’ Rory says. ‘On the floor – I was going to move shelves to make room. Explore the second-hand stuff, see if we could find that book she’d been looking for…’ Another rub at his eyes, harder. ‘Sorry. I’m babbling. I didn’t get any sleep.’

‘You’re grand,’ Steve says. I take out my notebook and fade back a few steps, between a shelf full of sepia guys running in helmets and a shelf full of laughing women with good hair giving babies adoring looks. The dimness makes them stir and twitch in the corners of my eyes. ‘Could we have the lights on in here?’

‘Oh. Yeah.’ Rory finds a switch by the door, and the lights flicker on. He looks even worse in the light, hunched and red-eyed, like he’s been barricaded in here for years hiding from the zombie apocalypse.

‘Thanks,’ Steve says. ‘Are you doing OK?’

Rory does some kind of movement that could mean anything.

‘We won’t take a lot of your time. I just wanted to ask you about your theory? The dumped guy watching Aislinn, getting upset when he found out she was preparing for dinner with you?’ Rory flinches, remembering the slagging that theory took off me and Breslin. ‘Yesterday, you started to say something about how you had a bit of evidence to back that up. Yeah?’

Rory glances over involuntarily to see if I’m gonna point and laugh again, but I’m all ears. ‘A guy, you said,’ Steve says, moving to catch his attention back. ‘A guy you saw in the street on Saturday night. Yeah?’

‘Yeah. There was a guy. I wasn’t making it up. I saw him.’

Steve nods, leaning against a bookshelf. ‘OK. When was this?’

‘When I was leaving Viking Gardens. When I’d given up on Aislinn. I turned down Astrid Road, towards the main road, and I passed the entrance to the laneway that runs behind Viking Gardens. The laneway where…’

That involuntary glance at me again. ‘Where you’d been hanging out to watch Aislinn,’ Steve says matter-of-factly. ‘And?’

‘And there was a man coming out of the laneway. We startled each other – both of us jumped.’

Steve nods. ‘What’d he look like?’

‘Middle-aged. A bit taller than me, but probably shorter than you? He had curly dark hair, going grey. Average build, I suppose.’

McCann, coming from Aislinn’s house.

He went out, and presumably in, the back way. The back door was locked when we got there; Breslin must have had a key to give him.

‘Do you remember what he was wearing?’ Steve asks. Easily, like this is no big deal, nothing at all.

Rory shakes his head. ‘Not really. A dark coat. A light-coloured scarf, I think. The main thing I noticed was that he seemed… I thought he was on something. Coke, maybe, or… I mean, I don’t know enough about drugs to know what does what, but he jumped a lot harder than I did, and his eyes were…’ He flares his eyes into a wild, unfocused stare. ‘If he wasn’t on something, I thought he had to be… unbalanced. Either way, he was the last thing I wanted to deal with, right at that moment. I sped up and got away from him as fast as I could.’

‘How close were you?’

‘About from here to that door.’ Rory points to the back-room door. Five feet, maybe six. Close enough for an ID; far enough, with no light but the streetlamp, for a defence barrister to hammer it down.

‘Did he say anything? Do anything?’

‘There wasn’t really time. I was only looking at him for a second or two, before I got out of there. When I got to the corner of Astrid Road I looked back, in case he was following me, but he was going in the opposite direction. He was walking fast, with his head down, but I’m almost positive it was the same guy.’

‘And all this would’ve been around half-eight?’ Steve asks.

‘Just after. I texted Aislinn one last time at half-eight, and then I gave her five minutes to answer. When she didn’t, I left. So when I saw the man, that would’ve been between twenty-five to nine and twenty to.’

That gave McCann anywhere from thirty-five to fifty-five minutes inside the house. Rory had left the laneway and headed for Tesco around 7.40. Maybe McCann had seen him having his moment, watched and waited for him to leave; maybe he hadn’t shown up till Rory was already gone. But by eight o’clock, when Rory knocked on the door and Aislinn didn’t answer, McCann was in there.

He wouldn’t have wasted time on losing the head when he realised what he’d done, not McCann. Ds are experts at slamming the emotions away for later, when we can afford them. As soon as he knew Aislinn was dead or on her way there, he would have taken off his shoes so as not to leave prints, grabbed a handful of kitchen roll and started wiping down every place where Breslin could have left a fingerprint. Turned the cooker off, because God forbid it should set off the smoke alarm before he was done and far away. Listened to the doorbell and the knocking, to Aislinn’s phone chirping and ringing as Rory tried to find her, and stayed out of eyeshot of the windows. When he was done, he would have scuffed out any shoeprints he’d left on the way in, stuffed the kitchen roll in his pocket to dump in a bin on the way home, and slipped out the back door. Thirty-five to fifty-five minutes: plenty of time.

‘How come you didn’t tell us about this on Sunday?’ Steve asks.

‘Because…’ Rory rubs at his mouth. ‘OK. You see, I’d seen him before. Twice. In Stoneybatter. The first time was an evening maybe three weeks ago – I was looking for my chance to go down the laneway, and he was right at the top of it lighting a cigarette, so I had to walk around the block and try again. I was across the road from him, that time, so he might not have noticed me; I only noticed him because he was in my way. But the second time – I think about ten days ago – I passed right by him on Astrid Road when I was heading home, and we made eye contact. There was a good chance he’d remember me, if he had any memory at all for faces. I knew if I told you about seeing him on Saturday, you’d try to track him down – and if you did, he’d tell you about seeing me before, and then you’d know I’d been… I was hardly going to tell you about him. I was praying you wouldn’t find the guy.’

What the hell? hovers in the air between me and Steve. What was McCann doing, hanging around Aislinn’s gaff for weeks on end?

Rory takes the second of silence as disbelief. ‘I was scared! “Oh, by the way, Detective, I was spending half my evenings wandering around Stoneybatter peering in a woman’s window, and while I was at it I happened to notice another guy who might have been doing the same kind of thing, so you should really look at him…” I would have had to be insane to come out with that. Look what happened when you did find out.’

‘I get it,’ Steve says. ‘I do. And by the time that had come out, and you tried to mention this guy…’

‘No one was listening,’ I finish for him. ‘Yeah. I owe you an apology for that.’ Rory blinks, startled, and then comes up with a clumsy nod. ‘Lucky for us all Detective Moran picked up on it.’

‘Do you think you’d recognise the guy?’ Steve asks.

‘Yes. Almost definitely, yes. I’ve been thinking about him constantly, ever since I found out about Aislinn.’ Rory’s swaying forward eagerly; he’s our friend again. ‘The more I think about it, the more I think he… I mean, his face, Saturday night: something wasn’t right.’

Steve is pulling the photo array out of his bag. ‘OK,’ he says. ‘I want you to have a look at this and tell me if the man you saw is on here. If he’s not, say so. If you’re not sure, say so. Yeah?’

Rory nods, gearing up to concentrate. Steve hands him the card.

It takes Rory all of two seconds. ‘This guy. That’s him.’

His finger is on McCann.

‘Take your time,’ Steve says. ‘Make sure you’ve looked at all the faces.’

Rory does another scan because he’s a good boy, but his finger doesn’t move. ‘It’s him.’

‘Are you sure?’

‘Yes. I’m positive. He looks a bit younger here, but it’s him.’

And there it is: a solid link. No if-then-maybe; this is the real thing, at last. It shakes the air as it thuds down between me and Steve, dense and tarnish-black and too heavy to move. We’re stuck with it now.

Rory can feel us believing him. ‘Do you think he…? Who is he?’

‘He’s a guy,’ Steve says. ‘We can’t go into details right now. Can you write down where you’ve seen the man, at the bottom there? Sign it and date it, and put your initials next to the photo you recognise.’

Rory leans the card on a shelf and writes carefully. ‘Here,’ he says, passing it back to Steve. ‘Is this OK?’

Steve reads. ‘That’s great. We’ll need you to come in and give an official statement, but not right now. You can relax.’

‘You mean…? Do I still have to go in to you later on?’

‘I don’t know yet. We’ll see how the day goes. For now, just try and chill out a bit; get some kip, get some breakfast. I know that’s easier said.’

‘Am I still…’ Rory’s throat moves; he can’t get the word out. ‘Did you talk to Aislinn’s neighbours? Did any of them see me, in the… outside her place?’

‘Not yet. We’ll get back to you. Like I said: try and relax for now.’

‘Do you… you know. Do you still think I did this?’

Steve says, ‘I need to ask you, man. Is there anything else you’ve held back? Anything at all?’

Rory shakes his head vehemently. ‘No. That was it. I swear: there’s nothing.’

‘OK,’ Steve says. ‘If you think of anything else we should know, ring me straightaway. Meanwhile, all I can say is that we believe you saw this guy’ – I nod – ‘and we’re going to follow up on it very thoroughly. Yeah?’

‘Thanks,’ Rory says, confusedly, on a long breath out. ‘Thank you.’

I put my notebook away; Steve straightens the books that shifted when he leaned against them. ‘Um,’ Rory says, twisting his hands in the hem of that godawful jumper. ‘Can I say one thing?’

‘Sure,’ Steve says.

‘Me watching Aislinn. I know it sounds like… But remember when I said Aislinn didn’t mind being drawn into other people’s daydreams? And you didn’t believe me?’

He’s talking to me. ‘I remember you mentioning that, all right,’ I say.

‘When I watched her… I was trying to do the opposite of that. I was trying to feel what it was like to live there, be her. Trying to slip into that. Instead of doing it the other way round, like everyone else had.’

He’s wound himself into a tangle of jumper. ‘Does that…? Does that make sense?’

It sounds like gold-plated self-justification bollix to me, but we need him on side, so I nod. ‘It does,’ Steve says gently. ‘We’ll keep it in mind.’

We leave Rory standing among his shelves, peering dazedly at us over the ranks of silhouetted badasses and spooky trees and women prancing in sundresses, like if we come back in a few hours they’ll have closed over his head and he’ll be gone.

Outside the door, I say, ‘What the hell was McCann at? Messing about in Stoneybatter weeks ago?’

‘Doing a recce, maybe,’ Steve says. ‘Getting the lie of the land, so that when it came time to do the job, he could get in and out without getting lost or getting spotted.’

‘Except he did get spotted. A bunch of times. That’s what Google Earth is for: so you can do your recce without getting your hands dirty.’

‘Yeah, but we can check what he’s been at on Google Earth. You can argue an ID; harder to argue with internet records.’

Deasy’s black Pajero is gone; two streetlamps down, there’s a white Nissan Qashqai that wasn’t there before. That was quick. I wonder if it’s Breslin in there, but I’m not about to check, not with Rory blinking behind the bookshop window. ‘Listen,’ I say, whipping around on Steve and pointing a finger in his face, ‘meet you in twenty minutes, in that park where we had breakfast Sunday. Make sure you’re not followed.’ I jab him in the shoulder. ‘Clear?’

‘Whatever,’ Steve says, rolling his eyes. ‘Jesus,’ and as I turn to stride off to my car, I see him throw his hands in the air in exasperation. Who knows whether it’ll fool Breslin, or his eyes and ears in the Qashqai. I get in my car and gun it like I’m well pissed off.

I’m first at the park, and I’m pretty sure there’s no one on my tail. The place is damp and near-deserted again, just a Lycra-wrapped cyclist stuffing down something depressing out of Tupperware and two nannies having what sounds like a bitching session in Portuguese while a clump of toddlers dig up a flowerbed. I pick the bench farthest from all of them and have a look through my notes on the Rory interview, while I wait for Steve.

The description that matches McCann. The times that give him anything up to an hour in Aislinn’s place. All in my handwriting, in my regulation notepad just like the ones packed with notes about the scumbags who danced on the other scumbag’s head and the rapist who strangled his victim with her own belt and all the rest of them. Witness identified Det Joseph McCann.

I flip to a clean page and ring Sophie. It’s just gone half-eight, but she picks up on the second ring. ‘Hey. I was going to ring you as soon as I got to work.’

‘Hey,’ I say. ‘Does that mean you’ve got something?’

‘It means you’re on my shit list.’ She’s chewing and moving at the same time: breakfast standing up, while she throws her stuff together. Sophie’s running late. ‘Four o’clock this morning, my phone starts going apeshit: texts, e-mails, more texts, all from my computer guy. When I ignored them, because I’m normal, he started ringing me. The guy’s great at his job, but when it comes to being a human, he’s a total fucking incompetent. I finally had to turn off the phone. And so obviously the bloody alarm didn’t go off, and I woke up like ten seconds ago.’ Bang of a cupboard door.

‘Ah, shite,’ I say. ‘Sorry. Want to give me the computer guy’s number and I’ll ring him every half-hour for a week or two?’

That gets a snort of laughter out of Sophie. ‘If I thought he’d even notice, I’d say yeah. Listen, though: he got into your vic’s double-super-secret pics folder. That’s what he was doing till stupid o’clock. You were right: the password was “missingmymissingdaddy”, with a few substitutions thrown in for kicks.’

The shot of disgust catches me by surprise. It’s the first thing I’ve felt all day. ‘Brilliant,’ I say. ‘I love it when they’re predictable. What’s in there?’

Sophie slurps something. ‘I’ll forward you the stuff as soon as I get in the car. Basically, it’s a couple of dozen photos of Post-it notes with numbers and letters on them, plus one photo of a piece of paper with what looks like a kiddie fairy tale. I don’t know what you were hoping for, but this better be worth screwing up my day.’

‘I can’t tell till I see it,’ I say, ‘but it’s gotta be worth something if she bothered hiding it, right? Thanks a million, Sophie. Forward me the stuff – throw in the dates and times when the pics were taken, if you’ve got time. I promise to tell you it’s cracked the case wide open.’

‘You better. I have to go because I can’t find my other boot and I’m about to start smashing shit. See you ’round.’ And she hangs up.

I check the Courier online, in case I need to block out some time to go break Crowley’s face, but there’s nothing there about my personal life. Apparently even an arrogant fuck like last night’s knows when to back away. There’s another vomit-blast of Aislinn stuff – Crowley’s tracked down some old classmate to make generic sobbing noises about what a lovely girl Aislinn was; Lucy, good woman, must have told him to get stuffed. And there’s a sidebar of unsolved murders from the last couple of years – for a second I think The gaffer’s gonna love that, before I remember that by the end of the day this article is gonna be the least of O’Kelly’s problems. I can’t even start imagining what he’ll think of me by then. It bugs me that that even occurs to me. O’Kelly’s opinion isn’t gonna play a big role in my future, but some base-of-the-skull part of my brain hasn’t caught up with that yet.

Just for kicks, I experiment with wondering what last night’s smug fucker will think when – if – he sees my name at the heart of the story on every front page. I try it delicately at first, like biting down on a broken tooth you’ve been avoiding for a long time. It takes me a minute to figure out I’m feeling nothing. I bite harder, wonder whether he’ll be proud of me for taking down the bad guy, impressed with all the work I put into it, disappointed at what this’ll do to my career, disgusted with me for ratting out my own: turns out I don’t care. I go meta, try to resent that he left it too late even to let me have a reaction: nothing. All I feel is stupid, for wasting brain space on this shite. When I ring my ma this evening, I’m gonna dig up some old rubber-hamster story from Missing Persons, make her laugh, and say not one word about last night.

Steve comes through the park gate talking into his phone and looking around for me – the nannies give him the once-over, then go back to their conversation when they see me lifting a hand to him. He drops onto the bench beside me, shoving his phone into his pocket.

‘Story?’ I say.

‘I left a message for my guy at the mobile company, the one who’s tracking down full records on the phone that called in the attack to Stoneybatter. I’m hoping there’s something on there to help us prove it’s Breslin’s phone. We should be so lucky, but…’ The corner of his mouth twists down. ‘Any news?’

‘Sophie’s guy got into Aislinn’s password-protected folder. She says it’s mostly numbers on Post-its; she’s gonna e-mail me the pics now.’

Steve’s face crunches into a quick grimace. ‘Ah, shite. Shite. We needed that to be something good.’

‘It still could be. Who’s the pessimist now?’

‘’Cause Rory’s ID… it won’t be worth a lot. Any defence barrister’s going to say Rory had passed McCann in the corridor at HQ, on his way in or out, so he knew his face from there and got mixed up.’

‘Yep,’ I say. ‘Or he didn’t just get mixed up: he was frantically trying to invent a fall guy, so he pictured someone he’d seen recently, to make the description sound realistic.’

‘Yeah.’ Steve hasn’t moved since he sat down, not even to resettle his arse on the damp bench. He’s concentrating hard. ‘We need to try for a voice ID, off the uniform who took the call.’

‘While you’re with Breslin this morning, see if you can get a voice sample. Just record a minute of the conversation on your phone. Then send it to me, if you can’t get away from him, and I’ll take it down to Stoneybatter.’

He nods. My phone beeps. ‘Here we go,’ I say, pulling it out. ‘Keep your fingers crossed.’

‘They are. Believe me.’

The e-mail says Here, and a list of dates and times. It has twenty-nine pics attached. I swipe through them: yellow Post-it, 8W inside a circle. Post-it, 1030 inside a circle. Post-it, 7 inside a circle, in the background a sliver of purple that looks like Aislinn’s sitting-room curtains. Post-it, 7Th inside a circle, chunk of a thumb in one corner.

I say, ‘Times and days.’

‘Looks like.’

‘Remember we were wondering how the secret boyfriend could’ve made appointments with Aislinn?’

Steve flicks the edge of my phone with one fingernail. ‘Low-tech. The safest way.’

‘And we didn’t find any of these in the search of her gaff.’ I keep swiping: 11, 6M, 745. ‘When Breslin knows he’s got some free time coming up, he sticks a note through Aislinn’s letterbox, letting her know what time she needs to be ready and waiting in her good lingerie. Then, when he gets there, he takes the note back and destroys it. Just like we said: he’s careful.’

Steve reaches over and enlarges the 745 on my screen. ‘You figure that matches Breslin’s writing?’

‘Hard to tell. There’s nothing that clashes, anyway. And I’ve seen him write times like that, without the full stop.’

‘Plenty of cops do that.’

‘Yeah, but not a lot of civilians. That might narrow it down.’

‘Even then…’ Steve shakes his head. ‘A handwriting expert’s not going to give us a match on this much.’

‘No way,’ I say. I go back to swiping: 9F, 630W, 7. ‘And Breslin would know that. Again: not taking any chances.’

‘No way he was planning on killing Aislinn from the start.’

‘No, but he wasn’t planning on leaving his wife for her, either. Breslin likes his life. He likes his kids. He likes his house, and his car, and his fancy sun holidays. Probably he even likes his wife, more or less. He liked Aislinn, too, but not enough to risk losing all the rest of it. If she went bunny-boiler on him, he didn’t want her having any evidence she could show his wife.’

‘He did a good job.’ Steve doesn’t look happy about it.

7, 745Th, 8, and then: a plain sheet of white paper. Careful, even handwriting – not Breslin’s; this looks like a match to the signatures and scribbles on Aislinn’s paperwork. Every loop neatly rounded, every line so straight that she must have put a lined sheet underneath to guide her, keep it perfect. I screen-pinch it bigger and we read, me glancing at Steve for a nod when I’m ready to scroll down.

Once upon a time two girls lived in a cottage in the deep dark forest. Their names were Carabossa and Meladina.

Carabossa ran barefoot in the forest all day and all night. She climbed the tallest trees. She swam in the streams. She trained wolf cubs to eat from her hand. She shot bears with her bow and arrow.

Meladina never left the cottage, because a wizard had put a spell on her. Carabossa couldn’t break the spell. No prince could break it. No good witch or wizard could break it. Meladina thought she would be trapped there forever. She looked out the cottage window and cried.

Then one day Meladina found a spell book buried under the floor of the cottage. She started to teach herself magic. Carabossa warned her that the wizard was dangerous, and she should have nothing to do with him, but Meladina had no choice. It was that or die in the cottage.

When she had learned enough, Meladina worked her magic and moved the spell from herself onto the wizard. He was trapped in the cottage forever, and Meladina ran out to climb trees and swim in streams with Carabossa. And they lived happily ever after.

If I got the ending wrong, I need you to tell them. Love and more love.

‘What the hell?’ Steve says.

I say, ‘That’s meant for Lucy.’

‘Yeah, I get that part. But what’s it mean? Like, Aislinn fell in love with Breslin – OK, that’s the spell – and it kept her trapped. And then what? She got him to fall in love with her too? Or what?’

‘I don’t care. Lucy can explain all the cutesy fairy tale crap. Because that’s what this end part means: if shit goes wrong, Lucy needs to tell us – or whoever – the whole story. And it means Aislinn was scared. As far back as’ – I tap at the phone, going back to Sophie’s e-mail – ‘as far back as the twelfth of November, Aislinn was scared things could end exactly like this. She made her will right around then, remember?’

‘Too scared to leave him,’ Steve says, trying it out. ‘And that’s the spell?’

‘Scared he was going through her laptop, too, or she wouldn’t have bothered with the password – not on something she wanted found. Sounds like a lovely romance all round.’ I’m checking the dates on the note pics, too, while I’m at it. Ninth of September, 5.51pm. Fifteenth of September, 6.08pm. Eighteenth of September, 6.14pm. Aislinn getting home from work, finding a note, taking a photo, uploading it onto her computer and deleting it off her phone. Planning something.

‘And her reversing the spell on him is her trapping him, somehow. Getting him locked up, maybe?’ Steve has his eyebrows pulled together and his hands clasped on top of his head, thinking it through. ‘The whole Rory thing was Aislinn trying to provoke Breslin into beating the shite out of her, so he’d go to prison, because that was the only way she could think of to get rid of him? Except she didn’t think things would go this far?’

I consider that. It fits with what we know about Aislinn: naïve enough to think an idiot plan like that could actually work, just because it played so nicely in her head; spent such a big chunk of her life trapped by someone else’s demands, she could have panicked when it happened again. ‘It’d explain why Aislinn kept pics of the notes. Evidence of the affair, in case Breslin tried to claim he’d never seen her in his life.’

‘Except why just the notes? Why not, I don’t know, set her phone to voice-record a conversation? Or take photos of him naked in her bed when he crashed out?’

I could’ve gone my whole life without that mental image. The things this job puts you through. ‘Scared he’d catch her at it,’ I say. ‘Or go through her phone before she could upload the file and delete it.’

‘Dammit,’ Steve says. ‘Even one nude pic would’ve been hard evidence. This stuff…’ He blows out a breath. ‘Unless Lucy’s got something amazing up her sleeve, we’ll be lucky if we ever have enough for a charge. Never mind a conviction.’

He’s watching the kids put dirt in their hair, with his hands clasped between his knees. The tense hunch of his spine says he’s not happy.

I say, ‘You don’t need to do this.’

It needs saying. Last night, with me and Steve caught up in our adrenaline hurricane from the hunt and the realisation, I took it for granted we were in this together, all the way to the finish line. I think he did too. Today, with Steve dumping doom and gloom into this morning made of flat chilly sky and Deasy’s watchful eyes and leftover rain dripping inside the park hedges, it feels like he should have a chance to change his mind.

His face turns towards me. Not blank; he’s not trying to pretend the thought’s never crossed his mind. Complicated.

He says, ‘Neither do you.’

‘I don’t have a lot to lose here. You do. And it’s my case.’ It gives me a quick flash of something like pain, the fact that part of me can’t stop thinking like a detective: my case, my responsibility. It’ll wear off, somewhere down the line. ‘You can throw a sickie. Get food poisoning. Go home, come back in a couple of days when the dust’s settled.’

‘We could both still get out of it. Tell Breslin that Rory’s ID’d McCann as being on the scene, and we know McCann’s not involved but we don’t want to fuck him up by letting him get dragged into court as an alternative theory of the crime, so we’re going to back off Rory and mark this one unsolved. Then tell Rory the ID didn’t go anywhere. The gaffer’ll give us a bit of shite for not getting the solve, but Breslin’ll put in a good word for us. Bang: we’re done. Like the whole thing never happened.’

He’s watching me, and his face has that same immobility it took on last night. The scraping light finds crow’s-feet and smile-lines I never noticed before. I can’t tell whether he wants me to say yes; yes, let’s flush this toxic godawful mess and walk away.

He’s right: we could do it. We could even square it with our consciences, near enough. Like he said, we’ll get a conviction around the same time we get a Lotto win. Even if we do, justice does nothing for the dead; nothing we do will make any difference to Aislinn. There’s no family needing answers, not this time. And it’s not like McCann and Breslin are going to turn into a rampaging serial-killer team if we don’t take them down; they’ll go back to being who they always were, and Breslin will go back to keeping it in his pants. No harm done, all round.

Except that, when you get down to it, I’m right where I thought I was when we figured Breslin and McCann were bent. If I keep my mouth shut, then they’ve put their hands on me and knotted me into someone else, living a whole different life, even if from outside it looks just like the old one. Breslin and McCann will be running me and my every day after all, whether they even wanted to or not.

I owe this case. I’ve got beef with this case. I need to shoot it right between the eyes, skin it and stuff it and mount it on my wall, for when my grandkids ask me to tell them stories about way back a million years ago when I used to be a D.

I can’t make myself tell Steve I’m gone, not yet. ‘Nah,’ I say. ‘I’ve started now; might as well finish.’

The sudden loosening in his face could be anything, relief or disappointment, till it resolves itself into a small, very sweet smile. ‘I might as well come along for the ride, so,’ he says. ‘I’ve never had food poisoning; I’d only make a bollix of faking it.’

For some reason that gets me, solid in the gut. Not like I’m welling up, or any of that shite, but something swells hard under my ribs. Weird how, when I realised I’m leaving, it never occurred to me that that’s gonna mean leaving Steve. Somewhere along the way I must’ve started taking the little bollix for granted, thinking he’d always be there, like a brother. I don’t do that shite. Because the fact is, Steve won’t always be there. Once I’m gone, we’ll stay in touch for a while. We’ll go for the odd pint, laugh too hard at each other’s stories and have conversations full of awkward stumbles where he tries to talk tactfully around work and his new partner, and I try to get him to knock that shit off. Then the pints will get further apart, and then one of us will get into a relationship and won’t be around as much; the texts will start with ‘Hey, too long no see,’ and all of a sudden we’ll realise it’s been a year since we met up. And that’ll be, in every way that counts, the end of that.

I can’t afford to be getting maudlin. ‘You little goody-goody,’ I say. ‘I bet you never once mitched off school, did you?’

‘Ah, I did. To visit my dying granny.’

I concentrate on the kids eating flowerbed, and the cyclist doing improbable stretches to show off his glutes to the nannies, till I can wipe my mind blank again. ‘OK,’ I say. ‘Good. In that case, I’m gonna go show Aislinn’s fairy tale to Lucy. You go play with Breslin. Tell him you and me called in to Rory – he’s gonna hear anyway. Say I was giving Rory hassle about his exes saying he was too full-on; I was asking if he stalked them too, he denied it, the poor guy got all upset. Play it like you’re still not totally sold on Rory, I’m still pissed off with you for having doubts, and you’re still pissed off with me for dissing them. That way Breslin’ll want to keep you close, and he won’t be too worried about me going MIA for an hour.’

Steve’s nodding, thinking it through. ‘All sounds good. If he asks where you’ve gone…?’

‘You don’t know. I told you it was none of your business.’

After a moment Steve asks, ‘When do we pull the pin?’

‘Today,’ I say. ‘It has to be. Breslin’s expecting to haul Rory in later on, arrest him and start preparing the file for the prosecutors. If I don’t do that, he’s gonna start wondering why not, and then they’ll be on guard.’

He nods. ‘Who do we go for? Breslin or McCann?’

‘I vote McCann. Unless Lucy comes out with something top-notch that we can use on Breslin. Breslin’s been watching us for days now; he’s got a lot better handle on us than McCann does. Plus, if we even hint any of this to Breslin, he’s gonna throw the mother of all self-righteous tantrums, and I’ve had enough of those for one week. We’ll find a way to get him out of our hair for a while, and we’ll tackle McCann.’

‘OK,’ Steve says, at the end of a long breath. ‘OK. McCann.’

‘And you’d better get moving, before Breslin starts wondering where you are.’

‘Right.’ He pulls the photo arrays out of his case and hands me a couple of each. ‘Good luck.’

‘Yeah,’ I say. ‘You too.’

For some reason me and Steve slap hands as we’re leaving. We don’t normally do that shite, what with not being sixteen, but it feels like we need something, on our way into this.