The Trespasser

Chapter 15

This time Lucy answers the buzzer fast. When she opens the front door, she’s dressed – black combats and a hoodie again, but clean ones, and she’s got Docs on. She looks at me, expressionless, and waits.

‘Morning,’ I say. ‘Are you OK to talk for a while, or is this too early?’

She says, ‘I figured you’d be earlier.’ Then she turns and heads back up the stairs.

Her sitting room is cold, the uncompromising damp cold after a night with the heat off. It smells of toast, smoke – the legal kind this time – and coffee. The stuffed fox and the old phones and the coil of cable are gone; instead there’s a record player and a stack of beat-up albums, a big cardboard box of flowery crockery, and a roll of canvas that touches the ceiling, coming unrolled to show a painted country lane disappearing into the distance. The room feels charged up with too many stories, jostling in the corners, pushing for space.

Lucy sits down first this time, grabbing the sofa with its back to the window and leaving me the one that takes the light – she learns fast. She’s got her armoury lined up ready on the coffee table: pack of smokes, lighter, ashtray, mug of coffee. She doesn’t offer me any. She sits still and watches me, braced for my first move.

I take the shitty sofa. ‘I’m going to tell you some stuff I’ve been thinking,’ I say. ‘I don’t want you to tell me whether I’m right or wrong till I’m done talking. I don’t want you to say anything at all. I just want you to listen. OK?’

‘I’ve told you everything I’ve got to tell.’

‘Just listen. OK?’

She shrugs. ‘If you want.’ She makes a thing of settling herself back into her sofa, cross-legged, mug nested in her lap, ready to humour me.

I can play that game too. I rearrange cushions, shift my arse on my bockety sofa, find the best angle to stretch out my legs. Lucy winds tighter, wanting me to get on with it.

‘So,’ I say, when I’m good and comfortable. ‘Let’s start with your friendship with Aislinn. You two were a lot closer than you tried to make out. Her phone records say you guys talked or texted basically every day. You were proper friends; best friends.’

Lucy pokes her coffee with her fingertip, scoops out a speck of something and examines it. The solid black of her against the blue-and-rust-striped Mexican blankets, and the white-blond forelock falling in her white face, make her hard to see, like a blank spot in the middle of my vision.

‘So there has to be a reason you didn’t want us knowing that, on Sunday. And the point when you started claiming you and Aislinn weren’t close was when you told us about her secret fella. Which has to mean three things. A, you know more about him than you let on. B, you’re scared of him; you don’t want him finding out you know anything. And C, you think he might find out through us.’

One blink, on the word scared. She rubs her fingertip clean on the edge of the cup.

I say, ‘Me and my partner, at first we wondered if Aislinn was going out with some gangster.’ The way Lucy’s face closes down would tell me, if I didn’t already know, how far off target that was. ‘It took us till last night to click. Aislinn’s married fella wasn’t a gangster. He was a cop.’

The silence stays. I’m better at leaving it than Lucy; more practice. In the end she moves. ‘Is that it?’

‘Yeah. Your turn.’

‘For what? I’ve got nothing to say.’

‘You do. I can see exactly why you’re scared’ – that blink again – ‘but if you wanted to keep your mouth shut, you would’ve. You told us Aislinn was seeing someone on the side because you wanted us to track him down. You didn’t want to get in too deep; you were hoping that, if you pointed us in the right direction, we’d get there on our own. And we have.’

Lucy’s eyes are still on her coffee. She says, ‘Then you don’t need me.’

‘If we didn’t, I wouldn’t be here. I’m pretty sure I know who Aislinn was seeing. I’m pretty sure I know who killed her. But I can’t prove any of it.’

‘Or you’re saying that because you want to find out how much I know.’

I say, ‘You want to hear something I haven’t told anyone? We’ve got lockers, at work. A couple of months back, someone jimmied mine open and pissed in it. All over my running gear and half a dozen interviews’ worth of notes.’

Lucy doesn’t look up, but I catch the flick of her lashes: she’s listening. I say, ‘Here’s the part that matters. Murder works separate from the other squads; there’s no one else in our building. And the locker room has a combination lock on it. One of my own squad did that.’

She looks up then. ‘Why?’

‘Because they don’t like me. They want me out. That’s not important. The point is, this isn’t the telly, where cops are all blood brothers and anyone who gets on the wrong side of a cop ends up dead in a ditch while the rest of us lose the evidence. I don’t have any squad loyalty. I’m not here to clean up anyone’s mess. I’m just working my case. Anyone gets in my way, cop or not, I’ve got no problem running him down.’

‘That’s supposed to reassure me?’

‘If I was just here to shut your mouth, I would’ve done it by now. One way or another. I already know you know something; if I didn’t want it coming out, I wouldn’t need the details.’

For a second I think I’ve got through, but then Lucy’s face shuts down again. She says flatly, ‘You’re better at this than I am. I know that. I’ve got no chance of figuring out whether you’re telling me the truth.’

I take out my phone, find Aislinn’s fairy tale and pass it across the table to Lucy. ‘Here,’ I say. ‘I think this is for you.’

I’m hoping to God it won’t break her down again, because I don’t have time to stick her back together today, but Lucy’s made of tough stuff. She has to bite down on her lips once, and when she looks up at me her eyes are too shiny, but she’s doing her sobbing in private now.

I say, ‘That’s Aislinn’s handwriting. Right?’

‘Yeah.’

‘And it’s meant for you.’

‘Yeah. It is.’

I say, ‘I don’t understand all of it, but I get this much: if the story doesn’t have a happy ending, you’re supposed to tell me the rest. I think this qualifies as a pretty shitty ending.’

That gets something like a laugh, helpless and raw. ‘Carabossa and Meladina,’ Lucy says. ‘When we were kids, and Aislinn used to make up stories about us having crazy adventures, those were our names. I can’t even remember where they came from. I should have asked her.’

I say, ‘If I wanted this story kept under wraps, I wouldn’t have brought you that. You’re right, there are detectives who’d try to bury the whole thing. You didn’t get them. You got me.’

Lucy’s touching the phone screen, just lightly, two fingertips. ‘Can I have this?’ she asks. ‘Could you send it to me, or print it out for me?’

‘Right now it’s evidence. I can’t go passing it around. Once the case is over, yeah, I’ll get you a copy. I promise.’

Lucy nods. ‘OK. Thanks.’

I hold out my hand. She takes one more moment with that message; then she catches a small tight breath and straightens her back. ‘Yeah,’ she says, and passes me the phone. ‘The guy Aislinn was seeing was a Guard. A detective.’

Flash of her eyes, checking my reaction. I ask, ‘Did you ever meet him?’

‘Yeah. The same night Aislinn did. I wasn’t going to let her-’

‘Hang on,’ I say. ‘One step at a time. Do you think you could identify him?’

‘Yeah. Definitely.’

I open my satchel and find the Breslin photo array. ‘OK,’ I say. ‘If you see the man who Aislinn was going out with, I want you to tell me. If he’s not there, or you’re not sure, say so. Ready?’

Lucy nods. She’s bracing herself for his face.

I pass her the card. She scans; then her face goes blank with bafflement. ‘No. He’s not here.’

What the fuck? ‘Take your time,’ I say. ‘Are you sure?’

‘I’m positive. None of these guys look anything like him. At all.’ Lucy almost shoves the card back at me. She’s gone wary again, wondering what I’m playing at. I’d swear it’s real.

In the moment as I bend to put the card back in my satchel – wondering wildly where the hell I go from here, wishing I’d brought Steve – it hits me.

I pull out the other photo array, the McCann one. ‘Try these guys,’ I say. ‘Do you recognise any of them?’

It takes less than a second: the scan, the quick burst of breath through her nose, the clamp of tension grabbing her whole body. ‘Him,’ Lucy says quietly, and her finger comes down on McCann. ‘That’s him.’

‘The man Aislinn was seeing.’

‘Yeah.’

‘How sure are you?’

‘A hundred per cent. That’s him.’

‘Write it down,’ I say, passing her a pen. ‘At the bottom of the sheet. Which number you recognise, and where you recognise him from. Sign and date it. Then initial beside the photo you’re identifying.’

She writes neatly, steadily; only the fast rise and fall of her chest and the slight huff of her breath give away that her adrenaline’s running wild. Mine is too. The big mystery about why McCann was hanging around Viking Gardens for weeks: gone. Aislinn’s neighbour thought the guy climbing the wall was fair-haired, but yellow half-light from a streetlamp would turn McCann’s grey streaks fair. The phone calls from McCann’s wife giving him grief about missing another dinner, the slump to his back while Breslin promised to get rid of me, the state of him the last few days, it all fits.

The only piece that still won’t drop into place is why the hell Aislinn wanted McCann; what the hell me and Steve have been missing, all along.

Lucy passes me back the photo array. ‘Is that OK?’

‘Yeah,’ I say, giving it a quick read. ‘Thanks. Now you can tell me the story.’

She takes a breath. ‘What do you want to know?’

‘All of it. Start from the beginning.’

‘OK.’ Lucy wipes her hands down her thighs – rubbing away sweat or the feel of that photo, I can’t tell. ‘OK. OK. I guess the beginning was maybe seven or eight months after Ash’s mum died – so about two and a half years ago? Ash and I were out for a pint, and she said, “Guess what I’m going to do.” She was ducking her head down and looking up at me like this, out of the corner of her eye, this bashful little smile – for a second I thought she was going to get a nipple piercing or something…’ Lucy laughs, a small dry sound. ‘If only. But then she said, “I’m going to find out what happened to my dad.” Which was the last thing I expected. She was always making up stories about where he was, or the ways he might come back; but she’d never talked about actually tracking him down.’

I say – I can sound as empathetic as anyone – ‘Maybe she didn’t feel able to do it while her mam was alive. Looking after her would’ve taken all of Aislinn’s energy; I’m not surprised she had none left for her da.’

Lucy’s nodding fast. ‘That’s what I figured. I thought it could be a good idea – not finding him, specifically; there were too many ways that could go pear-shaped. But this was the first time she’d ever come up with a plan to go after something she wanted. I thought that had to be good, for her to learn how to do that. Right? That makes sense, right?’

‘Total sense,’ I say – and I actually mean it – and watch the relief rush through Lucy. ‘She wasn’t going to get a lot out of life till she did.’

‘Exactly. So I said great idea, fair play to you. Aislinn told work she had a dentist appointment, dressed up in her best gear, and went in to the Missing Persons squad. They gave her the runaround at first, but finally this detective looked up her dad on some computer system and said he was dead. Aislinn was…’ Lucy bites down on her lips, remembering. ‘God. She was devastated. She rang work and said the anaesthetic had made her feel faint and she couldn’t come in, and then she went home and cried all day. I went over there after work, and she looked like roadkill. Everything had gone out of her; she was just… lost.’

This is the part where I should probably feel bad: my callousness turning poor Aislinn’s story down the path towards tragedy, blah blah blah. Yesterday, I would have felt fuck-all. Like I said to Steve: if she wanted to hook her life onto some guy who wasn’t even around, that was her problem. But today, I don’t know what it is. All of a sudden it feels like there were so many people nudging Aislinn from every direction: me, Gary, her ma, her da, on and on, all those fingers poking, shoulders barging, everyone shoving her life whatever way happened to suit them. It makes my skin leap like flies are covering it. And finally someone didn’t bother nudging: her life didn’t suit him, and he punched it right out.

Lucy says, ‘I was scared she’d go back to just drifting along, you know? That this had been her one chance at actually getting hold of her life, and now it had been smashed like that, she’d never give it another go. So I said, like a fucking idiot, I said, “Maybe someone who worked on the case could tell you what happened to him.” I was only trying to make Ash feel better. I just wanted to give her something to go after.’

That appeal is back in her eyes. ‘Sounds right to me,’ I say. ‘That’s probably exactly what I would’ve said.’

‘I should’ve kept my stupid mouth shut. But at the time, I actually thought I’d done the perfect thing. Aislinn stopped crying, just like that, and dived for her phone. I went, “What?” and she said I’d just reminded her of something the Missing Persons guy had said. He’d mentioned the names of the detectives who were in charge of the case, when her dad first went missing. Detective Feeney and Detective McCann.’

Hearing the name in her voice touches the back of my neck, one icy drop. I say, ‘And?’

Lucy says, ‘She Googled them. She found Detective Feeney’s obituary – she only vaguely recognised the photo, but it said he’d spent twenty-three years in Missing Persons, so she knew it had to be him. So that was a dead end. But Detective McCann… it took Ash a while to find anything on him, but finally she came up with a news video of him leaving court after some murder case – so she knew he was on the Murder squad now. And him she recognised straightaway. She’d forgotten his name – she just knew it was McSomething – but she remembered him spending a fair bit of time at her house, trying to talk her mum down. And she remembered him patting her on the head and saying, “Sometimes things are better off left. You’ve got great memories of your daddy, don’t you? We wouldn’t want to change that.” Aislinn kept saying, “That has to mean he knows something, doesn’t it? He definitely knew something.” I said maybe, maybe not, maybe he was just trying to make you feel better about them not knowing anything, right? But she wouldn’t let go of it. For weeks, that was all she talked about. Finally I was like, “For fuck’s sake, just track down the guy and ask him.” ’

‘And did she?’

Lucy shakes her head. ‘No. She said if he hadn’t told her back then, why would he tell her now? And it wasn’t like she could force him to – the Missing Persons detectives had told her you couldn’t use the Freedom of Information Act to find out about investigations. So Aislinn decided she’d have to go at him a different way: meet him “by accident”, not tell him who she was, and get him talking.’

I’ve got an eyebrow up. Lucy says, ‘I know, yeah. But Aislinn wasn’t just planning to bounce up to him the next morning and hope he spilled his guts. She was thorough. This was her last chance; she wasn’t going to blow it. She wrote down everything she could remember about Detective McCann – she had this notebook. She hadn’t paid a lot of attention to him, himself, because she didn’t think he mattered; but she used to sit at the bottom of the stairs in the dark, listening in while he and her mother were talking in the sitting room, hoping she’d get some clue to where her dad had gone. So she remembered bits about him. She remembered he was from Drogheda, and he took his tea with just a drop of milk, no sugar.’

McCann still does. For some reason that’s the thing that sends a cold spike down my spine. That’s the moment when it goes right through me: that guy is the same McCann who was waiting for me outside the Murder building yesterday morning, all stubble and restlessness. That missing-persons case followed him from the dim house with the silent kid listening, down every twisting road, all the way to our bright shouting squad room. That’s the moment when I understand that McCann is our man.

‘She remembered he was married, with two little boys – her mum asked him over and over, “And you wouldn’t leave them, would you? You’d never walk away from your own wife and your own children?” and he always said no, he never would. She remembered his coat, this grey tweed overcoat – he’d leave it hanging on the banister, and she’d pick bits of fluff off it while she listened and stick them in his pockets – she didn’t like him being there. But the big thing Ash remembered, the thing she wrote down with circles and stars all round it, was that he was into her mum.’

‘Into her like what?’ I ask. ‘Like they had a relationship? Like he came on to her?’

‘Jesus, no!’ The instant squeeze of disgust on Lucy’s face says it’s true. ‘This wasn’t some Greek tragedy; Ash wasn’t shagging her mum’s ex. Just, in hindsight, she was pretty much positive that he’d fancied her mum. She figured that was why he spent so much time on the case. Even though he was married with kids, even though he was supposed to be professional, even though Ash’s mum was going nuts trying to find her husband: he fancied her, and he went with it.’

‘And Aislinn thought that was important.’

‘Yeah. She knew she could use it. She said, “If he’s that kind of guy, the guy who does stupid stuff for pretty women, I can be that. I’d have to change my look anyway; I can’t have him recognising me and getting suspicious – not that he ever looked twice at me, he barely noticed I existed, but I’ll only get one chance at this and I’m going to do it right.” And she did.’

Lucy laughs, a humourless small breath. ‘God, she did. She basically stopped eating, and she started going to the gym every day. Once she got thin enough that she was satisfied – too thin, if you ask me, but whatever – she went to an image consultant and got shown what clothes to buy and how to put on makeup and what colour to dye her hair. She came out looking like she’d been cloned in some creepy factory off the M50. I was like, “Why don’t you just wear whatever you like best?” but Ash said no. She said, “I don’t know what type he goes for – except my mum’s type, and I can’t look anything like her or he’ll suss me. So I have to look generic. I have to be someone who any guy in the world would think was pretty, so even if he’s not actually attracted to me, being with me will be too much of an ego-boost to resist. I’ll have plenty of time afterwards to figure out what I like.” I mean…’ Lucy’s hands fly up in frustration. ‘What was I supposed to say to that?’

Part of me is actually growing some respect for Aislinn Murray. The core idea is idiotic shite, but the way she went about it: fair play to her. She wasn’t the limp blob I pictured on that first day in her house, or the pushed-around kid I felt sorry for a minute ago. She was training, taking her time and doing whatever it took, to do some pushing of her own.

‘That’s some pretty obsessive stuff right there,’ I say. ‘Didn’t you worry about her? That she was getting way too wrapped up in this?’

‘Of course I did. When I thought she needed to start going after what she wanted, this wasn’t what I had in mind. She spent like a year and a half trying to turn herself into what she thought some total stranger would fancy. It was insane.’

‘Did you say that to her?’

‘Ahh…’ Lucy grimaces, rubbing both hands down her face. ‘I did and I didn’t. The last thing I wanted to do was start pushing Ash around, you know? She’d had a tough enough time getting a hold of what she wanted to begin with, without me telling her she had it all wrong. But after the image-consultant thing, I had to say something. I didn’t exactly go, “This is fucking mental,” but I made it pretty clear that I thought she was taking this too far and it would be a lot healthier to either go talk to Detective McCann straight out or else forget the whole thing. Aislinn just laughed at me. She was like, “Don’t worry, silly! I know what I’m doing; I’ve got a plan, remember? All I have to do is get this sorted, and then the whole thing’s finally over and I can start my real life! Do you want to come to Peru with me?” I was like, “Can we not just go to Peru straightaway, and forget this guy?” ’

‘But she wouldn’t,’ I say.

‘No. She said she needed to do this. She kept saying – in her new accent; she used to sound Greystones, like me, but she was worried that Detective McCann might connect up the accent, so she’d started talking like that newsreader who does the weird pout thing – she kept going, “You worry too much! Look at me; don’t I look happy?” ’ Lucy has a small sore smile on her, remembering. ‘And she did; she really did. The happiest I’d ever seen her. Giddy, like a kid high on sweets, but still: happy. And she was making plans for afterwards – she’d never made plans before. Peru wasn’t just a joke – I mean, the bit about me going was, because I don’t have the dosh and I couldn’t leave my job for that long, but Ash was going travelling, all right. She was doing research on all the different countries she wanted to visit, and on the college courses she was thinking about doing when she came back… This plan had her galvanised. So…’ Lucy’s shoulder moves in something like a shrug. ‘Hard to argue with that.’

‘The plan,’ I say. ‘What was it?’

‘She was just going to flirt with this Detective McCann for a few weeks, go on a few dates. She wasn’t going to try and seduce him, or anything, and she wasn’t worried that he’d be looking for a shag – she said she was positive he’d never made a move on her mum, so he wasn’t the type of guy who has actual affairs. He was just the type who likes getting attention from attractive women, and who laps it up even when he shouldn’t. She said he’d probably run a mile if she even tried to kiss him.’ The shadow of a smile, flicking Lucy’s mouth. ‘She was just going to give him attention. Loads of attention.’

‘Smart,’ I say. ‘Aislinn was good at reading people.’

‘Yeah, she was. It was because she’d never had a life of her own; she’d spent all her time watching other people, thinking about how they work. That was the only reason why I thought she might actually pull off her plan. I mean, this guy was a detective, he wasn’t going to be the type to fall for any old shite; but if anyone could get him, it was Ash.’ The smile deepens, but it looks painful. ‘She was going to pretend she was one of those people who’re fascinated by the police, so she could ask Detective McCann questions about all his cases – she’d gone through old newspaper articles and court cases to figure out what types of cases he’d worked on, and she’d bought books on all the stuff, so she could ask the right questions. And then she was going to gradually steer the conversation round to her dad… And then, once she found out whatever Detective McCann knew, she was going to quit seeing him. And go to Peru.’ Lucy’s head goes up all of a sudden, and she blinks hard at the ceiling. ‘That was all. A few weeks of attention.’

Those true-crime books on Aislinn’s bookshelf, the gang murders in her internet searches. Not for the thrills, after all, or to cosy up with one of Cueball’s boys. I say, ‘What changed?’

Lucy says, ‘I knew Aislinn hadn’t thought it through properly. It was like the fairy tales: the story just goes up to the wedding, and then they all live happily ever after. That’s what Ash was doing. All she could think about was the big moment when she’d get this guy to tell her about her dad; everything after that was just this haze where life was perfect. I tried to tell her that it might not work out exactly like that; I tried. But…’ She spreads her hands.

‘She wouldn’t listen.’

Lucy runs her hands through her hair, leaving it sticking out at ragged-kid angles. She says, ‘We were sitting right here. Ash was where you are, all curled up in a blanket with a mug of tea – we’d been out clubbing, so it was late enough and we were drunk enough that I could say it to her. I went, “Ash, what if you don’t like what you find out? It could be bad. Like really bad.”

‘It was dark – we just had on that lamp over there. All I could see was her face, staring out of the blanket. She didn’t look pretty; she looked hollowed-out, starving, all bones and teeth, and way older than she was. And she said, “Luce, you don’t think I get that? Seriously? I’ve thought about every single possibility. I get that the most likely thing is my dad killed himself and the Guards didn’t have enough evidence to be sure, so they decided to say nothing in case they were wrong; or else he had a breakdown and ended up on the streets, and the Guards couldn’t track him down and didn’t want to admit it. I get that a Guard could have hit him with his car and they covered it up. I get that there’s a chance some psycho killed him and buried him up the mountains, and the police had some reason for not wanting to know – it was mixed up with a big investigation, maybe – and so they never followed up. I get all that. I just want to know. So it’ll be over. And then I can go do the next thing.” ’

‘So you left it,’ I say.

‘Yeah, I left it. Probably I should’ve pushed harder – well, Jesus, obviously I should’ve pushed harder. Right?’ Lucy spits out a furious little laugh. ‘But the way she looked; like this plan was all she had, and she could gnaw it down to the bones and still be ravenous… I couldn’t do it. I told myself maybe it would be fine: maybe this McCann guy wouldn’t give her the time of day. Or maybe he’d see through her – I mean, seeing through people was his job, right? – and he’d tell her her dad had died saving a little blond kid from an evil drug lord, and she’d have a cry and move on, just like she thought.’

If only McCann had had the cop-on to do exactly that. ‘But it didn’t work out that way,’ I say.

Lucy says, ‘She played him like a jukebox. The big tough cynical detective, yeah? It only took her a month to get it out of him.’

‘How’d she go about it?’

‘She went online and found out the places where Guards drink – I think she asked on some discussion board; she made it sound like she just wanted to bag herself a cop, tee-hee. She got a list of places, and we had to check them all out.’

‘“We,” ’ I say. ‘You went with her?’

That sends Lucy’s chin up. ‘Course I did. You think I’d let her go by herself?’

‘Nah. I’d have gone with my best mate, too. Just checking.’

She settles down. ‘Some of the places were obviously wrong, like Copper Face Jack’s – Guards go there, but they’re all young guys on the pull. But there was one pub, probably you know it – Horgan’s?’

‘Yeah,’ I say. Horgan’s is a cop pub, all right: an old-style pub, all threadbare red velvet seating and sconce lighting, hidden away in the tangle of laneways around Harcourt Street, where most of the squads and the General Unit work. I used to drink there, sometimes, back before I made Murder. I saw McCann and Breslin once or twice. Back then I watched them like they were rock stars.

‘Plenty of older guys drink there. So we kept going back. It was messy, because a couple of guys tried to chat us up – well, chat Ash up, basically – and we had to get rid of them, but not too hard, or else we’d get a reputation for being bitches and McCann wouldn’t bother with us if he did show up. We played it like…’ Lucy blows out air. ‘It was Aislinn’s idea. We played it like I was upset about something, a breakup maybe, and just wanted girl talk; that way she could blow off any guy who tried it on with her, and make it look like it was for my sake.’

She catches my eye and says, with a defensive edge on her voice, ‘I wasn’t happy about it. That’s not my kind of thing, at all. But… Aislinn was good at bringing you along with her. One little step at a time, and all of a sudden, without knowing how I got there, I was in the middle of some play she was putting on.’

That cold touch on the back of my neck again. McCann – same as every Murder D; same as me – he’s the one who writes the scripts. He wouldn’t have liked opening his eyes one day and finding himself in the middle of someone else’s play.

‘And then,’ Lucy says. ‘The fourth time we went to Horgan’s. I was sitting there pretending to be depressed and wondering how soon we could leave, and all of a sudden I felt Aislinn freeze. The breath went out of her; her drink went down on the table, bang, like her muscles were gone. I turned around to see if she was OK, and she said – barely even a whisper, I almost didn’t hear her – “That’s him.”

‘He’d just come in the door. I recognised him too: his hair was a bit greyer, but it was the guy off the video, all right. He must have felt us looking, because he turned around. And Aislinn, straightaway, she did this’ – Lucy drops her eyelashes, glances up from under them with a tiny smile, ducks her head away to sip her coffee. ‘As quick as that. She was right on it.’

I say, ‘And it worked.’

That rough laugh again. ‘Jesus, yeah. It worked all right. Detective McCann did an actual double take, he was so stunned that this gorgeous woman was looking at him like that. And Ash giggled across at him, this idiotic giggle she’d been practising on all the other guys who tried it on. And when he went to the bar, she knocked back what was left of her drink and dashed up there, right beside him, to order another. And next thing you know, Detective McCann had paid for our drinks and he was bringing them over to our table.’

The fucking fool. ‘When was this?’

‘The end of July. We left after that drink – I didn’t have to fake wanting to get out of there; it was probably the weirdest conversation I’d ever had. Ash gazing up at this guy and laughing her head off at everything he said, and him swelling up, thinking he had her wrapped around his finger, and all the time… But before we left, Ash gave Detective McCann – Joe – her phone number. He rang her the next day.’

‘She was good, all right,’ I say.

‘Yeah,’ Lucy says. ‘She was. That was what really freaked me out. Watching her pull him in, so easily, like she’d been doing it all her life; and I realised that she had. Deep down, it was the same as when we were kids and she’d come up with stories to make things better. Just that this time, it was real. And I didn’t like it. It felt- This sounds melodramatic, I know that, but it felt dangerous.’

No shit. I ask, ‘Dangerous to her? To Joe? To you?’

Lucy says, ‘Aislinn wouldn’t hurt anyone. She- Ash was gentle.’

I’m not convinced. Gentle to start with, maybe, but someone who’s been as hard on herself as Aislinn had been for a solid year and a half, she’s not gonna go easy on anyone else. I let that go. ‘That doesn’t answer the question.’

‘Dangerous to her. Maybe to Detective McCann, too, but I wasn’t thinking about him; just about Ash. She didn’t realise this was real. She didn’t get the difference.’

That one is probably true. ‘So then Detective McCann contacted her,’ I say. ‘And they met up again?’

Lucy asks, ‘Is it OK if I smoke?’

‘Go for it.’

She doesn’t look at me while she disentangles her legs from the striped blankets, puts her coffee cup down, opens the smoke packet and finds a cigarette and shakes the lighter. She’s still got time to play it safe: I don’t know the rest of the story, Aislinn wouldn’t tell me, once she actually got her hands on Joe she got cagey…

There’s nothing I can say that I haven’t said already. I keep still and wait.

In the end Lucy blows a long stream of smoke away from me and says, ‘They met regularly. At least once a week, usually twice or three times.’

‘Were you ever there for the meetings?’

‘Not after that first time. I wanted to go, but Ash said I’d only cramp her style. Everything had to be about Joe.’

‘What’d they do?’

‘They weren’t sleeping together. Not then. Nothing like that. They just talked. He’d pick her up – never at her place, in case the neighbours saw him; always down on the quays – and they’d go for a drive, up the mountains or somewhere. I didn’t like that. I mean, you guys are always finding bodies up the mountains, right? He’s picked up this girl, he’s made sure no one saw him, he’s taking her to the middle of nowhere… How serial-killer can you get?’

I ask, ‘Did you have any reason to think he might be dangerous?’

Lucy shakes her head, reluctantly. ‘No. Ash said he was always nice to her – a total gentleman, was the way she put it. She didn’t exactly like him; she said he was way too intense about everything, even when he tried to make her laugh he was intense about it – but his stories were interesting, and he was an OK guy. He really cared about his work, and that reassured her: it meant he’d probably done a good job on her dad’s case, so there would be something to find out, right?’ A humourless little breath of smoke that could be a laugh. ‘Jesus. No shit.’

I say, ‘And he was OK with just talking? He wasn’t trying to move the relationship into something sexual?’

‘No. Ash was right about him not being the affair type: he never tried it on with her, not even a kiss. He was a romantic, she said; he liked being into her from afar. But he was into her, all right. Aislinn felt bad about it, what with him being married-’

‘On Sunday you told us she’d have no problem shagging a married man,’ I say. ‘Never mind going for drives with one.’

Lucy doesn’t bother with embarrassment. ‘Yeah, I lied. I needed you to know that she’d be on for going out with a married guy, and I couldn’t exactly explain why it was only this one particular married guy.’

Even when grief had just punched Lucy straight in the face, her mind was going ninety. She was well scared. ‘Fair enough,’ I say. ‘So Joe wasn’t coming on to Aislinn, but he was into her.’

‘Oh yeah. He kept telling her how great she was, how gorgeous, how intelligent – what he meant was she acted like everything that came out of his mouth was pure gold, which of course she did – and how he and his wife didn’t get on. He said the two of them had drifted into getting married when they were way too young, and they should never have done it, because his wife was too thick to understand his job and too selfish to get that he was doing something that mattered; all she cared about was that he wasn’t around to help with the kids’ homework or eat the dinner she’d cooked.’ A wry twist to Lucy’s mouth, around her cigarette. ‘Yeah. So Aislinn took her cue from that. She piled it on thick about what an amazing job Joe had, how amazing it was to know someone who was doing something so important, and please would he tell her another story about how he had been amazing and solved an amazing case? And of course he did.’

Of course he did. Like Aislinn said: McCann is a romantic, at heart. He wanted to see himself riding down the green hill with light flashing off his spear, doing battle to save the world from itself. No way the job was letting him tell himself that story, not after this many years. His wife wasn’t doing it either. Aislinn let him tell it to her instead.

‘And then,’ Lucy says, ‘at the end of August, Aislinn decided it was time to go for it. She and Joe went for a picnic somewhere, and she started asking him what Missing Persons had been like, because it sounded so incredibly mysterious – she had it all planned; she’d written out her questions and learned them off by heart, she made me run lines with her the way actors do. She let Joe tell her a couple of stories while she gasped in the right places. She waited for him to come up with a bad one – some teenager who OD’d – and then she said ohmyGod, the family must’ve been totally in bits! How did he deal with it when the families were really upset? Because she’d never be able to deal with families who were going through something like that, she’d just totally go to pieces, but she was sure Joe was just amazing at getting people through the absolute worst time of their lives, right? And once he’d told her some story about that, Ash said she betted that sometimes, when they didn’t find the missing person, Joe stuck around for the family even after the case was officially over, because she knew he wouldn’t just leave them to pick up the pieces themselves, right? And next thing you know…’

Lucy grinds out her smoke. Her voice has changed; she’s wrung it dry, making sure nothing seeps in there that might break out of control. She says, ‘It was that easy. They hadn’t even finished their sandwiches, and Joe was telling her all about this poor woman whose husband ran off on her, left her with a little girl. The woman was the delicate type, Joe said – Aislinn could see him getting all misty, remembering – she wasn’t able for a nasty shock like that. He went all out, trying to get the poor woman some answers, and he finally tracked down the husband. In England, living with some younger woman.’

I say, ‘That had to hurt.’

‘Yeah. It wasn’t exactly what Ash had been hoping to hear.’ A twitch of Lucy’s mouth, like a flinch. ‘But she could have handled it. She was ready for something like that; not as ready as she thought she was, but she would’ve dealt with it… Only Joe kept talking. He said he rang the guy up, gave him a bit of hassle about shirking his responsibilities, asked what they were supposed to tell the wife. And the guy said something along the lines of, “Just tell her I’m OK. Tell her I’m so sorry. And I’ll get in touch when things settle down a bit.” Which Joe knew he wouldn’t; apparently the ones who do a runner without even leaving a note, they’re the ones who never find the exact right moment to get back in touch.’

‘Huh,’ I say. Gary said – I’m pretty sure Gary believed – that Des Murray told the cops to say nothing, not one word, to his wife. ‘Only Joe didn’t pass on the message to Mrs Murray.’

‘No,’ Lucy says. ‘What Joe did was, Joe decided it wouldn’t be good for her to hear that. The poor helpless little woman wasn’t able for that kind of news, don’t you know; she would have been destroyed. He decided she’d be better off knowing nothing at all.’ That tic at the corner of her mouth again. ‘So that’s what he told her: nothing. He was very proud of himself, for taking the whole thing off her shoulders.’

I just bet he was. At least when I palmed Aislinn off on Gary, I had the basic honesty not to do it for her own good. I did it because I felt like it, and fuck her. ‘What did Aislinn do when she heard that?’

‘She told me she almost smashed her glass and put the sharp end in Joe’s throat, only her hands felt too weak to do it. So instead she said to him – all wide-eyed, all thrilled to hear such an amazing story – she said he had been so right, that had been so brave of him, so wise, that woman had been so lucky he was on the case. And then she told him she was getting a headache, and would he mind terribly if she went home and had a sleep? And he drove her back home and told her to take a Nurofen, and they both waved goodbye.’

‘And she rang you straightaway,’ I say. ‘Yeah?’

‘No. She came here. She was…’ Lucy catches a hiss of breath, remembering. ‘I’ve never seen her like that. I’ve never seen anyone like that. She was so furious she was screaming into the sofa cushions – all dolled up in this pink flowery dress, screaming, “How dare he, how dare he, who the fuck does he think he is” – mascara all over her face from crying, and her hair coming down out of this fancy twist, and she was beating the cushions with her fists, she was biting at them… Do you get that at all? I mean, do you get why she was raging?’

She’s staring at me. ‘Yeah, I do,’ I say. ‘I get it, one hundred per cent. He had no right to make that call.’

She keeps up the stare, eyes flicking back and forth across my face. I say, ‘It would’ve been one thing if Aislinn’s da had been dead from the time he went missing. McCann wouldn’t have been taking anything away from her by keeping his mouth shut. But her da was alive. She could’ve got in touch with him any time. Her ma might not have lost the plot, if she’d known what was going on.’

Lucy says, ‘More than that.’ And waits, to see if I get it.

I do. I say – and I hear my voice saying it, into the small cluttered room that’s getting colder – ‘Aislinn had been thinking McCann kept his mouth shut for his own sake. Because a cop car hit her da, or because finding him would fuck up some big investigation. She could handle that; people do selfish shit, other people get caught in the crossfire, that’s life. But then she found out McCann had done it because of her and her ma. Because he’d decided their lives should play out this way. Her and her ma, they weren’t just collateral damage. They were the target.’

The light through the window is hitting me in the face, relentless, stripping me bare. I manage not to blink or move away.

Lucy nods: I’ve passed. ‘Right. Fuck whether they might actually have an opinion, right? What they might want? He was the cop, he had the right to decide that for them. They weren’t even people; they were just extras in his hero film. That was what had Aislinn losing her mind. That.’

Her voice has filled out again, ripe and pulsing with Aislinn’s anger and her own. She’ll tell me anything.

All that rubbish from the gaffer about me not being good enough with witnesses. This witness, who’s got every reason to shut down on me, she trusts me enough to give me everything she’s got. I wish that could still make me, even the smallest part of me, feel anything other than sad.

I say, ‘And so her plan changed.’

Lucy laughs, one sharp breath. ‘You know the first thing I thought, when she showed up on my doorstep sobbing her heart out and kicking the walls? At least it’s over. Thank God. I didn’t say that to Ash till I had her calmed down – which took forever; I had to listen to the whole story three or four times over, every detail, she couldn’t stop telling me. But finally I got a shot of whiskey and a cup of tea into her – I mean, she looked like she could’ve used a massive spliff or a Valium or something, but I didn’t have any and I just knew sweet tea for shock, right? It worked, anyway: she was still raging, but she settled down enough that at least she could sit still and she was only crying off and on, and I could get a word in edgewise. So I said, “Look, the only good thing is that now you know. Now you can leave it. Like you said.”

‘Ash practically came up off the sofa. Her hands were-’ Lucy’s hands shoot up, rigid claws. ‘I thought she was going to go for me, or dig her nails into her own face, I didn’t know whether to grab her before she could… But she went, “You think I’m going to fucking leave this?” – Ash doesn’t swear. “I’m not done. I’m nowhere near- I’m going to get that fucker. He thought he had the right to decide my life – no. No. No. I’m not going to just lie down and take it, yes sir whatever you want sir do it to me harder sir- Fuck him.” She was so angry she was panting, but it was a different kind of angry from before. She looked dangerous. Ash, like; the least dangerous person in the world. Her voice was wrecked from crying, this hard hoarse voice that didn’t even sound like her – she said, “Now I’m going to do it to him. I’m going to make the rest of his life into whatever the fuck I want.”

‘I went, “OK, hang on, what?” And Ash said, “He’s already half in love with me. I’m going to get him the rest of the way there. Then I’m going to convince him to leave his wife and get a divorce so that he and I can be together. I’m going to make him tell her all about me, so there’s no way she’ll ever take him back. And then I’m going to dump him.” ’

And there it is, the one piece me and Steve couldn’t find: why Aislinn wanted McCann. ‘Jesus Christ,’ I say. ‘There’s no way that was going to end well.’

‘I know that. I told her that. In those exact words.’

‘I thought Aislinn was good at people.’

Lucy says, ‘She is. That’s what freaked me out the most. In order to come up with a fucking looper idea like that one, she had to have completely lost hold of everything she knew about how people work. She was so obsessed with the story in her head, the fact that there were actual people involved wasn’t even a factor any more.’

She reaches for her smoke packet, not to open it, just to have something in her hands. ‘I tried to wake her up. I said, “I thought Joe wasn’t the type to have affairs.” And Ash said, “He isn’t. I can get past that. It won’t be that hard; he’s always dropping little hints about how he and his wife are basically staying together out of habit and he loves her but he’s not in love with her, blah blah clichés. Which is just him trying to convince us both that it’s totally fine for us to be going for drives together, but I can use it. I’ll make him think he’s the brave romantic hero breaking out of his meaningless marriage and turning himself into something special by following True Love. Him telling my mum that he’d never leave his wife and kids, never, the sanctimonious fuck, and all the time he knew- I’ll have him dumping her by Christmas. Just watch me.” ’

I say, ‘Being blunt here: she was planning on shagging his brains out till he couldn’t think straight.’

That makes Lucy blink, but she says evenly, ‘Yeah. She was.’

‘Not everyone would be on for that.’ Which is putting it mildly. There are plenty of undercovers, trained professionals, who won’t shag the targets. For a civilian, Aislinn was hardcore.

Lucy moves on the sofa, like a spring is sticking into her. ‘Ash was weird about some things,’ she says. ‘Sex, love, all that. She was all into reading romantic books that ended happy-ever-after, but when it came to her own life: no way. She said – ever since we were kids, she said it, and she meant it – that she was never going to fall in love. She went out with a couple of guys, but that was just for the experience – she didn’t want to be thirty and a virgin who didn’t know what a date felt like. The second the guys seemed like they might be getting serious, Aislinn broke it off.’

‘Because of her dad,’ I say. ‘And her ma.’

‘Yeah. She said look what it does to you, falling in love. Just look. It means someone else has hold of your whole life. At any second, like that’ – a snap of her fingers – ‘they could decide to change it into something else. You might never even know why. And you might never get it back, your life. They could just walk out and take it with them, and it’s gone for good.’

Lucy’s eyes are on nothing and her voice has changed, lightened and tightened: Aislinn’s voice, quick and urgent, running under her own. She’s remembering. For that second I want to nod to her – to Aislinn, not Lucy; that nod across a crowded room to the person you peg as a cop, to the only other woman there, to the only person dressed in your same style. The nod that says, whether you like each other or not, You and me, we get it.

Lucy says, ‘I mean, I thought she was doing exactly that anyway: letting her parents have her life. She was going to deliberately miss out on falling in love, because of what they did. But Ash said I didn’t get it. She said this was her; her own decision. She was right, I didn’t exactly get it, but I did get that the idea of shagging Joe… it didn’t mean the same thing to Aislinn as it would to most people. Sex wasn’t something she was hoping would be special, or mind-blowing; she specifically didn’t want it to be. And this, getting Joe, this was the most important thing in her life. So if sex could help her do it, why not?’

‘Well,’ I say. ‘You said she’d never hurt anyone. This plan was going to hurt Joe’s wife, and his kids. A lot.’

Lucy turns the smoke packet between her fingers. ‘I know. I said that to her, that day. I thought it would stop her for sure.’

‘Why didn’t it?’

She shakes her head. ‘It should’ve. When I said Ash wouldn’t hurt anyone, I wasn’t just being sappy, trying to make her into a saint because she’s… dead. She genuinely was like that.’ She turns the smoke packet faster. This is jabbing at her. ‘I don’t know. Yeah, she was obsessed, but still, I couldn’t believe… But she just stared at me. Like I was talking gibberish. I still don’t get it.’

But I get it. Lucy’s right: Aislinn had got good at tangling people in her stories, building the relentless current that drew them in deeper and deeper, tugged them step by step towards the ending she could see waiting misty and beckoning on the far shore. She had got too good: in the end she tangled herself. By the time Lucy pointed out McCann’s wife and kids, it was too late for Aislinn to pull free. Her own current had grown too strong for her. It wound around her ankles, her knees, rising, and it dragged her downstream to a shore she never saw waiting.

Lucy says, ‘She’d wiped her face on her dress. This flowy pink dress that she’d bought specially for the big day, to make her look sexy and adorable and harmless and everything that would make Joe more likely to spill his guts – she’d spent two hundred quid on it – and she’d been smearing the skirt across her face like it was a tissue. It was covered in mascara and foundation and tears and snot. And all of a sudden Ash looked down like she was only noticing, and she went, “Jesus, what a mess! I’ll have to get this dry-cleaned. Joe likes it; I’ll need it again.” And she found a tissue and started dabbing at the worst bits. Like she’d spilled tea on it, or something. She wasn’t angry any more, or crying; it was like none of that had ever happened.’

‘What did you do?’

‘I begged her to please, please just give it a few days before she did anything. I thought once she got over the shock, she’d realise this was a terrible idea in like a hundred ways. I begged her.’ Lucy’s hand’s clamped around the cigarette packet, and her voice has started to rise. She drives it back down to normal. ‘But Ash – I swear she didn’t even hear me. She got the worst of the crap off her dress, and then she found her phone and Hailoed a taxi. Then she got up and gave me a hug – a long hug, tight – and she said, right in my ear, “When I dump him, I’m going to tell him it’s for his own good.” And then she left.’

I say, ‘And she didn’t give herself a few days to get over it.’

‘Inside a week,’ Lucy says, ‘she’d slept with him. I don’t know how she convinced him. She said it wasn’t hard; she made him think it was his idea, and she was the one who needed convincing. And afterwards she got upset – not too upset, just prettily tearful – because she was scared he’d hate her for getting carried away and doing such a terrible thing to his marriage, and she’d never see him again. So he got to reassure her that it wasn’t her fault and he’d never think less of her and never leave her and his marriage was a mess anyway and blah blah blah. It all went perfectly.’ There’s a savage twist on the last word.

‘And?’ I ask. ‘How’d the relationship go after that?’

Lucy flips open her smoke packet and pulls out another, glancing at me for permission; this is getting harder. I nod.

She says through the cigarette, tilting her head to the lighter, ‘Well. The first thing was they stopped going for drives up the mountains, which was kind of a relief, except that instead he’d call round to Ash’s house and they’d… stay there. Which wasn’t a relief.’ She tosses the lighter on the table and pulls hard on the smoke.

‘How often were they meeting?’

‘Same as before: maybe once a week, maybe two or three times. They didn’t have a routine. Joe said he had to play it by ear, to make sure his wife didn’t suspect anything.’

‘So he wasn’t planning on ending his marriage,’ I say.

‘Not yet, he wasn’t,’ Lucy says dryly. ‘But Aislinn was getting him there. The second thing was that he started buying her presents. Only tiny ones – a little china cat with a checked bow when he saw she had checked stuff in her kitchen, things like that – because his wife looked after the money and she noticed every euro, she’d have been on it like a bonnet if Joe had bought anything big. But he kept going on about how he’d love to buy her a diamond necklace, and take her to Paris because she’d said she wanted to travel… And Ash said it wasn’t just talk; he meant it. So she fed it. Told him how she’d always dreamed about having a diamond necklace, and printed off pictures of cheesy places they could visit in Paris.’

I think about the high frustrated yammer coming out of McCann’s phone, again and again and on and on, while the squad lads mime whipcracking and McCann tries to disappear into his chest. A girl who acted like every word out of his mouth was pure perfection would have made a nice change. I remember that fugly china cat, pride of place on Aislinn’s kitchen windowsill.

‘The third thing,’ Lucy says, ‘was that at the end of October – October; that’s three months after they met – Joe told Aislinn he loved her.’

The fucking idiot. ‘I’d say she was pleased with that,’ I say.

‘Over the moon. She brought me out for champagne to celebrate. I didn’t exactly feel like celebrating, but I went anyway, because…’ Lucy leans her head back on the sofa and watches the smoke trickle out of her cigarette. ‘I missed her,’ she says. ‘We were seeing a lot less of each other. Aislinn felt like she could never make plans, in case Joe wanted to call round. We weren’t even talking any more, not properly. I mean, we rang each other, we texted each other, but it was all stupid stuff: are you watching this on the telly, did you hear this song… Nothing that mattered.’

She’s still watching the curls of smoke ooze through the cold air, not looking at me. ‘We were losing hold of each other,’ she says. ‘Just little by little, but there was nothing I could do to stop it, and I knew if this didn’t end soon… All Ash could talk about was Joe, and I didn’t want to hear the gory details. What I did hear, I didn’t like.’

I say, ‘Like what?’

‘Like,’ Lucy says. Her head moves against the sofa. ‘She still didn’t have Joe’s phone number, you know that? He’s all in love with her, he wants to drink wine with her in a café in Montmartre, but give her his phone number: oh, Jesus, no. He’d only ever rung her once, the day after we met him, and that was from a blocked number. After that, when he wanted to see her, he’d leave a note at her house. And then – get this – when they met up, he’d make her hand the note back to him so he could destroy it.’

But once Aislinn got stuck into her brilliant new plan, she started taking photos of the notes for her secret stash, before she handed them over like a perfect obedient mistress. McCann thought he was on everything, the big bad Murder D running a watertight operation. He underestimated Aislinn by light-years.

‘Thorough,’ I say.

‘That’s not thorough. That’s fucked up. What kind of person even thinks of something like that?’

Ds are all about preserving evidence, not destroying it. McCann was already thinking like something else. I wonder if he noticed.

‘Did it bother Aislinn?’ I ask.

‘Not really. I told her I didn’t like it, but she brushed it off. She thought Joe was just paranoid that she might go to his wife – which she figured was fair enough, specially considering he was right. But I thought it was more than that. Joe wanted to be the one calling the shots. His way meant Ash had no say in anything: if he dropped her a note saying “Seven on Wednesday”, she couldn’t text him going, “Hey, I’m busy Wednesday, how about Friday?” All she could do was ditch whatever she’d meant to do on Wednesday evening, put on a pretty frock and wait at home. And sometimes, right?’ Lucy’s head comes up so she can watch me. ‘Sometimes he didn’t even give her that much notice. He just showed up at her door and expected her to drop everything and spend the evening with him. Ash thought it was just because his schedule was unpredictable, but to me it sounded like he was checking up on her. He wanted to see what she was doing when he wasn’t looking.’

Her eyes are dark and speeding across my face, trying to catch hold of what I’m thinking. We both know what she’s saying. If McCann decided to check up on his girl, Saturday night, he would have found candlelight and wineglasses and her polished to a glow, and all for someone else.

I keep my face blank. ‘What happened if she wasn’t there when he told her to be?’

‘She always was. Like I told you before, she was ditching me all the time, the last few months. That was why.’

She ditched Rory, too, the first day they were supposed to have dinner at Pestle. Really sorry, something’s come up tonight! Rory thought she was looking after her sick ma; we thought she was playing hard to get. I say, ‘Did she ever do anything he didn’t want her to?’

Lucy makes a face. ‘Not really. I mean, her whole plan was based on being his dream woman.’

‘No arguments? No disagreements?’

‘I told you, he worshipped Ash. Going by what she said, they would’ve sounded like the perfect couple, if you didn’t know better. The only time they had any kind of disagreement was once, maybe at the end of September? Joe picked up Aislinn’s phone and started messing with it, and it was locked, like with a code. He wasn’t happy about that, at all. He wanted to know if she was texting people about him.’

‘What kind of not-happy are we talking about?’

One corner of Lucy’s mouth twists, around her cigarette. ‘Do you mean did he hit her?’

‘Did he?’

She thinks about lying, but after a second she shakes her head. ‘No. From what Aislinn told me, he never touched her, not like that. She never sounded like she was even worried that he might. And she would’ve told me – what was I going to do about it, call the cops?’ She leans forward to tap ash. ‘From what she said, Joe wasn’t even angry about the phone; more freaked out. He said it was because of his wife: it’s a small city, people gossip, you never know who might say something to the wrong person… But Aislinn said he acted more like he was terrified the phone was full of texts to her mates about how she’d pulled this middle-aged fool who was going to erase her penalty points. Aislinn thought he wasn’t totally convinced, at least not yet, that this was real.’

‘McCann’s a detective,’ I say. ‘Like you said. His instincts must’ve been telling him something was up. He just didn’t want to hear it.’

A small, humourless laugh out of Lucy. ‘No kidding. If only he’d had the sense to listen.’

‘What did Aislinn do?’

‘She begged for forgiveness like she’d run over Joe’s dog – obviously she didn’t put it that way, but I’m translating. She let him look through every text on her phone – which, yeah, I was delighted about: there was stuff in there that… I mean, nothing major, but just texts about nights out that I didn’t necessarily want a Guard to see.’ A quick glance at me. Seeing as I don’t care, I stay blank. ‘That didn’t even occur to Ash; all she cared about was getting Joe in deeper. And of course she started keeping her phone on swipe-lock. So he could see everything on there, any time he wanted.’

He had some willpower, not touching that phone on Saturday night. It hits me all over again how much of a fight me and Steve are in for. ‘She was OK with that?’ I ask.

Lucy lifts a shoulder. ‘She didn’t care. It was only for a few months, right? And Joe being obsessed was what she wanted; she wasn’t complaining. But I didn’t like it. A control freak like that…’

She lets it fall. I don’t pick it up. She’s right, obviously: this should have been yet another alarm bell waking Aislinn the hell up. This guy who couldn’t let a text or a Post-it go out of his control, how did she think he was gonna take it when she kicked him to the kerb? Her own floodwaters had risen so deep around her, they drowned it out. She underestimated herself too.

‘By the beginning of December,’ Lucy says, ‘Aislinn said she was nearly there with Joe. He told her he loved her all the time, he was constantly going on about the great stuff he’d do for her when they could be together; he was this close to offering to leave his wife. And Ash – Jesus. She was on a total high, all the time: talking a mile a minute and screaming laughing at nothing and never able to sit still, she was like someone on speed. Not from having a guy wrapped round her finger – Ash wasn’t like that; because her plan was working. She could hardly believe it. To her, it was like finding out that magic was real and she had it, she could turn pumpkins into carriages, she could turn princes into frogs and back again. Do you… Does that make any sense? Do you get it?’

‘Yeah,’ I say. ‘I totally get it.’ Out of nowhere I think of my first morning on Murder. Me in my new suit cut for victory, satchel swinging and shining, my heels on the footpath laying down a fast rhythm on the city swirl of buses and voices as I sliced straight through them heading for the Murder squad room waiting for me, finally, finally all my own. I could have done the walk to the door in ten-foot leaps. That morning I could have pointed at the Castle and made its roofs unfurl in great gold petals and trumpet blasts.

Lucy says, jamming out her cigarette, ‘And then Rory came along.’

I say, ‘Rory wasn’t in the plan, no?’

‘The Plan…’ She spreads her hands with a flourish. ‘I’d started thinking of it like that, in capital letters: THE PLAN, da-da-da-dum. No: Rory definitely wasn’t in the plan. Rory was my fault. I dragged Aislinn out to that book launch – and it took some dragging – because I was hoping if she had a night off from sitting at home obsessing over whether Joe would call round, if she went out and had a laugh and a chat about normal stuff with people our age, then she might get some perspective. Realise how mental this whole thing was.’

‘Meet a nice normal guy,’ I say.

‘It never occurred to me that she’d get that far. I was just hoping she’d have a non-insane evening. But one hour with Rory, and Ash was head over heels. She was totally freaked out by it – this was the last thing she was looking for, specially just when she was getting Joe where she wanted him. She couldn’t even believe she’d spent that long talking to Rory. She had this rule about not talking to a guy for too long, in case he thought he was in with a chance – Ash figured that wasn’t fair, when she wasn’t on for a relationship-’

‘You told us the reason she had that rule was because she liked to make guys work for it.’

Lucy shrugs. ‘That was the best I could come up with. I had to tell you she cut off her chat with Rory halfway through the evening, because other people might’ve noticed that; but I wasn’t about to tell you she wasn’t into relationships, or you wouldn’t have gone looking for her secret guy. And I couldn’t exactly go into the whole thing.’

‘Fair enough,’ I say. For someone who doesn’t like coming up with scripts, Lucy’s done a lot of it, the last while. Aislinn got good at sucking people in, all right. ‘So Aislinn didn’t know what to do about Rory?’

That smile on one side of Lucy’s mouth again, tender and bruised. ‘No, she knew exactly what to do about him: give him the brush-off. But she couldn’t do it. She thought he was the best thing since sliced bread. We went back to hers that night, after the launch, and she could not stop talking about him. She was all pink and giggly, like a kid, and she kept going, “What do I do? OhmyGod, Luce, what do I do?” ’

‘What did you say?’

The smile breaks up. ‘By this time I had no qualms about telling Ash what to do. I went, “You ring Joe tomorrow and cut him loose. Tell him you can’t live with yourself if you break up a marriage, some bullshit like that-” ’ Lucy’s hands go through her hair again. ‘I could hear myself sounding like her, making up stories… I just wanted her out of the whole Joe thing, before she pulled the pin and blew herself to bits. I told her, “And then when Rory rings you, which he will, you say yes I’d love to meet up thank you very much.” I told her, “This is how you get your revenge on Joe. By not letting him lose you a guy you actually really like. By not letting him run your life any more.” Right?’

‘Sounds dead right to me,’ I say. ‘Sounds like she should’ve had it tattooed on her arm. But no?’

Lucy shakes her head. ‘No way. Not a chance. And being honest, I could see why not. The amount Ash had put into this… All the planning, all the energy. All the starving herself. Shagging this guy she loathed, for months. And right when it was all about to pay off, when the explosions were about to go off and the big soundtrack number was about to kick in, I was telling her to ditch the whole thing?’

And she was telling Aislinn to give up the magic, just when she was about to start shooting fireballs out of her palms. ‘That wouldn’t be easy,’ I say. ‘I get that.’

‘And then of course two days later Rory texted Ash, wanting to meet up. If she said no, he’d take it as a brush-off, obviously – and she couldn’t exactly say, “Could you just give me a month or two while I finish shagging this guy into leaving his wife, then I’ll be all yours?” She stalled him a bit, as much as she could without him thinking she wasn’t into him, but in the end she said yes; yes, let’s meet. And they went for a pint, and they had an amazing time, and Aislinn was totally smitten.’

‘But she still didn’t break it off with Joe.’

‘No. She just started trying to nudge him along, hurry the whole thing up. She dropped hints about how much she missed him when he had to go home, and how she wanted to have babies and she wasn’t getting any younger… She had to be extra careful, because the last thing she wanted was him getting all noble and giving her up because she deserved better, or getting paranoid that she was sticking holes in the condoms. It was-’ Lucy’s hands go over her face and she laughs into her fingers, a laugh with a sob caught in it. ‘Jesus, it would’ve been hysterical, if it wasn’t so insane.’

‘How’d Joe react?’

‘I was praying he’d do the grand renunciation. I was trying to send him thought-waves. I’m not even joking.’ Another half-sob of laughter. ‘But nope: Joe just followed right along where Aislinn was taking him. Three weeks ago – just after New Year’s – he told her he was going to leave his wife.’

McCann, who used to brag to Aislinn’s mother about how he’d never leave his family. She’d fed all that into the shredder. I say, ‘I bet she was delighted with that.’

‘Oh yeah.’ Lucy wipes her hands down her face. This is taking a lot out of her. ‘Yeah, she was over the moon. Except Joe wanted to wait till summer. One of his kids is doing the Leaving Cert; Joe didn’t want him upset till that was over.’

‘Meaning Ash would have six more months of trying to juggle him and Rory.’

‘Yeah. She wasn’t happy about that, at all. She cried – not hard enough to be ugly, of course, just a cute little tear – and she told him she knew there would be something else after that, men never left their wives, it was so hard to watch him go home to another woman, blah blah blah. But Joe wouldn’t budge.’

‘So what did she do about it?’

‘God…’ Lucy grimaces, eyes closing. ‘Aislinn was so, so badly out of her depth. This was real stuff, you know? Twenty-five-year marriages, kids… There was no way she could keep up. Not a chance. All she could think of to do was keep Joe nervous, basically. She was still being Perfect Girlfriend, but every now and then she’d show him some Facebook picture of someone’s baby and sigh, or she’d let it slip that some client at work had flirted with her… She just kept poking him, nice and delicately, with the chance he could lose her if he didn’t get off his arse.’

I ask, ‘Did she ever tell him about Rory? Even a hint?’

‘You mean, to make the point that she had options?’ Lucy shakes her head. ‘No. I thought of that, too. I specifically asked Aislinn – warned her, more like – and she said no way. But I wondered if… I told you Joe wanted to be able to look through her phone. I wondered if maybe Ash was leaving a couple of texts from Rory on there. Just so, if Joe went looking…’

Which she was. Jesus Christ. I think about banging my head off the coffee table a few times. Naïve didn’t begin to describe this girl.

‘That was what worried me,’ Lucy says, ‘when Ash told me she had invited Rory over for dinner. They could’ve met anywhere, you know? If they wanted a shag, they could’ve gone back to Rory’s. Why go where Aislinn knew Joe might show up?’

I say, ‘Unless she was actually hoping for that.’

‘Yeah. Maybe not even consciously, but she had to know it could happen. And she was getting desperate for this whole thing to be over. Every time she saw Rory, or even talked to him, she got more smitten. Deep down, all she really wanted to do was forget the whole Joe mess had ever happened, and go off and spend twenty-four hours a day snuggling and giggling with Rory. She just couldn’t quite make herself let go of the Joe plan. Maybe part of her was hoping that Joe would call round, see Rory, throw a wobbler and stamp off into the sunset. Make the decision for her.’ Lucy catches the look on my face. We’ve been watching each other for so long, we’re getting good at each other. ‘I know. You think I don’t know? Like I said, she was miles out of her depth. She could’ve genuinely thought it would go down that way. Just that simple.’

Jesus Christ. ‘If only,’ I say.

Lucy says, ‘He did it. Didn’t he? Joe killed Aislinn.’

I say, ‘You need to keep quiet about this whole conversation. No dropping hints to your mates, nothing. Is that clear?’

‘Yeah, it is. I’ve kept quiet about this for months; I’m not going to start yapping now. I just need to know.’

I’m not gonna be McCann, doling out info in prissy little drips only when my all-knowing enlightened self has determined that it’s for someone’s own good. ‘Yeah,’ I say. ‘I’m pretty sure he did.’

Lucy puts a knuckle to her mouth and nods for a long time. This wasn’t a surprise, but hearing it out of my mouth changes it. It takes her a while to get used to.

She asks, ‘Was it on purpose? Was he actually trying to kill her, or was it something where he just snapped and didn’t realise…?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘Has he ever done anything like this before? I mean, not exactly like this, obviously, but-’

I say, ‘You mean, should you have seen this coming.’

‘Yeah.’

‘I wouldn’t have,’ I say, ‘and I know McCann a lot better than you do. I’ve never heard even a hint of a rumour about him smacking his wife around, or giving a suspect the slaps – and we all know who does that, when they can get away with it, and who doesn’t. He’s not a violent guy.’

‘The thing is, I was scared this would blow up. I said to Aislinn…’ Lucy catches a tight breath. ‘Back in September, when she told me she’d got Joe into bed. I asked her – we were in the Flowing Tide, but it was noisy enough that we could talk – I said, “Have you told him I’m your best friend?” She said no, they hadn’t really talked about anything except Joe and his general amazingness. I said, “Then don’t. Please. Make sure you tell him I’m just someone you go for drinks with, every now and then.” Ash was like, “Why? I’m not going to pretend you don’t matter to me.” ’ Lucy’s eyes close for a second on that. ‘But I told her, “When you pull the trigger, he’s going to be raging. He’s not going to just go away and sob into his pint. You’ll be in Peru or wherever, seeing Machu Picchu and shagging gorgeous backpackers; he won’t be able to get to you. But if he knows I’m your best friend, he’ll know he can get to you by doing things to me.” ’

‘“Things,” ’ I say. ‘What were you worried he’d do?’

‘I didn’t even get as far as specifics. I just… Me on my own in this flat, you know? A Guard could do whatever he wanted: plant anything, do anything. I didn’t want to find out. I figured I was safest staying far away from the whole drama.’ Lucy’s head goes back. That dry flick of a laugh, up at the ceiling. That hasn’t gone to plan. ‘But that wasn’t even the real point. The point was, I needed to get it through to Ash: This isn’t a game. I’m genuinely frightened that you’re doing something that’s actually, real-life dangerous. I knew she didn’t give a fuck that she was taking risks, but I thought maybe if she realised she could be putting me at risk as well, she might pay attention.’

‘But even that didn’t get through.’

‘Nope.’ A small jerky shrug. Even through everything else, that still stings. ‘Aislinn said sure, OK, she’d drop in a mention of me, make sure Joe thought I was just some sort-of-friend left over from school. But she was only doing it to shut me up. She didn’t think it was important. Like I said: all she could hear was the story in her head. Anything outside that was just…’ Lucy makes a yappy-mouth sign with one hand. ‘Just noise. And I should’ve known that.’

‘Aislinn had got herself in deep,’ I say. ‘You did your best.’

She shakes her head like I don’t get it. ‘No. Where I went wrong was, I never thought of this. I knew Aislinn was playing with fire, and I knew Joe was the wrong guy to pull this shite on – someone who thinks he’s got the right to decide whether or not you know where your own father’s gone, how’s he going to react when someone else does the same thing to him? But I never thought of this. I thought maybe when Ash dumped him he might hit her, yeah. But mainly I was worried that he’d decide to fuck up her life. Have her arrested for some bogus reason, land her in jail, make her spend years and thousands of quid fighting made-up charges, then start all over again. That was what I thought, when you guys showed up here on Sunday: that Joe had called round to Aislinn’s, he’d seen Rory there, and he’d found some way to have her arrested for something.’

‘Makes sense,’ I say. ‘That’s what I would’ve worried about, too.’

‘And instead it was this.’ Lucy has her fingers wound in the fringe of the throw, so tight they’ve gone white and lumpy. ‘And now I keep wondering… what if I’d said the opposite to Aislinn, that night? If I’d said, “You make sure Joe knows how close we are.” If he’d known that Ash was probably telling me the whole story. Do you think he’d have…? Would he have stopped himself from…?’

It would have made no difference. The split second where McCann decided to throw that punch was too small to fit any calculations. But I need Lucy feeling guilty.

‘No way to tell,’ I say. ‘And no point in beating yourself up over it now. You just do everything you can to help me get him.’

Lucy’s eyes come up to meet mine. She says bluntly, ‘You said the other detectives want you out. Are you going to be around to get him?’

I say, ‘I never have given one solitary fuck what the other detectives want.’

‘Seriously. Because I’m not going to go in there and sign a statement about all this, and maybe have Joe fucking up my life, if it’s not even going to do any good.’

I say, ‘I can’t guarantee you that McCann will go to prison. Even with your evidence, we’ve got maybe a fifty-fifty shot. But what I can guarantee you is that, if you put what you’ve told me into an official statement, his life won’t just go back to the way it was. I’m gonna make absolutely fucking sure of that, and I’m not going anywhere till it’s done. Is that good enough?’

After a moment Lucy lets out her breath and pulls her fingers free of the throw fringe. ‘I guess it’ll have to be,’ she says.

‘You’ve got my card,’ I say. ‘I seriously doubt McCann’s gonna come after you; it’d be too risky and it wouldn’t do him a lot of good, now that you’ve talked to me, plus he’s gonna have other stuff on his mind. But if anything happens that worries you, if anyone gives you hassle or even if something just strikes you as weird, you ring me. Yeah?’

She nods, flexing her fingers to get the blood back into them, but I’m not sure she’s really heard me. ‘I wanted Ash to have that happy-ever-after ending,’ she says. ‘I really did. Even if it was a million miles away, with that backpacker in Machu Picchu. She deserved it. But it’s like she wasn’t able to want that for herself, not till she got Joe out of her way. She could barely even see the happy ending. That’s how huge he was in her head.’

‘Or else she saw it just fine,’ I say, ‘and she wanted it, but she wanted to get Joe even more.’ This shrink-style crap is making me antsy, or maybe that’s just from sitting still hearing about people’s stupid sides when there’s shit I need to be doing. I get up. ‘I’ll be in touch when I need you to come in and give your statement. Till then: thanks. I mean it.’

Lucy makes a small worn noise that could be a laugh. ‘Look at that,’ she says. ‘Here we are, you and me, getting Ash what she wanted all along. I guess this was one way to get it.’

She walks me to the door of the flat, but she shuts it behind me fast, without coming downstairs. Lucy’s got some crying to do. Me, I’ve got nothing to do except head down the lopsided stairs that smell of soup and dead flowers, with Lucy’s story hammering inside my head while I try to work out what the hell I’m gonna do with it.