The Trespasser

Chapter 2

Steve’s contact gives us a home address for Lucy Riordan in Rathmines, a work address at the Torch Theatre in town, and a birth date that makes her twenty-six. ‘Just gone half-nine,’ Steve says, checking his watch. ‘She should be home.’

I’m dialling my voicemail; I’ve got a new message, and I just can’t wait to hear it. ‘She’ll be sleeping off last night. Like anyone with sense, this time on a Sunday morning.’ The park is making me edgy. Outside the car windows the sky is dead, not one bird, and the massive trees feel like they’re slowly tilting inwards over us. ‘You head up the interview.’ Seeing as I don’t have a legit reason to arrest Crowley or punch him in the mouth, or to tell the gaffer where to shove his domestics, I’m gonna take the head off the first person who gives me half an excuse, and I don’t want it to be our key witness.

I didn’t use to be like this. I’ve always had a temper on me, but I’ve always kept it under control, no matter how hard I had to bite down. Even when I was a kid, I knew how to hold it loaded and cocked while I got my target in range, lined up my sights and picked my moment to blow the bastard away. Since I made Murder, that’s been changing – slowly, I never lose a lot of ground at once, but I never gain any back, and it’s starting to show. The last few months, I’ve lost count of how many times I’ve caught myself in the half-second before I splattered temper everywhere and stuck myself cleaning up the mess for the rest of my life. I wasn’t kidding about telling that witness he was too stupid to live: my mouth was opening to do it, when Steve came in with some soothing question. I know, dead certain, that someday soon neither of us is gonna catch me in time.

And I know, dead certain, that the rest of the squad is gonna be on that moment like sharks on chum. It’ll be blown up to ten times life-size and spread all round the force like it’s a full-frontal shot of me naked, and every day for the rest of my career someone will slap me in the face with it.

Murder isn’t like other squads. When it’s working right, it would take your breath away: it’s precision-cut and savage, lithe and momentous, it’s a big cat leaping full-stretch or a beauty of a rifle so smooth it practically fires itself. When I was a floater in the General Unit, fresh out of uniform, a bunch of us got brought in to do the scut work on a murder case, typing and door-to-door. I took one look at the squad in action and I couldn’t stop looking. That’s the nearest I’ve ever been to falling in love.

By the time I made it onto the squad, something had changed. The pressure level means Murder is balanced so finely that it only takes a few new heads to shift the whole feel of the squad: turn that big cat rogue and edgy, set that rifle warping towards its moment to blow up in your face. I came in at the wrong time, and I got off on the wrong foot.

Part of it was not having a dick, which apparently is the main thing you need to investigate murders. There’s been women on the squad before, maybe half a dozen of them over the years; whether they jumped or got pushed, I don’t know, but by the time I got there none of them were still around. Some of the guys figure that’s the natural order; they thought I had some cheek, swanning in like I had a right to be there, and I needed to be taught a lesson. Not all of them – most were fine, at least to start with – but enough.

They tested me, my first weeks on the squad, the same way a predator tests a potential victim in a bar: tossing out small stuff – worn-out jokes starting Why is a woman like a, comments about me being on the rag, hints about how I had to be pretty good at whatever I’d done to get this gig – to see if I’d force myself to laugh along. Checking, just like the predator checks, for the well-behaved one who’ll take the putdowns and the humiliation sooner than God forbid make a fuss; who can be forced, shove by shove, into doing whatever he wants.

Deep down, though, it wasn’t about me being a woman. That was just their in; that was just the thing that they thought would, or should, make it easy for them to push me around. Deep down, this was simpler. This was about the exact same thing as primary school, when Ireland was still lily-white and I was the only brownish kid around, and my first ever nickname was Shiteface. It was about the same thing as everything else humans have done to each other since before history began: power. It was about deciding who would be the alpha dogs and who would be at the bottom of the pile.

I went in expecting that. Every squad hazes the newbie – my first day on Missing Persons, they tried to send me door-to-door asking if anyone had seen Mike Hunt – and Murder was already growing a rep for doing it that bit harder, fewer laughs, more edge. But just because I expected it, that didn’t mean I was gonna take it. If I learned one thing in school, it’s this: you never let them get you on the bottom of the pile. If you do, you might never get up again.

I could have followed official policy and reported to my superintendent that I felt other officers were discriminating against me and creating a hostile workplace environment. Apart from the obvious – that would have been the perfect way to make things worse – I’d rather shoot my own fingers off than go running to the gaffer whining for help. So when this little shiteball called Roche slapped my arse, I nearly broke his wrist. He couldn’t pick up a coffee cup without wincing for days, and the message went out loud and clear: I wasn’t going to roll over, belly-up and wiggling and panting for whatever the big dogs wanted to do to me.

So they went shoulder to shoulder and started pushing me out of the pack. Subtle stuff, at first. Somehow everyone knew about my cousin who’s in for dealing smack. Fingerprint results never made it to me, so I never found out about the link between my case and a whole string of burglaries. One time I raised my voice at a lying alibi witness; nothing major, no worse than everyone else does all the time, but someone must have been watching behind the one-way glass, because it was months before I could interview a witness without the squad room wanting to know – just slagging, all a great big laugh – Did you shout it out of him, Conway, bet you had him shiteing his kax, is he gonna get compensation for the hearing loss, the poor bastard’ll think twice before he agrees to talk to the cops again won’t he? By this time even the guys who’d been grand were smelling the blood in the air around me, pulling back from trouble. Every time I walked into the squad room, I walked into a thud of instant, total silence.

Back then, at least I had Costello. Costello was the oldest inhabitant, it was his job to show newbies the ropes, and he was sound; no one was going to turn it up too high while Costello had his eye on me. A few months later, Costello retired.

In school I had my mates. Anyone who messed with me was messing with them too, and none of us was the type you wanted to mess with. When a rumour went round that my da was in prison for hijacking a plane, and half the class wouldn’t sit next to me in case I had a bomb, we tracked down the three bitches who had started it and beat the shite out of them, and that was the end of that. In Murder, once Costello went and until Steve came on board, I was all on my own.

Before the door closed behind Costello, the lads stepped it up. I left my e-mail open on my computer, came back to everything wiped: inbox, sent box, contacts, gone. Some of them refused to switch into interviews with me when it was time to shake things up, You’re not sticking me with her, I’m not taking the blame when she fucks up; or they needed every warm body for a big search, except mine, and sniggered Couldn’t track an elephant through snow just too loud on their way out the door. At the Christmas party, where I knew better than to have more than one pint, someone got a phone snap of me with my eyes half shut; it was on the noticeboard next morning, labelled ‘ALCOCOP’, and by the end of the day everyone knew I had a drink problem. By the end of the week, everyone knew I had got rat-arsed drunk, puked on my shoes and given someone – the name varied – a blowjob in the jacks. No way for me to know which one of the lads was behind it, or which two or five or ten. Even if I stick it out in the force till retirement, there’ll still be people who believe all that shite. As a rule I don’t give a fuck who thinks what about me, but when I can’t do my job because nobody trusts me enough to go near me, then I start caring.

All of which is why Steve was the one ringing his contact for Lucy Riordan’s info. You pick up useful pals along the way, for moments when an official request would take too long, and a few months back I was making nice with this kid who worked for Vodafone; until one day I rang him to find out who owned a mobile number, and he stammered and dodged and tied himself in knots and couldn’t get off the phone fast enough. I didn’t bother asking for explanations. I already knew; not the details, like who had got onto him or what they had threatened him with, but enough. So Steve rings the mobile companies when we need info, and Steve runs interviews when I’m too wired to trust myself. And I keep telling myself those fuckers will never get to me.

My voicemail message is from Breslin, of course; lucky me. ‘Conway. Hi.’ Breslin has a good voice – deep, smooth, the newsreader accent that tells you Mummy and Daddy forked out for school fees to make sure he wouldn’t have to meet people like me and Steve – and does he know it. I think he fantasises about doing movie-trailer voiceovers that start ‘In a world…’ ‘Good to be working with you guys. We need to touch base as soon as possible; give me a bell when you get this. I’ll head down to the crime scene, take a quick look-see at what we’ve got. If we don’t cross paths there, I assume we’ll have talked by the time I’m done. We’ll take it from there.’ Click.

Steve shoots me finger-guns and a wink. ‘Yeahhh, baby. Touch my base.’

I snort before I can stop myself. ‘You know what it feels like? It feels like he’s sticking his tongue right out of the phone down your ear.’

‘And he’s positive it just made your day.’

We’re snickering like a pair of kids. Breslin brings it out in us; he takes himself so seriously you’re never gonna live up to it, so we don’t try. ‘Because before he rang you, he spritzed the good eau de cologne on his magic tongue. Just for you.’

‘I feel all special now,’ Steve says, hand on heart. ‘Don’t you feel special?’

‘I feel like I should’ve brought my ear lube,’ I say. ‘What’ll keep him out of our hair for another while?’

‘Incident room?’ Which isn’t a bad idea all round: someone needs to nab us an incident room, and Breslin will get one of the good ones with an actual whiteboard and enough phone lines, while me and Steve would get dumped with the two-desk shithole that used to be the locker room and still smells like it. ‘But nothing’s going to keep him away for long. In fairness, the interviews are why the gaffer has him on board; he’s going to want to be there for them.’

‘Don’t be giving me “in fairness”. I’m not in the humour to be fair to bloody Breslin.’ Actually, I’m in a better mood; I needed that laugh. ‘Incident room is good. We’ll go with that.’

‘Don’t be biting his head off,’ Steve warns me.

‘I’m not gonna bite his head off. Why shouldn’t I bite his head off, if I feel like it?’ Breslin isn’t one of the worst by a long shot – mostly he ignores the pair of us – but that doesn’t mean I have to like him.

‘Because we’re stuck with him? Because that’ll be a lot harder if he’s in a fouler with us from the start?’

‘You can smooth him down. Stick your tongue in his ear.’

I ring Breslin’s voicemail again – if I have to deal with Breslin, phone tag is the ideal way to do it – and leave him a message back. ‘Breslin, Conway here. Looking forward to working with you.’ I shoot Steve an eyebrow: See, I can do nice. ‘We’re going to pick up the guy who was due at the vic’s house for dinner and bring him back to base for the interview. Could you meet us there? We’d really value your angle on this one.’ Steve mimes a blowjob; I give him the finger. ‘On the way to his place we’re going to have a quick chat with the vic’s best friend, in case there’s anything we should know. Can you use that time to set us up with an incident room, since you’ll be heading back to the squad anyway? Thanks. See you there.’

I hang up. ‘See?’ I say to Steve.

‘That was gorgeous. If you’d put in a kiss at the end, it would’ve been perfect.’

‘Funny guy.’ I want to get going. The bare trees feel lower, closer, like while I was focusing on Breslin they grabbed their chance to move in around us. ‘Let’s find out what kind of crap floaters they’ve dumped on us.’

Steve is already dialling. Bernadette the admin gives him numbers for our floaters – six of them: O’Kelly pulled out all the stops there. A couple of them are good guys, useful; at least one isn’t. If we want more, we’re gonna have to fill out requests in triplicate, explain why we can’t do our own dirty work, and generally sit up and beg like a pair of poodles.

Later on we’ll have the first case meeting: me and Steve and Breslin and all the floaters in the incident room, everyone taking notes while I give a rundown of the case and we assign jobs. There’s stuff that needs doing fast, though, no time to wait. Steve sends two of our lucky floaters to do a preliminary door-to-door on Viking Gardens, find out what everyone knows about Aislinn Murray and what they saw and heard last night, and another two to pull all the local CCTV footage they can get, before anyone records over it. Meanwhile I send the last two off to get Rory Fallon’s address, find out if he’s home, sit on the house if he is, track him if he goes anywhere, and try to be discreet about the whole thing. They could just bring him in straightaway, but my plans don’t include Breslin spotting him in the corridors and deciding to do me and Steve a favour by getting a confession before we even make it back to the squad. Breslin rings me back; I let it go to voicemail.

The chewed-up night-shift look on Steve gives me some idea what I look like, so before we head for Lucy Riordan’s place we do a fast reboot: brush wrinkles out of our jackets and night-food crumbs off our shirts, Steve combs his hair, I take down what’s left of my bun and pull it back smooth and tight again. I don’t do makeup on the job, but the slice of me in the rear-view mirror seems decent enough. On a good day I look good, and on a bad day you’d still notice me. I take after my da, or I assume I do: I got the height from my ma, but not the thick shiny black hair, or the cheekbones, or the skin that’s never gonna need fake tan. I wear good suits, stuff that’s cut right and works with my shape – long and strong – and anyone who thinks I should be schlepping around in a sack to protect him from his own bad thoughts can fuck himself. The stuff people think I should try to hide – being tall, being a woman, being half whatever – is the stuff I keep up front and in their faces. If they can’t handle it, I can use that.

‘Yeah?’ Steve says, pointing at himself.

He looks like his mammy spit-shined him for Mass, but he plays that up on purpose. You use what you’ve got, and what Steve’s got is that your parents would be delighted if you brought him home. ‘Have to do,’ I say, readjusting the mirror. ‘Let’s go.’

I hit the pedal hard and let the Kadett pretend it’s a real car while it gets us out of there. I get a sudden nasty feeling like the trees behind us have snapped together and come down, with a silent roar and a smash of branches, onto the spot where we were parked.

Lucy Riordan lives in one of those tall old terraced houses split into flats. A lot of those are shitholes, but hers looks OK: the front garden’s been weeded, the window-frames have been painted in the last decade, and there are six bells by the door instead of a dozen, meaning the landlord isn’t jamming people into nine-foot-square bedsits and making them all share a jacks.

It takes two rings before Lucy answers the intercom, in a voice coated with sleep. ‘’Lo?’

Steve says, ‘Lucy Riordan?’

‘Who’s this?’

‘Detective Garda Stephen Moran. Could we have a word?’

A long second. Then Lucy says, and the sleep’s fallen off her voice, ‘I’ll be down in a minute.’

She opens the door fast and wide awake. She’s short and fit, the kind of fit you get from life, not from the gym – she wears it like it’s owned, not rented. Cropped platinum hair with a long sweep of fringe falling in her face – pale face with clean quick features, smudges of last night’s mascara. She’s wearing a black hoodie, paint-splashed black combats, nothing on her feet, a lot of silver ear jewellery and what looks to me like a fair-sized hangover. She has bugger-all in common with Aislinn Murray, or with what I was expecting.

We have our IDs out and ready. ‘I’m Detective Garda Stephen Moran,’ Steve says, ‘and this is my partner, Detective Garda Antoinette Conway.’ And he pauses. You always leave a gap there.

Lucy doesn’t even look at the IDs. She says, sharp, ‘Is it Aislinn?’ Which is why you leave the gap: it’s unbelievable what people will spill into it.

Steve says, ‘Could we come in for a few minutes?’

She looks at the IDs then; takes her time checking them out, or making some decision. Then: ‘Yeah,’ she says. ‘OK. Come in.’ And she turns and heads up the stairs.

Her flat is on the first floor and I was right, it’s decent: a small sitting room with a kitchenette to one side and two doors leading off the others, for the bedroom and the jacks. She had people over last night – empty cans on the coffee table and under it, thick layer of smoke in the air – but even before that, this place was nothing like Aislinn’s. The curtains are made out of old postcards sewn together with twine, the furniture is a banged-up wooden coffee table and a couple of lopsided sofas covered in Mexican-looking woven throws, and there are four 1970s phones and a stuffed fox on top of a coil of cable beside the telly. Nobody ordered this place through an app.

Me and Steve go for the sofa with its back to the high sash window, leaving Lucy with the limp excuse for daylight hitting her face. I get out my notebook, but I sit forward, letting Steve know that I’m not gonna be sitting this one out altogether. O’Kelly was full of shite, Steve is great with witnesses – not as flashy with it as Breslin, but he can make just about anyone believe he’s on their side – but I used to be pretty good too, not all that long ago, and Lucy doesn’t seem like she’s gonna piss me off. This girl is no idiot.

‘Anyone else home?’ Steve asks. After this conversation, Lucy is going to want backup.

Lucy sits down on the other sofa and tries to look at both of us at once. ‘No. It’s just me. Why…?’

Your basic witness-face is a mix of eager to help, dying to know the story and oh-God-I-hope-I’m-not-in-trouble. Your standard variation, in neighbourhoods where we’re not popular, is a sullen teen-style slouch-stare, including from people who are decades too old to pull off that shite. Lucy isn’t wearing either of those. She’s sitting up straight, feet planted like she’s ready to leap into action, and her eyes are too wide open. Lucy is scared, and she’s wary, and whatever she’s wary about is taking all her focus. There’s a green glass ashtray on the coffee table that she should have emptied before she let cops in. Me and Steve pretend we don’t see it.

‘I’ll just confirm a couple of things,’ Steve says, easily, giving her his best nonthreatening smile. ‘You’re Lucy Riordan, born the twelfth of April ’88, and you work at the Torch Theatre. That’s all correct, yeah?’

Lucy’s back is stiffening up. Nobody likes us knowing stuff they haven’t told us, but she’s liking it even less than most. ‘Yeah. I’m the technical manager.’

‘And you’re friends with Aislinn Murray. Close friends.’

‘We’ve known each other since we were kids. What’s happened?’

I say, ‘Aislinn’s dead.’

Which isn’t me being tactless. After the way she opened the door, I want her reaction neat.

Lucy stares at me. So many expressions collide on her face that I can’t read any of them. She’s not breathing.

I say, not bitchily, ‘Sorry to start your day off like this.’

Lucy grabs for a pack of Marlboro Lights on the coffee table and reefs one out without asking permission. Even her hands look active: strong wrists, short nails, scrapes and calluses. For a second the lighter flame jumps and wavers; then she gets it under control and draws hard on the smoke.

She asks, ‘How?’

Her head is down, that white-blond streak hiding her face. I say, ‘We don’t have any definitive answers yet, but we’re treating the death as suspicious.’

‘That means someone killed her. Right?’

‘Looks like it. Yeah.’

‘Shit,’ Lucy says, low – I’m pretty sure she doesn’t know she’s saying it. ‘Ah, shit. Ah, shit.’

Steve says, ‘Why did you assume we were here about Aislinn?’

Lucy’s head comes up. She’s not crying, which is a relief, but her face is a nasty white; her eyes look like she’s having trouble seeing, or trouble not getting sick. She says, ‘What?’

‘When you came to the door, you said, “Is it Aislinn?” Why would you think that?’

The cigarette’s shaking. Lucy stares at it, curls her fingers tighter to keep it still. ‘I don’t know. I just did.’

‘Think back. There has to have been a reason.’

‘I don’t remember. That’s just what came into my head.’

We wait. In the walls, pipes hoot and groan; upstairs a guy yells something about hot water and someone gallops across the floor, making the postcard curtains tremble. Next to Lucy on the sofa is a Homer Simpson stuffed toy with a Rizla that says princess buttercup stuck to its forehead. Last night was a good one. Next time Lucy sees that toy, she’s gonna shove it to the bottom of her bin.

After a long minute, the line of Lucy’s spine resets. She’s not gonna cry or puke, not now anyway; she’s got other things to do. I’m pretty sure she’s just decided to lie to us.

She taps ash without even clocking the spliff butts in the ashtray. She says – carefully, feeling her way – ‘Aislinn just started seeing this guy Rory. Last night she was cooking him dinner. It was his first time in her house; they’d only met in public places before. So when you said you were Guards, that’s the only thing I could think of: something went wrong there. I mean, I couldn’t think of any other reason you’d want to talk to me.’

Bullshit. Just off the top of my head I can think of half a dozen reasons – the hash, noise complaint from the neighbours, street fight outside and we need witnesses, domestic in another flat ditto, I could keep going – and Lucy’s well able to do the same. Here it is: the lie.

‘Yeah,’ I say. ‘About that. Yesterday evening, you and Aislinn were texting about her dinner date.’ The wariness goes up a notch, as Lucy tries to remember what she said. ‘You told Aislinn to’ – I pretend to check my notebook – ‘“be careful, OK?” Why was that?’

‘Like I said. She hadn’t known him that long, and she was going to be on her own in the house with him.’

Steve is doing puzzled. ‘Is that not a bit paranoid, no?’

Lucy’s eyebrows shoot up and she stares at Steve like he’s the enemy. ‘You think? I wasn’t telling her to have a loaded gun in her bra. Just to mind herself with a strange guy in her house. That’s paranoid?’

‘Sounds like basic good sense to me,’ I say. Lucy turns to me gratefully, relaxing back off the attack. ‘I’d tell my mate the same thing. Had you met Rory?’

‘Yeah. I was actually there when the two of them met. This guy I know from work, Lar, he published a book about the history of Dublin theatres, and the launch was at the bookshop Rory runs – the Wayward Bookshop, in Ranelagh? A bunch of us went from the Torch, and I talked Aislinn into coming along. I thought she needed a night out.’

Which is more info than I asked for. It’s the oldest technique in the book – get the witness pissed off with one of you, she’ll give the other one extra – and me and Steve do it a lot, but mostly we do it the other way round. I let Steve take the notes while I enjoy the feeling of being the good cop for the first time in a long time. ‘And Aislinn and Rory clicked,’ I say.

‘Big-time. Lar had read a bit out of the book and he was signing copies, and the rest of us were hanging around drinking the free wine, and Aislinn and Rory got talking. They basically vanished into a corner together – not snogging or anything, just talking and having a laugh. I think Rory would’ve stayed there all night, but Ash has this rule about not talking to a guy for too long-’

Lucy cuts off, blinking. It’s that filter – God forbid we should think bad things about poor sweet Ash – but I know what she’s on about: The Rules. ‘In case the guy guesses she’s into him,’ I say, nodding like this makes total sense.

‘Yeah. Exactly. I don’t know, that’s a bad thing for some reason.’ A twist of Lucy’s shoulder and her mouth, but it’s affectionate, not bitchy. ‘So after maybe an hour Ash came dashing over to me, and she was all, “OhmyGod, he’s so sweet and so funny and so interesting and so lovely, that was sooo much fun…” She said she’d given him her number and now she had to find someone else to talk to, so she stuck with me and the gang from work, but she spent the whole rest of the night going, “Is he looking over? What’s he doing now, is he looking at me?” Which he always was. They were both totally smitten.’

‘Lar who?’ I say. ‘And when was the book launch?’

‘Lar Flannery – Laurence. It was at the beginning of December, I don’t remember the exact date. A Sunday night, so theatre people could come.’

‘Did you meet Rory again after that?’

‘No, that was it. Aislinn’s only seen him a few times. She was taking it slow.’ Lucy’s head ducks to her cigarette, a long pull. We’ve just brushed past whatever she’s hiding. We leave a silence, but this time she drops nothing into it. Instead she asks, ‘Are you…? I mean, do you think Rory was the one who…?’

The question’s natural enough, but all of a sudden her voice is full up and leaping with things I can’t catch, and the flash of her eyes under her fringe is too fast and too intent. This means more to her, or means something more urgent, than it should.

Steve says, ‘What do you think? Would he be your guess?’

‘I don’t have a guess. You’re the detectives. Is he your prime suspect, or whatever you call it?’

‘Was there anything specific about Rory that set off your radar?’ I ask. ‘Made him seem like someone to be careful of?’

Lucy’s twitching to ask again, but she knows better. Smart, capable and used to thinking on her feet: whatever she’s keeping back, we’ll be lucky to get to it. She takes another drag of her smoke. ‘No. Nothing. He seemed like a nice guy. Kind of boring – I thought, anyway – but Ash was obviously seeing something I missed, so…’

‘She ever say anything indicating that he frightened her? Pressured her? Tried to control her?’

Lucy’s shaking her head. ‘No. Seriously. Nothing like that, ever. It was always how lovely he was and how relaxed she was around him, and how she couldn’t wait to see him again. Are you thinking-’

I say, ‘Then I’ve gotta be straight with you, Lucy. It doesn’t make sense that you were this worried about Aislinn. Texting her to be careful, yeah, sure, I can see that. But taking one look at us and figuring we had to be here about her? When you just told me Rory seemed like a good guy, no threat? Nah. When we showed up, you should’ve been wondering if the guy downstairs was dealing, or if someone got stabbed outside last night, or if one of your family was mugged or hit by a car. There’s no way your mind should’ve gone straight to Aislinn. Unless there’s something about her that you’re not telling us.’

Lucy’s smoke is right down to the butt. She grinds it out in the ashtray, taking her time, but she’s not stonewalling; she’s deciding. The light through the window is filling out; it’s ruthless on her, scraping away what should be offbeat-pretty, turning her to nothing but eyebags and mascara smudges on white.

She says, ‘Is it OK if I get a glass of water? My head’s killing me.’

‘No problem,’ I say. ‘We’re in no hurry.’

She takes her time running the tap in the kitchenette, her back to us; cups water in her hands and ducks her face into them, stays there while her shoulders lift and fall once. She comes back holding a pint glass in one hand, wiping water off her face with the other wrist and looking a couple of notches more alive. When she sits down she says, ‘OK. I think Ash might’ve been seeing someone else. As well as Rory.’

That flash of her eyes again, checking our reactions, too ferociously intent. Me and Steve don’t look at each other, but you can feel your thoughts click together like glances. Steve thinking I knew it, I knew something was weird here; me thinking Not a fucking chance I’m gonna get my run today.

Steve says, ‘What was his name?’

‘I don’t know. She never said.’

‘Not even a first name?’

Lucy’s shaking her head hard enough that her fringe falls forward. She shoves it back again. ‘No. She never even actually said she was seeing anyone else. It’s just a feeling I got; I don’t know anything specific. OK?’

‘OK,’ I say. ‘Fair enough. What gave you that feeling?’

‘Just stuff. Like the last few months – way before Ash met Rory – I’d ask if she wanted to meet up for a drink, and she’d say no, she couldn’t, but without any reason why not – and normally she’d have been like, “Can’t, I’ve got Pilates” or whatever. Or she’d say yes, and then at the last minute she’d text me like, “Change of plans, can we do it tomorrow instead?” She was around a lot less, mainly. And she got her hair done a lot more, and her nails – they were always perfect. And when someone’s around less, and gets more high-maintenance…’ Lucy shrugs. ‘Mostly it’s a new relationship.’

Aislinn cancelling her restaurant date with Rory, with just a few hours to go. I thought she was showing him who was boss.

I feel it again, that faint pulse that caught at me in Aislinn’s kitchen when Steve showed me the cooker. A pulse like hunger, like dance music: something good, away on the horizon, tugging. I can feel the beat of it hitting Steve’s blood too.

He says, ‘How long ago did this start?’

Lucy draws tight lines in the condensation on her glass and has a think, either about the actual answer or about the one she wants to give us. ‘Maybe five or six months ago. Towards the end of summer.’

‘Any idea where they might have met? Work? Pub? Hobby?’

‘Haven’t a clue.’

‘Who else did Aislinn hang out with, besides you?’

Lucy shrugs. ‘She went for a drink with people from work, sometimes. She doesn’t have a lot of friends.’

‘What about hobbies? She have any?’

‘Not serious ones. She’s been doing a bunch of evening classes, the last couple of years: she did salsa for a while, and then some image and styling thing, and she learned a bit of Spanish… Last summer I think she was doing cooking. She liked the people, but she never talked about any guy in particular. There was never anyone she mentioned that bit too often, nothing like that.’

Aislinn Murray is sounding like more and more of a laugh riot. I say, ‘I’ve gotta tell you, Lucy, this is coming across pretty weird to me. You and Ash, you were best friends since you were kids, but she tells you nothing about her fella?’

Her eyes come up, wary. ‘I said we’ve been friends since we were kids. I didn’t say we were best friends.’

‘No? Then what were you?’

‘Friends. We hung out in school, we stayed in touch when we grew up. We didn’t have a Vulcan mind meld.’

Steve has this lovely mix of worried and reproachful growing on his face. He says, ‘You know how we got your name? Aislinn had you down as her emergency contact. When you’re picking that, you pick someone who you think cares about you.’

Lucy’s head jerks away from the reproachful frown. ‘Her mum died a few years back, her dad’s not around, she’s an only kid. Who else was she going to put?’

Lying again. For some reason she’s trying to make the friendship sound like a leftover stuck to her shoe, but the layer of warmth when she talked about Aislinn’s idiot rules said different. I say, ‘You’re also the person Aislinn texted and rang most often. Like you said, she didn’t have a lot of mates. She thought of you as her closest friend, all right. Did she know you didn’t feel the same way?’

‘We are friends. I said that. I’m just saying, we don’t live in each other’s pocket. We don’t know everything about each other’s life. OK?’

‘So who would know all about Aislinn’s life? Who was her best friend, if it wasn’t you?’

‘She didn’t have one, not like you mean. Some people don’t.’

Her voice is pulling tighter. I leave it: she’s holding herself together by her fingernails, and I don’t want her going to pieces on us right now. ‘Regardless,’ I say. ‘Me, when I’m going out with someone, I tell my friends, even if they’re not my best bosom buddies. Don’t you?’

Lucy takes a gulp of her water and gets herself back. ‘Yeah. Sure. But Aislinn didn’t.’

‘You said she was dying to talk to you about Rory, how great he was. Did she tell you about other boyfriends, before him? Introduce them to you?’

‘Yeah. I mean, it’s been a few years since she went out with anyone, but yeah, I met him.’

‘She wanted to talk about him, see what you thought of him, all that. Right?’

‘Yeah.’

‘But not this time.’

‘No. Not this time.’

Steve asks, ‘Why did you figure that was?’

Lucy rubs her water glass over a smear of purple paint on the knee of her combats, scrapes at it with a fingernail. She says, ‘I figured the guy was married. Wouldn’t you?’

She’s looking at me. I say, ‘That’d be my first thought, all right. Did you ask her?’

‘I didn’t want to know. As far as I’m concerned, anyone who’s taken is well off limits, and Ash knows that. Neither one of us wanted to have the conversation. It would only have turned into a fight.’

‘You’re saying she might’ve been OK with seeing a married guy, though. They weren’t off limits to her.’

Purple paint flakes away. Lucy rubs it to a smudge between her fingertips. ‘That makes her sound like some homewrecker vamp manhunter. She’s not like that. At all. She just… she’s really unsure. Of a lot of stuff. Does that make sense?’ A quick glance up at me. I nod. Her face looks older than it did when we got here, dragged down around the edges. This conversation is taking a lot out of her. ‘And if the other person’s totally sure, a lot of the time she ends up thinking they’re probably right. So yeah, I could see her hooking up with a married guy. Not because she thought it was OK, or because she didn’t care, but because he convinced her that it might not be not OK.’

‘Gotcha,’ I say. I’m glad Aislinn is the vic and Lucy is the witness here, not the other way round. By this point I would’ve brained Aislinn with something gingham.

‘So you must’ve been well pleased when she hit it off with Rory,’ Steve says. ‘Nice single guy, nothing to cause tension between the two of you, nothing to cause Aislinn hassle. Yeah?’

‘Yeah.’ But there’s a fraction of a second before it. Another brush past something Lucy isn’t telling us.

I say, ‘Did you get the sense she’d finished it with the other fella before she started seeing Rory? Or would you guess she had them both on the go?’

‘How would I know? Like I said-’

‘Was she still being vague about her social plans? Still cancelling on you at the last minute?’

‘I guess. Yeah, she was.’

I say, ‘So that’s why you were worried about Aislinn?’

Lucy’s still messing around with paint smears, elbows on her thighs and her head right down. ‘Anyone would be. I mean, juggling two guys, one of them’s married… that’s not going to end well. And Ash… she’s really naïve, in a lot of ways. It wouldn’t occur to her that this was a pretty volatile situation. I just wanted her to be aware of that.’

This is making more sense, but not enough. ‘You said Rory didn’t set off your alarm bells,’ I say. ‘What about this other guy?’

‘I don’t know anything about him to set off alarm bells. Like I said. I just didn’t like the whole setup.’

She’s tensing, digging her elbows into her thighs. Whatever we’re circling, she’s not happy being this close to it. I’m not happy myself. Lucy is no idiot; she should know this isn’t the time to fuck about. I say, ‘That still doesn’t explain why your mind went straight to Aislinn when we showed up at your door. You want to try again?’

The edge on my voice makes her elbows dig in harder. ‘That’s why. Because what else was it going to be? Maybe I lead a really boring life, but most people I know don’t do anything that could land actual detectives on my doorstep.’

I’m less and less in the mood for bullshit. ‘Right,’ I say. I lean over and give the ashtray a shove so it slides towards Lucy, a little puff of rancid ash rising into the light. ‘Like I said: try again.’

Lucy’s head comes up and she gives me a whole new kind of wary look.

Steve shifts his weight beside me. I know that shift: Leave it.

I consider punching my elbow through his ribs, but the fact is, he’s right. I’ve been getting on well with Lucy, and I’m about to throw that away for good. I say, more gently, ‘We’re not planning on doing anything about that. We’re only interested in Aislinn.’

The wary look fades, but not all the way. Steve – right back in the Good Cop seat, where he’s happiest – says, ‘Tell us a bit about her. How did yous meet?’

Lucy lights another smoke. I love nicotine. It puts witnesses back in their comfort zone when things get tricky, it keeps the vic’s friends and family from going to pieces, it means we can make suspects as antsy as we want and then throw them an instant chill pill when we want them calm again. Non-smokers are double the hassle; you have to find other ways to adjust their dials. If it was my call, everyone involved in murders would be on a pack a day. She says, ‘When we started secondary school. So when we were twelve.’

‘You’re from the same place, yeah? Where’s that?’

‘Greystones.’

Just outside Dublin; smallish town, but big enough that Lucy and Aislinn were hanging out together by choice, not because there was no one else. Steve asks, ‘And what was Aislinn like, back then? If you had to describe her in one word, what would you pick?’

Lucy thinks back. That affection warms her face again. ‘Shy. Really shy. I mean, that wasn’t the most important thing about her, not by miles, but back then it covered up practically everything else.’

‘Any particular reason? Or just the way she was?’

‘Partly just the way she was, and being that age. But I think mostly it was because of her mother.’

‘Yeah? What was she like?’ This is what I mean about Steve being good with witnesses. The way he’s leaning forward on the sofa, the tilt of his head, the note in his voice: even I could believe he’s genuinely, personally interested.

‘She was messed up,’ Lucy says. ‘Mrs Murray, not Ash. Like, properly messed up; she should’ve been in therapy, or on medication. Or both.’

Steve nods away. ‘What kind of messed up?’

‘Ash said she used to be fine, back before we knew each other. But when Ash was almost ten, her dad walked out on them.’ Lucy should be relaxing, now that we’ve moved away from the murder and the hash and whatever she’s hiding, but her fingers are still rigid on her smoke and her feet are still braced on the paint-splattered floorboards like she might need to run any minute. ‘They never knew why, exactly. He didn’t say. Just… gone.’

‘And that wrecked Mrs Murray’s head.’

‘She never got over it. She just started going downhill and couldn’t stop. Ash said she was ashamed; she felt like it had to have been her fault.’ That twist to Lucy’s mouth again, through her cigarette, but this time the warmth isn’t there. ‘That generation, you know? Everything was the woman’s fault somehow, and if you didn’t get how, then you probably needed to pray harder. So Ash’s mum basically cut herself off. From everyone. She still went to the shops and to Mass, but that was it. So by the time we met, Ash had had two years where she spent most of her life stuck in the house, just her and her mum and the telly – she’s an only child. I never even wanted to go over there because her mum creeped me out so much – you’d hear her crying in her bedroom, or else you’d go into the kitchen and she’d just be standing there staring at a spoon while something went up in smoke on the cooker, and the curtains were always closed in case someone saw her through a window and, I don’t know, thought bad things about her… And Aislinn had to live there.’

Steve’s hit the Go button. Lucy’s talking faster; she’s not going to stop till we stop her, or till she crashes. ‘There was small stuff, too. Like, since her mum didn’t go out, and they didn’t have a lot of money, Ash’s clothes were always wrong – she never had whatever everyone else in school was wearing; it was always charity-shop crap that was two years out of date and didn’t suit her. I used to lend her stuff, but we were different sizes – that was another reason Aislinn was insecure: she was always, not fat, but a bit overweight – and my mum bought her stuff sometimes, but there’s four of us so there was a limit to what she could do, you know? It doesn’t sound like a big deal, but when you’re twelve and everyone already knows that your dad’s left and your mum’s gone off the rails, the last thing you need is to look like some weirdo.’

This is the stuff Steve likes, and the stuff I’m wary of. He thinks it gives us an insight into the victim. Me, I think about those filters. I already know Lucy’s got at least one agenda that we haven’t pinned down. The Aislinn we’re getting here is totally in Lucy’s hands; she can do whatever she wants with her.

I say, ‘This is gonna sound blunt, Lucy, and I’m sorry about that. But I’m not getting why you two were friends. I’m trying to see it, but I can’t put my finger on a single thing yous had in common. What made it work?’

‘I guess you had to be there.’ Lucy half-smiles; not at me, at whatever she’s seeing. ‘We did have stuff in common. I wasn’t having that great a time in school either. I wasn’t an outcast or anything, but I was always into carpentry and electrics, so the boss mares gave me shite about that and called me a dyke, and the people who wanted to get in with them did it too, and it wasn’t some major torture thing but overall school mostly sucked. But Ash, right? She thought I was great – for the exact same things that everyone else was slagging me about. She thought I was totally amazing, like some kind of heroine, just because I told the other girls to fuck off and did what I wanted even though they didn’t like it. Ash thought that was the coolest thing ever.’

The smile spasms into something wretched. She takes a drag off her smoke to force it back under control. ‘And yeah, at first partly I was hanging out with her because I liked her thinking I was amazing, but after the first while it was because I liked her. People thought she was thick, but that was just because of what I told you, how she was unsure – it made her seem like she wasn’t keeping up. She wasn’t thick, at all. She was actually really perceptive.’

Steve is nodding along, all enthralled. I’m interested too, but not like that. Lucy wants us to know Aislinn, or at least her version of Aislinn; wants it badly. Sometimes we get that: the friends and family want to shove a holy innocent in our faces, so we won’t think this was all the vic’s fault. Usually they do it when they think it was at least partly the vic’s fault. Aislinn shagging a married man might be enough to do that for Lucy, or there might be more.

‘And she could make even shit things funny. Like I’d have some bitch-off with some cow in our class, and afterwards I’d be all pissed off and adrenaline-y, like “Who does that geebag think she is, I should’ve punched her face in…” And Ash would start giggling, and I’d be like, “What? It’s not funny!” all ready to go off on her; but she’d go, “You were brilliant, like this little furious cat chasing away a horrible dirty hyena” – and she’d do an imitation of me jumping up and down, trying to punch something way above my head. She’d be like, “I thought she was going to run for it, she’d be hiding in a corner screaming for help while you bit the ankles off her, everyone’d be crowding around chanting your name…” And all of a sudden I’d be laughing too, and the whole thing wouldn’t feel like a big deal any more. I wouldn’t feel like such a big deal.’

Lucy laughs, but there’s a stretched sound to it, like it’s straining against the solid weight of pain dragging downwards. ‘That was Ash. She made things better. Maybe because she’d had so much practice with her mum, trying to make their life even bearable for both of them; I don’t know. But even when she couldn’t make things better for herself, she made them better for other people.’

Please I don’t know where else to- That woman was still the twelve-year-old that Lucy’s describing: chubby, insecure, clothes that wouldn’t suit anyone and definitely didn’t suit her. The dead woman was a whole different story. I say, ‘Things got better for her, too, though. She grew into her looks, got a bit of style, bit of confidence. Yeah?’

Lucy grinds out her smoke, picks up her glass but doesn’t drink. Now that we’ve moved back to the present, the carefulness is creeping back in.

She says, ‘Not as soon as she should’ve. Even after we left school, she stayed living at home – she felt like she couldn’t leave her mother, and even though I thought her staying was a terrible idea, I could see her point: without Aislinn there, probably her mum would’ve killed herself inside a few weeks. So right up until a few years ago, Ash was going home to that house every night, just like when we were kids. It kept her…’ She turns the glass between her hands, watching the light move on the surface of the water. ‘Like it kept her from growing up. She had a job, but it was the same one she’d had since we left school – she was the receptionist at this place that sells toilet roll and hand soap to businesses, which would have been fine except it wasn’t what she wanted to do. She didn’t have a clue what she wanted; she’d never had a chance to think about it. I was scared for her, you know? I could see us being thirty, forty, and Ash still doing this job she’d wandered into and going straight home to look after her mum, and her whole life just…’ Lucy snaps her fingers, hand lifting through a patch of pale sun. ‘Gone. And she could see it too. She just didn’t know how to do anything about it.’

‘So what changed?’ Steve asks.

‘Mrs Murray died. Three years ago. This is going to sound bad, but it was the best thing that ever happened to Ash.’

‘What did she die of?’

‘You mean, did she actually kill herself?’ Lucy shakes her head. ‘No. She had a brain aneurysm. Ash came home from work and found her. She was devastated, obviously she was, but after a while she started coming out of that, and… it was like that was when her actual life started. She sold the house and bought herself the cottage in Stoneybatter. She lost a load of weight, she got her hair dyed, she bought new clothes, she started going out…’ A sudden grin. ‘To really trendy places, even. I mean, this was the girl I had to drag out for one pint in some manky theatre pub, and suddenly she wants to go to some super-fancy club she’s read about in some social column – and when I said there was no chance the bouncer would let me in, she was like, “I’ll do you up, you can wear my stuff, we’ll get in no problem!” ’

The grin widens. ‘And we actually did. It wasn’t my scene – tossers in labels seeing who could yell loudest – but it was totally worth it just to watch Ash. She had a ball. Dancing, and flirting with one of the tossers, and turning him down… She was like a kid at a funfair.’

The grin is gone. Lucy grabs a big breath and lets it out in a hiss, trying to keep herself together.

‘She was just getting her chance to figure out what she wanted to do. Just starting to get enough confidence to even think maybe she was allowed to figure that out. Just starting-’

She was getting, she wanted, she was. Lucy has switched Aislinn to past tense. It’s sinking in. Any minute now she’s going to melt down.

‘She was going to quit her job – she’d never had much to spend her salary on, so she had a load of money saved up, and she was going to take a year or two out and decide what she wanted to do next. She was-’ Another grab for breath. ‘She was talking about travelling – she’d never been out of Ireland – about going to college… She was giddy about it. Like she was waking up after being in a coma for fifteen years, and she couldn’t believe how bright the sun was. She…’

Lucy’s voice fractures. She dives her head down and digs at another smear of paint, so viciously that she’s got to be gouging into her leg through the combats. Whatever game she’s playing with us, it’s used her up.

She says, down to her knees, ‘How did…? Whoever did this. What did he do to her?’

I say, ‘We can’t give out details, for operational reasons. As far as we can tell, she didn’t suffer.’

Lucy opens her mouth to say something else, but she can’t make it work. Tears fall onto her combats and spread into dark stains.

The decent thing to do is leave, give her privacy while the first wave of grief smashes her down and pounds her black and blue. Neither of us moves. She holds out for almost a minute before she starts sobbing.

We give her tissues and refill her water glass, ask if she’s got someone who could come stay with her, nod sympathetically and stay put when she manages to say she just wants to be by herself. When she can talk again, we get her to make us a list of Aislinn’s exes – all three of them, including a two-week summer fling called Jorge when she was seventeen; the girl was a real player – and of everyone she remembers being at the book launch. We ask – just a formality, ticking the boxes, have to ask everyone – where Lucy was yesterday evening. She was at the Torch: arrived at the theatre at half-six, did various stuff within sight of other people till the show came down just after ten, went for a few in the pub, then came home around one in the morning with the lighting operator and two of the cast, who hung out doing the obvious until around four. We – meaning the floaters – will check her story, but we won’t find holes in it.

I’m about to bring up the formal ID when Steve says, ‘Here are our cards,’ and shoots a glance at me. I find a card and shut up. ‘Whenever you feel like you’re ready to make your official statement, you give one of us a ring.’

Lucy takes the cards without knowing they’re there. I say, ‘Meanwhile, please don’t talk to any journalists. Seriously. Even if you don’t think you’re saying anything important, it could do real damage to the investigation. OK?’ Creepy Crowley is still nagging at the back of my mind. If someone’s siccing him on me, it’s someone who’s gonna have access to Lucy’s details.

Lucy nods, wiping her eyes with the back of her hand – she used up the tissues a while back. It makes no difference; the tears are still coming.

She says – her voice has gone thick from crying – ‘Whoever did this… it’s like he killed a little kid: someone who never even had a chance to get her life started. He took away her whole entire life. Could you remember that? When you’re investigating?’

I say, ‘Don’t worry. We’re going to do everything we can to put this guy away.’

Lucy gives up and leaves the tears to drip off her chin. She looks like shite, eyes puffed half-shut, a smear of purple paint down one cheek. ‘Yeah, I know. Just… Could you just keep that in mind?’

‘OK,’ I say. ‘We’ll do that. In exchange, though, I want you to keep thinking about whether there’s anything else you can tell us. Anything at all. Yeah?’

Lucy nods, for whatever that’s worth. She’s not looking at either of us. We leave her staring at nothing, surrounded by the ashy leftovers of last night.

Daytime’s kicked in properly while we were up there. Rathmines is buzzing: students hunting hangover cures, couples making sure the world can see how in love they are, families who are going to enjoy their family time if it kills them all. One look at it drops us both into the morning-after vortex, when your body suddenly realises you’ve been up all night and shuts down the engine, turning you floppy with fatigue.

‘Coffee,’ Steve says. ‘Jesus, I need coffee.’

‘Wimp.’

‘Me? If you shut your eyes, you’ll fall over asleep. Do it. I dare you.’

‘Fuck off.’

‘Coffee. And food.’

I hate wasting my time eating on the job, I can’t wait for them to come up with some nutrition pill I can pop twice a day, but till then me and Steve both need food and plenty of it. ‘Your turn to buy,’ I say. ‘Find somewhere they serve coffee by the litre.’

Steve does it right: skips the shiny hip chai-and-cronut cafés, picks the smallest, scuzziest corner shop, and comes out with massive medical-grade coffees and breakfast rolls stuffed with enough sausages and egg and rashers to see us through most of the day. We take them to a little park off a side street; it’s too cold for that, with a nasty edge to the air like it’s just waiting for the right moment to dump sleet down the backs of our necks, but getting out of the car means at least no one can give us hassle over the radio, and we need to have a conversation that doesn’t belong in a coffee shop.

The park looks just adorable, all curly wrought-iron benches and neatly clipped hedges and flowerbeds waiting for spring, till you look again: used condom twisted in the hedge, blue plastic bag hanging off a railing with something sticking out that I don’t like the look of. The place has a nightlife. In sunshine it would be jammed, but the weather is keeping people wary. On one bench a guy in a Tesco uniform is having a smoke, whipping his head around after each puff like he’s checking no one’s seen him, and a kid is circling grimly on a scooter while his mother bobs a whining buggy and swipes at her phone. The kid is wearing a hat that looks like some kind of dinosaur eating his head.

We find a bench that doesn’t smell like anyone’s pissed on it recently. I turn up my coat collar and get half my coffee down me in one swig. ‘You were right. Talking to Lucy, that was worth doing.’

‘I think so, yeah. It could still be Rory Fallon-’

I give Steve the eyeball. ‘It is. Almost definitely, it is.’

Steve wavers his head noncommittally. He’s unfolding paper napkins to spread over the front of his overcoat – these are attack sandwiches, and Steve takes his work clothes very seriously. ‘Maybe. But the rest of that stuff’s worth knowing, either way.’

I’m feeling better already; the coffee zapped my eyelids open like something out of a cartoon. ‘At least we know why Aislinn’s gaff looked like Working Girl Barbie Playhouse. And why Aislinn looked like Dream Date Barbie. The woman hadn’t got a clue; she was putting together who she was meant to be out of magazines.’

Steve says, ‘Someone like that, she’s vulnerable. Really vulnerable.’

‘No shit. Rory could be a full-on psychopath with more red flags than the Chinese embassy, and as long as he wore the right labels and helped her put her coat on, she’d still have invited him over for dinner on Date Three. Because that’s what you’re supposed to do.’

‘Lucy’s not clueless,’ Steve points out. ‘If he was covered in red flags, she’d’ve spotted them.’

‘Speaking of,’ I say. The breakfast roll is good stuff, proper thick rashers, grease and egg yolk going everywhere; I can feel my energy creeping back up. ‘What’d you think of Lucy?’

‘Smart. Scared.’ Steve has finished arranging his bib. He props his coffee cup on the bench and starts peeling back his sandwich wrapper. ‘She’s keeping something back.’

‘She’s keeping back plenty. And that doesn’t make sense. Forget all that hair-splitting crap about old-mates-not-best-mates-no-not-that-kind-of-mates; she cared about Aislinn, a lot. So what the hell? Does she not want the guy caught?’

‘You think she knows more about Aislinn’s married fella than she’s letting on?’

‘I think we’ve only got Lucy’s word for it that this married fella even exists.’ We’re keeping our voices down; Tesco guy and buggy mammy look like they’ve barely noticed we’re here, but you never know. ‘She was dead careful not to give us anything we could disprove, you notice that? No name, no description, no dates, no place where they might’ve met, nothing.’

Steve has his roll opened up across his lap and is carefully decorating it with brown sauce. ‘You figure she made him up on the spot? Why, but?’

I say, ‘She cares way too much whether Rory’s our prime suspect. It’s not just that she wants to know who did this to her mate; she wants to know whether we’re looking at Rory, specifically.’

‘Yeah.’ Steve squirts the last of the brown sauce into his mouth and tosses the packet into a bin by the bench. ‘I couldn’t figure out whether she was hoping it was yes or no, though. She was straight in there giving us Rory’s name, telling us he was due at Aislinn’s last night; but after that…’

‘Right. Giving us his name and the appointment was no big deal: she had to know we had that already, or would any minute. And after that, it was all about what a good guy he was, how she never got any kind of threat vibe off him, how happy Aislinn was with him. Could be all true; she could be trying to steer us away from him because she genuinely doesn’t think it’s him, doesn’t want us wasting our time while the real guy gets away. But I’m wondering if her feelings for Rory were as nonexistent as she’s claiming.’

Steve’s eyebrows go up. ‘“I thought he was kind of boring, but Ash was obviously seeing something I missed…” ’

‘Yeah, we’ve only got Lucy’s word for that, too. For all we know, she was just as into Rory as Aislinn was. For all we know, she was actually seeing him behind Aislinn’s back.’

‘We just said: she cared about Aislinn. A lot.’

‘And for some reason, she’s not happy admitting that. Could be guilt.’ I get more coffee into me. ‘Like she said herself, that love-triangle shite can go way wrong.’

‘She’s got an alibi,’ Steve points out.

‘Yeah, plus the shock was genuine. Lucy’s not our woman. But her alibi means she can’t give Rory an alibi. So if she wants him off the hook, for whatever reason, the only thing she can do is come up with some mysterious other guy for us to chase.’

Steve chews and thinks. ‘We’ll cross-check Lucy’s and Rory’s numbers, Facebook accounts, e-mails, see if they’ve been in touch. Not that it proves anything if they haven’t; Lucy could still be into him.’

‘Yeah.’ The dinosaur kid is hovering, balancing on his scooter and eyeing our rolls. I give him a hairy look till he backs off. ‘And we need to go through Aislinn’s stuff ASAP, see if we find any evidence that this other fella existed. If he did, there’s gonna be something. Texts, calls, e-mails.’

Steve examines his breakfast roll, picking an angle. ‘Well,’ he says. ‘Maybe.’

‘What’re you on about, “maybe”? There’s no such thing as invisible, not any more. If he didn’t leave tracks, it’s because he wasn’t there.’

‘Tell you what I was thinking,’ Steve says. ‘Just an idea, now. But I was wondering: what if Aislinn’s other fella was a crim? A gangster, like?’

Fried egg nearly goes down my nose. ‘Jesus, Moran. How desperate are you to make this one interesting? Shame they got Whitey Bulger, or you could’ve told yourself it was him.’

‘Yeah yeah yeah. Think about it. It explains why Lucy doesn’t want us going after Rory: she’s positive it’s the other guy, doesn’t want us heading the wrong way. It explains why she figured straightaway we were there about Aislinn. It explains why she texted her to be careful, last night: if Aislinn was two-timing a crim, she’d want to be bloody careful about inviting some new fella around for dinner-’

I still have my mouth open to slag strips off him when it sinks in: Little Mr Optimist is right. It would fit.

‘Jesus,’ I say. That pulse is hammering right through me, practically lifting me off the bench. Forget coffee; this job, when it’s right, this job is the hit that speed freaks throw their lives away hunting. ‘And it’d explain why Lucy’s keeping stuff back. She wants us to get him, but the last thing she wants is to be up on the stand with some gangster watching her explain how she’s the one who dobbed him in. So she throws the idea out there for us to chase down, but she makes a big deal about how she doesn’t know the other guy’s name, doesn’t know anything about him, can’t even swear he exists, her and Aislinn weren’t actually that close. Fair play to you, Steo. It works.’

‘Not just a pretty face,’ Steve says, through roll, giving me a thumbs-up. When he’s swallowed: ‘And if it was a gangster, he might’ve been careful not to leave a trail. No texts, calls, none of that.’

‘Specially if he was a married gangster. Half of them are married to each other’s sisters, cousins, whatever. Playing offside could get you kneecapped.’ I’ve got my second wind now, all right. If this pans out, the gaffer is gonna shit a hedgehog; this is about as far from routine as a lovers’ tiff can get. ‘Jesus. It actually plays.’

‘It’d explain why the call came in to Stoneybatter station, too. Most civilians, if they want an ambulance, they’ll just ring 999-’

‘But a crim, or a crim’s mate, he’s gonna know that 999 calls are recorded. And he’s not gonna want his voice on tape, where we can identify it – specially if he’s already known to us. So he rings the local station instead.’

‘Exactly,’ Steve says. ‘The only thing, though. Does Aislinn seem to you like the type who’d go out with a gangster? Nice girl like that?’

‘Hell, yeah. She’s exactly the type. Her life was so boring, just thinking about it makes me want to hit myself in the face with a hammer for a bit of excitement. You know what she had in her bookcase? Bunch of books about crime in Ireland, including a big thick one on gangs.’

Steve lets out a huff of laughter. ‘Look at that. Maybe she was the type after all.’

‘I thought she was just looking for second-hand thrills, but she could’ve been reading up on her new fella’s job – or maybe the book was just for kicks, but then she got a chance at the real thing. And you heard Lucy: it’s not like Aislinn had some big moral sense, or even basic common sense, that’d stop her getting involved with a crim.’ I’m working to keep my voice even. It’s early days; this is a stack of made-up ifs and maybes that could dissolve into nothing any second. ‘If some dodgy geezer starts chatting her up in a club? As long as he’s good-looking and he dresses OK, she’s gonna be fucking thrilled. It’s gonna make her year.’

‘Most of them don’t dress OK, but,’ Steve points out. ‘The gang lads. They dress like shite. Lot of them look like shite, too.’

‘So that’ll narrow it down. Then, after a few months, the thrill’s wearing off, Aislinn’s starting to notice that Mr Excitement is basically just a scumbag. And that’s when she meets Nice Guy Rory. She dumps the scumbag – or else she can’t get up the guts to do it, just starts seeing Rory on the QT. Either way, the scumbag’s not happy.’

Steve says, ‘You think Lucy knows a name?’

‘If there’s a name to know.’

‘If. You think?’

‘Probably just a first name, or a nickname. And she’s not gonna give it to us. If he’s out there, we’ll have to find him ourselves.’

‘I’ve got no one good in Organised Crime. Do you?’

‘Not really. Sort of.’ I can’t stay sitting any longer, not with this bouncing in front of me. I shove the last bite of breakfast roll into my mouth, ball up the wrapper and toss it over Steve into the bin. ‘Don’t worry about it yet. Right now, we’re just gonna have a nice friendly chat with Rory Fallon. Depending on what comes out of that, we can decide if it’s worth following up this other thing. Meanwhile-’

Something moves in the corner of my eye and I whip around fast, but it’s just the guy in the Tesco uniform, scurrying back to his shelf-stacking now he’s got his fix on board. He flinches and tries to glare, but I point a finger at him and he concentrates on scurrying. When I’m on a case, I get what O’Kelly would probably call jumpy and what I call alert. Not just me; a lot of Ds do. It’s an animal thing: when you’re tracking a top predator, even though you’re not his prey and he’ll probably shit himself when you come face to face, your alert level hits orange and stays there. I’ve been having trouble coming off orange alert lately, even when I’m not working.

I say, ‘Meanwhile, I vote we say fuck-all about this.’

‘To Breslin.’

‘To anyone.’ If this doesn’t pan out, we’re gonna be the squad joke: the idiots who went full-on gangbusters on their by-numbers lovers’ tiff. ‘It’s all hypothetical; no point throwing it out there till we’ve got something solid. For now, all anyone needs to know is Lucy told us about Aislinn’s background, said Rory seemed like a nice guy, end of.’

‘Works for me,’ Steve says, just a little too promptly.

‘No shit,’ I say, realising. ‘That’s why you wanted to keep her far away from work. You cunning little bastard.’

‘Like I said.’ Steve grins and crumples his napkin bib. ‘Not just a pretty face.’

The dinosaur kid has fallen off his scooter and is sitting on the path trying to work up a convincing wail. We dodge around him and we’re heading for the gate, me dialling the floaters to tell them to bring Fallon in, when I catch the plastic bag in the corner of my eye and realise what’s sticking out of it: a dead cat, fur plastered sleek against its skull, lips pulled back to show spiky teeth open wide in a frozen howl of fury.