The Trespasser

Chapter 5

I used to love the first case meeting, love everything about it. The pulse of the incident room, everyone taut as greyhounds at the traps; in that room every answer comes in closer on top of the question, every glance snaps round faster. The whipcrack of the jobs being assigned, Murphy collect the CCTV footage, Vincent check gold Toyota Camrys, O’Leary talk to the girlfriend, bam bam bam. The moment when I’d shut my notebook and say Go, and we’d all be out of our seats and halfway to the door before my mouth closed on the word. I used to come out of that meeting feeling like the bastard we were after didn’t have a chance in hell. By this time, even the thought of it – floaters eyeing me up and down, wondering which of the rumours are true; me eyeing them back, wondering which of them is going to glom onto any slip-up, blow it up huge and barter it for a laugh and a pat on the back – turns me hangover-queasy and hangover-mean.

Incident Room C, but. I haven’t been in there since I was a floater chasing down pointless non-leads for the big boys; I’d forgotten. The white light exploding down from the high ceiling, skating and flashing on the whiteboard and the tall windows. The sleek computers lined up straining for action, the throb of them pumping at the air. The desks polished till they look like you could slice your thumb open on the edges. One step through the doorway, and that room blows the fatigue off me like dust and recharges me till I spark static. Walk in there and you could solve Jack the Ripper. And this time I’m no floater, there to jump when some big man snaps his fingers; this time I’m the big woman and every bit of this is all mine. Just for one second, that room blindsides me into loving the job, a hard green painful love like it’s growing from scratch all over again.

Steve’s lifted face, lips parted in a half-smile like a kid at the panto, says he feels the same way. That’s what smacks sense back into me. Steve falls arse over tip for anything beautiful, without bothering to think about how it got that way or why, or what’s underneath. I don’t.

I slap my stack of paper onto the boss desk, the double-length one at the head of the room. ‘Gentlemen,’ I say, loud. ‘Let’s get started. Who owns this?’ I whip a coffee mug off the desk and hold it up.

Breslin is leaning against the whiteboard, holding court for Deasy and Stanton, the floaters who brought Rory in, and the pair we put on the door-to-door – a slight, fidgety dark guy called Meehan, who I’ve worked with before and like, and a prissy-faced newbie called Gaffney, who I’ve seen around and who’s holding himself so straight that his suit looks like a prefect’s uniform. Breslin, or more likely someone he was bossing around, has made a start on the whiteboard – shots of Aislinn, the crime scene, Rory, a map of Stoneybatter – and set out a heavy hardback notebook for the book of jobs, where we keep a list of what needs doing and who’s supposed to be doing it. We even have an electric kettle.

‘That’s mine,’ Gaffney says, bobbing forward to grab the mug and retreating fast, scarlet. ‘Sorry about that.’

‘Meehan.’ I toss him the notebook. ‘Book of jobs, yeah?’ He catches it and nods. Steve dumps his stuff beside mine and starts handing out photocopies: the initial call sheet, the uniforms’ report, Rory’s statement. I head for the whiteboard and sketch out a fast timeline of last night. The floaters pick desks and settle fast: chitchat’s over.

‘The vic,’ I say, tapping the photo of Aislinn with my marker. ‘Aislinn Murray, twenty-six, lived alone in Stoneybatter, worked as a receptionist at a firm selling bathroom supplies to businesses. No criminal record, no calls to us. Assaulted yesterday evening in her home: Cooper’s preliminary exam says she took a punch to the face and hit her head on the fireplace surround. Texts on her phone narrow down the time to between 7.13 and 8.09.’ I move to Rory’s photo. ‘This guy here, Rory Fallon, he’s been seeing her for a couple of months. He was due at her house for dinner at eight o’clock.’

‘Stupid bastard,’ says Deasy, grinning. ‘A looker like her, he should’ve at least waited to kill her till after he’d got his hole.’

Snickers. Breslin clears his throat, with an indulgent smirk and a tilt of his head towards me. The snickers fade.

I say, ‘You can make it up to him, Deasy, seeing as it matters so much to you. Next time we bring him in, you go ahead and give him a blowjob in the jacks.’

Deasy pinches at his tache and makes a sour face. The snickers rise up again, prickly and equivocal.

I say, ‘Me and Moran and Breslin, we’ve just had a chat with Fallon. His story is that he was at Aislinn’s door at eight, but she didn’t answer, so he figured he’d been dumped and flounced off home to cry on his pillow.’

‘Amazingly enough,’ Breslin drawls, twirling his pen, ‘we don’t believe him.’

‘Our working theory,’ I say, ‘is that Fallon arrived at the vic’s place around half-seven, things went bad somehow, and he punched her. We’re guessing he thought she was just knocked out; he legged it home and hoped she wouldn’t call the cops on him, or wouldn’t remember what happened.’

That has Breslin nodding along approvingly, giving the newbies’ little theory his blessing. ‘More like manslaughter than murder,’ he says, ‘but that’s not our problem.’

‘By early this morning,’ I say, ‘either Fallon’s conscience got to him, or else he’d talked to a mate who wanted to do the right thing. An anonymous male caller reported to Stoneybatter station that there was a woman with head injuries at 26 Viking Gardens, and requested an ambulance.’

‘My money’s on Fallon doing it himself,’ Breslin says. ‘He’s exactly the type who’d bottle it after a few hours, start trying to put things right just when it’s too late.’

‘The phone number came up private,’ Steve says. ‘Who wants to get on it?’

All their hands shoot up. ‘Easy there, boys,’ Breslin says, grinning. ‘There’s plenty to go round.’

‘Gaffney, you take the phone number,’ I say – I need to give the kid a pat, settle him after the mug thing. Meehan writes that down. ‘Stanton, Deasy: you were working on a list of Fallon’s KAs. How’s that going?’

‘Nothing surprising,’ Stanton says. ‘Mother, father, two older brothers, no sisters; handful of mates from school and college, a few ex-flatmates, long list of work colleagues and friends – mostly history teachers, librarians, that kind of thing. I’ll e-mail it on to you.’

‘Do that. Detective Breslin, you’ve already started talking to the KAs, am I right?’

‘Both Fallon’s brothers sounded appropriately shocked,’ Breslin says. ‘According to them, they knew about Rory’s big date, but that’s as far as they’d got; they were waiting to hear all the dirty details. They claim they didn’t ring Stoneybatter station this morning, or ever, but then they would, wouldn’t they? I’ve got them both coming in for separate chats after this.’

Breslin’s planning on working a long shift, for a bog-standard case. ‘If they don’t pan out, keep working your way down the list,’ I say. ‘Start with anyone who lives near Rory’s route home, where he could’ve got a surprise visit last night. And while you’re at it, get the brothers and the best mates on tape. We need to run their voices and Fallon’s past the guy at Stoneybatter who took the call, see if he recognises any of them. Can you follow that up?’

For a second I think Breslin’s gonna tell me to stick my scut work, but he says, ‘Why not,’ although there’s a twist to his mouth. ‘Great,’ I say. ‘We need someone to go through CCTV – we’ll put Kellegher and Reilly down for that; they’re pulling all the local footage they can get, they might as well watch it.’

Meehan nods, writing.

‘And someone needs to pull footage from the northbound 39A bus route yesterday evening: find the buses that stopped on Morehampton Road around seven, see if you can pick out Rory Fallon getting on, confirm what time he boarded and what time he got off in Stoneybatter.’ The gym rat has a finger up. That whipcrack rhythm, the one I used to love: even though I know better, it still hits me like a triple espresso. ‘Stanton’s on that. And we need someone to head out to Stoneybatter and time the route Rory says he took from the bus stop: down Astrid Road to the top of Viking Gardens, then up to Tesco on Prussia Street, buy a bunch of flowers and head back down to Viking Gardens. Meehan, you’re around the same build and age as Fallon; can you do that? Time it twice: once at your normal pace, once as fast as you can go.’

Meehan nods. Steve says, glancing back and forth between him and Gaffney, ‘Did Rory’s flowers show up in the bins on the quays?’

‘I looked,’ Meehan says. ‘Gaffney kept going with the door-to-door. The bins hadn’t been emptied since last night, by the state of them, but no irises anywhere. Some lad probably robbed them to give to his bird.’

‘Or,’ Breslin says, ‘they were never in the bins at all: Rory Boy tossed them in the river, because he didn’t want us pulling Aislinn’s blood or hair or carpet fibres off them. Where are we on her KAs?’

‘She didn’t have any immediate family, or much of a social life,’ I say, ‘but her friend Lucy gave us a few names and numbers to start us off. Someone needs to go round to Aislinn’s workplace, get her boss to come in and ID the body, and have the chats with all her colleagues. I want to know if she talked about Rory, and what she said.’

Steve says, ‘And we need to know if any of the colleagues had a thing for her. Just on the off-chance that Rory’s telling the truth’ – Breslin snorts – ‘someone might not have been happy that Aislinn had got herself a fella. And her colleagues were the only people she spent any amount of time with.’ Nice touch. If anyone spots us doing something that doesn’t point to Rory, we’ve got a potential stalker colleague to take the heat. It might even turn out to be true.

‘Why don’t you two cover the office romance,’ Breslin says. ‘Feminine intuition, and all that jazz.’

‘Mine’s in the shop,’ I say. ‘Transmission went. We’ll just have to go with actual detective work. Deasy, Stanton, you head over there first thing tomorrow.’

‘The other place Aislinn spent time was at evening classes,’ Steve says. ‘She could have picked up a stalker there. We need someone to work out what classes she took, make lists of all the other students or whatever they call them.’

‘Gaffney, you take that,’ I say. ‘Me and Moran will handle Aislinn’s phone records, e-mails, social media, all that-’

‘I can make a start on that tonight,’ Breslin says. ‘I don’t mind staying a few hours late, if that’ll help put this case to bed, but I can’t exactly show up at Rory’s KAs’ houses at nine in the evening looking for chats. I might as well get cracking on the vic’s social life.’

My look clicks against Steve’s for a split second, before his head goes down over his notebook. Breslin could just be trying to buff up his stellar rep – everyone always wants the vic’s electronics, because more often than not, there’s something good in there – or he could be looking to make me into the loser who couldn’t find her own evidence. Or he could need to get rid of anything in there that points to a gangster pal.

Meehan has stopped writing and is looking back and forth between us, uncertain. ‘Me and Moran have already started on it,’ I say. ‘We’ve been in since last night and we need to catch a few hours’ kip, but we’ll get back onto Aislinn’s electronics first thing tomorrow morning. You’ve started on Rory Fallon, Detective Breslin; you might as well stick with him. We need someone to make a list of his exes and see what they’ve got to say about him, specially about what winds him up and what he’s like when he doesn’t get his way. If you can stay late tonight, why don’t you get the ball rolling on that.’

Breslin has on a face like he’s found a hair in his soup and knows the waiter is too useless to fix it. ‘Why don’t I do that.’

‘Great,’ I say. After a moment, Meehan’s pen starts moving again. ‘Detective Gaffney: first murder case, am I right?’

‘It is, yeah.’ He’s from somewhere involving sheep.

‘OK,’ I say, sending the gaffer a mental thank-you for not bothering to get us floaters with actual experience. ‘You stick close to Detective Breslin for now; he’ll show you the ropes, help you get the hang of this.’ Breslin nods pleasantly at Gaffney, no objections, but that means nothing. ‘Can you stay late tonight, yeah?’

Gaffney sits up even straighter. ‘I can, of course.’

‘Anyone who can’t?’ No one moves. ‘Good. We need someone to pull Aislinn’s financials – Gaffney, start on that; you’ll need to go through them anyway, for her evening-class payments.’

Breslin sighs, just loud enough to make it clear that I’m wasting valuable time and resources. Steve says, to everyone, ‘We don’t have a motive yet. The romance gone bad is the obvious one, but we can’t rule out a financial angle. Rory mentioned that his bookshop’s been having a hard time; and Aislinn’s mate Lucy Riordan said she had a bit of cash stashed away. Rory could have asked her to put a few grand into the bookshop and got nasty when she turned him down, something like that.’

Breslin shrugs. He’s started doodling on the corner of his notebook.

‘We’ll need Rory’s financials, too,’ I say. ‘Gaffney, pull those while you’re at it. Someone needs to get onto the phone company and start them tracking where Fallon’s phone went last night: Deasy, got a decent contact at Vodafone? Someone to confirm Lucy Riordan’s alibi with the rest of the staff at the Torch Theatre: Stanton, you handle that. Someone to talk to the staff at the Market Bar and Pestle, see if they can tell us anything about Aislinn and Rory’s dates: Meehan, yeah? Someone to assign one of the uniforms from the scene to go to the autopsy: Deasy, you do that. It’ll be early tomorrow morning; make sure he’s not late, or Cooper will throw a shit fit.’ Snorts from everyone who’s met Cooper. ‘Me and Moran will follow up with the techs, make sure we’re kept updated. There’ll be more, but those should get us started. Any questions?’

Head-shakes. They’re fidgeting at the starting line.

‘OK,’ I say. ‘Let’s go.’Meehan claps the book of jobs shut. They swing to their desks, their phones, to Rory’s statement, diving to see who can hit the ground running fastest. Incident Room C leaps with the energy ricocheting off the shining rows of desks, splintering on the windows.

And underneath all that, hidden and working away, the small ferocious buzzing of the thing at the back of my mind and Steve’s, nudging for us to let it loose. Breslin’s slick fair head is bent over his notebook, but when he feels me looking he glances up and gives me a great big smile.

Steve types up our report for the gaffer while I go through the stuff the floaters brought back. They’re all competent enough, although Deasy can’t spell and Gaffney feels the need to share every detail of everything, relevant or not (‘Witness advised that she was taking her daughter Ava aged eight to visit her grandfather in St James’s Hospital after severe stroke and saw Murray getting out of car…’). Nothing particularly interesting in the door-to-door: Aislinn was friendly with her neighbours – no bad blood over noise or parking spaces, nothing like that – but not close to any of them; a few of them saw a woman matching Lucy’s description going into or out of her house now and then; none of them ever saw any other visitors. Aislinn never mentioned a boyfriend. They saw her going out semi-regularly in the evenings, all dolled up, but they weren’t on gossip-swapping terms and they have no idea where she was heading or what she did there. The old couple in Number 24 are half deaf and heard nothing last night; the young couple in Number 28 heard Aislinn blasting her Beyoncé, but they say she turned the music either down or off a little before eight – they could pinpoint it because eight is the baby’s bedtime, so they appreciated the volume control. After that, not a sound.

The old fella in Number 3 backs Rory’s story, or bits of it: he was heading out to walk his dog (a white male terrier named Harold, according to Gaffney) just before eight o’clock last night, and he saw a guy matching Rory’s description turning in to Viking Gardens. When he got back fifteen minutes later, the guy was still there, down at the bottom of the road, messing about with his phone. None of the other neighbours were outside in those fifteen minutes – Viking Gardens is mostly old people and a few young families, no one heading out on the Saturday-night batter – which means Rory could have been let into the house, killed Aislinn, and been back outside texting up a cover story by ten past eight; but I don’t buy it. The part that turned him twitchy was earlier, before the Tesco side-trip. None of the neighbours were out in the road then, to see him or not.

Steve is still typing. Breslin’s headed off for his chats with Rory’s brothers, taking Gaffney with him and dispensing wisdom all the way; Meehan has buttoned his overcoat to the neck and gone off to time himself wandering around Stoneybatter, Deasy’s having a laugh with his contact at the phone company, Stanton’s laying down the law to someone from the buses. Their voices wander around the high corners of the room, turning blurry at the edges from too much space. The windows are dark.

My phone rings. ‘Conway,’ I say.

O’Kelly says, ‘You and Moran, my office. I want an update.’

‘We’ll be right in,’ I say, and hear him hang up. I look at Steve, who’s slumped in his chair, giving his report a last once-over. ‘The gaffer wants to see us.’

Steve’s head comes up and he blinks at me. Each of those takes a few seconds; he’s two-thirds asleep. For once he looks his age. ‘Why?’

‘He wants an update.’

‘Oh, Jaysus.’ The gaffer wants in-person updates when you’re working a big one, which this isn’t, or when you’re taking too long to get a solve, which even if you’re in his bad books should be longer than one day. This can’t be good.

The rumours say I got this gig because O’Kelly needed to tick the token boxes and I tick two for the price of one – and those are the nice rumours. All of them are bullshit. When the gaffer brought me on board, he was down a D – one of his top guys had just put in his papers early – and I was Missing Persons’ shining star, waving a sheaf of fancy high-profile solves in each hand. I was fresh off a headline-buster where I’d whipped out every kind of detective work in the book, from tracing phone pings and wi-fi logons to coaxing info out of family members and bullying it out of friends, in order to track down a newly dumped dad who had gone on the run with his two little boys, and then I’d spent four hours talking him into coming out of his car with the kids instead of driving the lot of them off a pier. I was hot stuff, back then. Me and the gaffer both had every reason to think this was gonna be great.

O’Kelly knows what’s been going down, I know he knows, but he’s never said a word; just watched and waited. No gaffer wants this on his squad, wants the sniping in corners and the grey poison smog hanging over the squad room. Any gaffer in the world would be wondering, by now, how he could get rid of me.

Steve hits Print on the report; the printer gets to work with a smug purr, nothing like the half-dead wheeze off the squad-room yoke. We find our combs, sort our hair, brush down our jackets. Steve has something blue smudged on his shirt front, but I don’t have the heart to tell him, in case the effort of trying to clean it off kills him. I assume I’ve got whiteboard marker on my face, or something, and he’s doing the same for me.

One of the reasons I don’t trust O’Kelly is because of his office. It’s full of naff crap – a framed crayon drawing that says world’s best granddad, pissant local golf trophies, a shiny executive toy in case he gets the urge to make clicky noises with swingy balls – and stacks of dusty files that never move. The whole room says he’s some outdated time-server who spends the day practising his golf swing and polishing his nameplate and working out fussy ways to tell if someone’s touched his stash bottle of single malt. If O’Kelly was that, he wouldn’t have been running Murder for coming up on twenty years. The office has to be window dressing, to put people off their guard. And the only people who see it are the squad.

O’Kelly is leaning back in his fancy ergonomic chair, with his arms draped on its arms, like some banana-republic dictator granting an audience. ‘Conway. Moran,’ he says. ‘Tell me about Aislinn Murray.’

Steve holds out the report the way you would wave raw meat at a mean dog. O’Kelly jerks his chin at his desk. ‘Leave that there. I’ll read it later. Now I want to hear it from you.’

He hasn’t told us to sit – which has to be a good sign: this isn’t going to take all night – so we stay standing. ‘We’re still waiting on the post-mortem,’ I say, ‘but Cooper’s preliminary says someone punched her in the face and she hit the back of her head on the fireplace. She was expecting a guy called Rory Fallon over for dinner. He admits he was on the spot at the relevant time, but he says she didn’t answer her door and he hadn’t a clue she was dead till we told him this afternoon.’

‘Huh,’ O’Kelly says. The hard sideways light from his desk lamp throws heavy shadows across his face, turning him one-eyed and unreadable. ‘Do you believe him?’

I shrug. ‘Half and half. Our main theory is she did answer her door, they had some kind of argument and Fallon threw the punch. He could be telling the truth about not knowing she was dead, though.’

‘Got any hard evidence?’

Less than twelve hours in, and I’m taking shit for not having a DNA match. I dig my hands into my jacket pockets so I won’t slap O’Kelly’s stupid spider plant off his desk.

Steve says, before I can answer, ‘The Bureau have the coat and gloves Fallon says he was wearing last night, and we’re searching his route home in case he ditched anything. He gave consent for us to search his flat and take any other clothes that look interesting, so a couple of the lads are on that. According to the techs, if he’s our guy we’ve got a good chance at blood or epithelials, or a fibre match to what they found on the body.’

‘I’ve asked a mate in the Bureau to put a rush on his stuff,’ I say, keeping my voice level. ‘We should have something preliminary tomorrow. We’ll let you know.’

O’Kelly matches up his fingertips and watches us. He says, ‘Breslin thinks ye need to quit wasting everyone’s time and arrest the little scumbag.’

I say, ‘It’s not Breslin’s case.’

‘Meaning what? You’ve got doubts? Or you just want to show everyone that Breslin’s not the boss of you?’

‘If anyone’s stupid enough to think Breslin’s the boss of us, I’m not gonna waste my time proving they’re wrong.’

‘So it’s doubts.’

In the dark outside the window, the wind is picking up. It sounds like wide country wind, barrelling down long straight miles with nothing to stand in its way, like the squad is standing high in the middle of empty nowhere. I say, ‘We’ll make the arrest when we’re ready.’

O’Kelly says, ‘Doubts about whether you’ve got enough to make it stick? Or about whether the boyfriend’s guilty at all?’

He’s looking at me, not at Steve. I say, ‘Doubts about whether we’re ready to arrest him.’

‘That doesn’t answer my question.’

There’s a silence. O’Kelly’s one eye, metallic in the lamplight, doesn’t blink.

I say, ‘I think he’s probably our guy. There’s no way I’m gonna arrest him based on nothing but my gut feeling. If that’s a problem, take the case off us and give it to Breslin. He’s welcome to it.’

O’Kelly eyeballs me for another minute; I stare back. Then he says, ‘Keep me updated. I want a full report on my desk every evening. Anything big shows up, you don’t save it for the report; you let me know straightaway. Is that clear?’

‘Clear,’ I say. Steve nods.

‘Good,’ O’Kelly says. He spins his chair away from the desk, to one of the stacks of files, and starts flipping paper. Dust swirls up into the light of his desk lamp. ‘Go get some kip. Ye look even worse than this morning.’

Steve and I wait till we’re back in the incident room, with the door shut, before we look at each other. He says, ‘What was that all about?’

I flick my coat off the back of my chair and swing it on. The floaters upped their rhythm when we came in; the room is all clicking keys and rustling paper. ‘That was the gaffer getting all up in our grille. What bit did you miss?’

‘Yeah, but why? He’s never given a damn about any of our cases before, unless we weren’t doing the business and he wanted to give us a bollocking.’

I throw my scarf around my neck and tuck the ends in tight: the dark at the window has a condensed look that says it’s cold out there. O’Kelly’s taken the shine off our bright new idea; gangsters and bent cops feel like a gymnast-level stretch, compared to just more people trying to screw me over. ‘Right. And even after the bollockings, I’m still here. Maybe the gaffer figures he needs to up his game.’

‘Or,’ Steve says, quieter. He hasn’t started packing up yet; he’s standing by his desk, one finger tapping an absent tattoo on the edge. ‘If he’s been wondering the same stuff we’ve been wondering, maybe for a while now, but he doesn’t want to say anything till he’s sure…’

I say, ‘I’m going home.’

From the outside, my gaff looks a lot like Aislinn Murray’s: a one-storey Victorian terraced cottage, thick-walled and low-ceilinged. It fits me just about right; when I let someone stay over – which isn’t often – I’m twitchy by morning, starting to feel the two of us barging up against the walls. The 1901 census says back then a couple were raising eight kids in it.

Get inside and my place has fuck-all in common with Aislinn’s. I have the original floorboards – sanded them and polished them myself, when I first bought the gaff – and the original fireplace, none of this gas fire and laminate shite; the walls are scraped back to bare brick – I did that myself, too – and whitewashed. The mortgage and my car payments eat enough of my paycheque that my furniture comes from Oxfam and the low end of Ikea, but at least nothing is gingham.

I throw my satchel on the sofa, turn off the alarm and switch on the coffee machine. I’ve got a text from my mate Lisa: We’re in pub get down here! I text her back Pulled a double shift, gonna crash. This is true enough – I’ve been up for more than twenty-four hours, and my eyes aren’t focusing right – but I could still have done with a pint and a laugh with a bunch of people who don’t think I’m poison. Except that’s the reason I’m staying in. You spend long enough being treated like you’re wearing a shit on me sign, you start to worry that the sign’s developing a reality of its own and now anyone you talk to can see it. In my mates’ heads I’m Antoinette the top cop, smart kickass successful Antoinette, nobody fucks with Antoinette. I want to keep it that way. I’ve turned down a lot of pints, the last few months.

Plus, odds are the gang in the pub includes my mate with the security firm. I don’t want him offering me the job again. I’m not gonna take it – not tonight, anyway, not with that dare still flashing at me – but I’m not ready for him to take it off the table.

I should throw some dinner into me and crash out, but I hate wasting time on sleep even worse than I hate wasting it on food. I stick some pasta ready-meal thing in the microwave; while it heats up, I ring my ma, which I do every night, I’m not sure why. My ma isn’t the type to bitch about her back problems or update me on which of her friends’ kids are up the pole and what she found while she was emptying some middle manager’s bin, which doesn’t leave her a lot to talk about. Me, when I’m in a good mood, I tell her the basic outline of my day. When I’m not, I give her the details: what the wounds looked like, what the parents said while they sobbed. Sometimes I catch myself at the scene filing away the bad stuff, thinking this is gonna be the one that finally gets to her, gets even just a sharp breath or a snap at me to leave it. So far nothing ever has.

‘Howya,’ my ma says. Click of a lighter. She has a smoke while we talk; when she puts it out, we hang up.

I hit the button for an espresso. ‘Howya.’

‘Any news?’

‘Me and Moran pulled a street fight. Couple of drunk fellas jumped another one, danced on his head. His eyeball was out on the footpath.’

‘Huh,’ my ma says, and inhales. ‘Anything else strange?’

I don’t feel like talking about Aislinn. Too much shite swirling around it, too much stuff I don’t have a handle on; I don’t tell my ma about anything I haven’t got well sussed. ‘Nah. Lisa texted me to go for a pint with the lads, but I’m shattered. Gonna crash.’

My ma lets that lie for a beat, just long enough to let me know I’m not getting away with it, before she says, ‘Marie Lane said you’re in the newspaper.’

Of course she bleeding did. ‘Did she, yeah?’

‘Not about any street fight. About some young one that got killed in her own house. The paper made you out to be a right gobshite.’

I swap out the coffee pod and hit the espresso button again: I’m gonna need a double. ‘It’s just a bog-standard murder. It made the paper because your woman was a blonde who wore a shit-ton of makeup. The journalist doesn’t like me. End of story.’

A lot of people’s mas would get a taste of the weakness, burrow in and suck out every last drop. Not mine. My ma just wanted to make it clear who’s the boss of this conversation, and who needs to up her game if she wants to bullshit a pro. Now that she’s made her point, she drops it. ‘Lenny asked me again can he move in.’

Lenny and my ma have been together nine years, off and on. He’s all right. ‘And?’

She lets out a hoarse laugh and a blow of smoke together. ‘And I told him he must be joking. If I wanted his smelly jocks in my room, they’d be there by now. He’s talking bollix anyway; he no more wants to eat my cooking, rather get his dinners down the chipper…’

She makes me laugh about Lenny till she’s finished her smoke and we hang up. The microwave beeps. I take the pasta thing and my coffee to the sofa and open my laptop.

I hit the dating sites. Over my own dead body would I do this at work – one glance over my shoulder, or one trawl through my computer when I’m out of the squad room, and I can already hear the whoops: Jaysus, lads, Conway’s doing the internet dating! – Yeah, frigidbitches.com – There’s a market for everything these days – For her? You serious? – Hey, we all know she gives a good gobble or she wouldn’t be here, she can put that on her profile… But if Mr Loverman exists, Aislinn met him somehow. Checking out her work colleagues and her evening classes won’t cover the crim angle, and going by her phone and by Lucy, she didn’t have much of a social life. Unless she found herself a gangster who was learning to crochet, the internet is my best bet.

I set up accounts using a throwaway e-mail address, Aislinn’s description and a smirking blonde from Google Images, just in case our man has a type and goes looking for a replacement girlfriend, and I poke around for a while. The sites mostly use handles, not names – j-wow79, footballguy12345 – and Aislinn’s description matches half the girls on there. I filter for age and type and skim the sea of duckfaced blond selfies till my eyes bubble, but there’s no sign of her. I believe in been positive in life whats for us wont pass us by lol… I like romance, spontaneity, respect, honesty, genuineness, good conversation… Looking to chat n just go with the flow message me you never know what might happen!!!

The pasta thing has gone cold and slimy. I shove down the last mouthful anyway. Outside the window my street is dark, the streetlamps fighting the night and losing. The wind is punching around a paper bag from the chipper, slamming it up against a wall, holding it there for a second before tossing it down the road again. The old one from Number 12 hurries past, pushing her tartan shopping trolley, headscarf bent low.

I switch to the guys’ photos and scan for a face that’s familiar from work or from news stories: nothing, not that a high-profile gangster is gonna upload his pic on some dating site. First time on a site like this not really sure what to say, looking for someone easy going no drama good sense of humour… I’m a bit mad will say anything just a wild n crazy guy so if u think u can handle me give me a text!!

These people are pissing me off. The neediness of it, all of them jumping up and down and waving their arms and doing their cutest little booty-shakes for the internet: Me, look at me, like me, please oh please want me!!! The because-I’m-worth-it shower (Looking for someone tall, slim, very fit, no smokers, no drugs, no kids, no pets, must have full-time job and own car, must like fusion cuisine, speak at least three languages, enjoy bikram yoga and acid jazz…) are just as bad: ordering their relationships from the online menu because of course you have to have one, same as you have to have a state-of-the-art sound system and a pimped-out new car, and it’s important to make sure you get exactly what you want. The only ones I can respect are the ones there on business: Ukrainian superbabes looking for older men down the country, with a view to marriage. All the rest could do with a good kick up the hole and a double shot of self-respect.

No one needs a relationship. What you need is the basic cop-on to figure that out, in the face of all the media bullshit screaming that you’re nothing on your own and you’re a dangerous freak if you disagree. The truth is, if you don’t exist without someone else, you don’t exist at all. And that doesn’t just go for romance. I love my ma, I love my friends, I love the bones of them. If any of them wanted me to donate a kidney or crack a few heads, I’d do it, no questions asked. And if they all waved goodbye and walked out of my life tomorrow, I’d still be the same person I am today.

I live inside my own skin. Anything that happens outside it doesn’t change who I am. This isn’t something I’m proud of; as far as I’m concerned, it’s a bare minimum baseline requirement for calling yourself an adult human being, somewhere around the level of knowing how to do your own washing or change a toilet roll. All those idiots on the websites, begging for other people to pull their sagging puppet-strings, turn them real: they make me want to spit.

I’ve got two private messages already. Hi what’s the crack?? So check out my profile tell me if u wanna chat. The kid is twenty-three and works in IT, which makes him an unlikely candidate for Aislinn’s top-secret squeeze. Hello beautiful woman, I’d love to know what’s under that stunning exterior. Me: spiritually evolved, very creative, world traveller, people tell me I should really write a novel about my life. Intrigued? Let’s share more. I recognise the profile shot: back when I was in uniform, I arrested the guy for wanking on a bus. Small city. I make a note to check out what he’s been at lately, when I get a spare moment, but it doesn’t feel urgent: there’s no reason why Lucy would have gone squirrelly about this little creep.

I’ve hit the stage where the screen is warping and sliding in front of my eyes. I throw back the last of the cold coffee. Then I log into a very old e-mail account and hit Compose.

Hiya hun, how’s tricks? Too long no see – love to catch up whenever your free. Let me know. Seeya soon – Rach xx

The ‘From’ address says rachelvodkancoke. I read it again. Don’t hit Send.

The light in the room shifts: the motion-sensor lamps out the back have clicked on. I get up, kill the inside lights and move to the side of the kitchen window.

Nothing: just my patio. The white light and the tossing shadows turn it sinister: bare paving stones, high walls, the spreading tracing where an ivy plant used to be and the dark looming up all around. For a second I think I see something move over the back wall, the top of a head bobbing out in the laneway. When I blink, it’s gone.

My heart is going hard. I think of Aislinn: young single woman, cottage in Stoneybatter, rear access via a laneway. Of the intruder who did a legger over her patio wall when he got spotted. I think of that spunkbubble Crowley splashing my photo across his front page, just in case anyone felt like waiting outside Dublin Castle and following me home.

I switch off the patio lights and check my gun. Then I slam my back door open, lunge across the patio, get a toehold on the wall and throw myself up onto the top.

I’m all ready to come face to face with anything from a junkie to Freddy Kruger. Instead I get the narrow laneway, dim in the faint yellow light from the streetlamp out on the road, and empty. Shadows and crisp packets banked along the edges, some kid’s fourth-rate tag scrawled in blue on the wall. I listen: what could be fast footsteps, somewhere out on the road, or could be just the wind bouncing rubbish.

The kick of anger is half letdown – I was starving for that fight – and half at myself for being a moron. Even if this case magically turns out to be some serial killer’s warm-up, tonight he’s at home having some hard-earned R &R, not out looking for high-grade action. The bobbing head in the laneway was either fatigue warping my vision or some drunk having a piss; my motion sensor got tripped by the wind messing with rubbish, or the local half-wild cat on the scrounge.

I go back to my laptop. I sit there with my finger on the button for a long time, listening to the wind move outside my house and keeping one eye on the kitchen for the patio lights, before I hit Send.