From a high corner angle Orla McCabe sits at a window table, drinking, watching the world go by, a bandage wrapped around her head and under her jaw as if she’d had a facelift. A young couple sitting beside her holding hands. After speaking with a waiter, Orla walks out of frame carrying an orange case lifted from under her table. Three minutes later, the waiter clears her table and sets down a fresh vodka. Six minutes pass before Orla returns to the table, empty-handed. She drinks the vodka and looks relaxed, unconcerned. Rain and lightning in the windows. She uses the payphone. She sits back down and looks out the window. Some four minutes later a man enters the frame in the top corner and lurches directly to the toilets. He wears a baseball cap and a leather biker jacket and his limp is pronounced. She seems not to notice him. He emerges from the ladies’ room two minutes later, carrying the orange case. And now she notices him. She turns from the window and looks at him. He looks back. Then, inexplicably, he draws a pistol from his jacket, aims at her and fires. Six mute muzzle flashes. The vodka glass explodes in her hand and her entire front turns red. The windows behind her are blown out, showering her and the nearby couple. Seats, tables and floor instantly covered in blood and broken glass. Next frame she’s slumped under the table. The young man is spread over his table with the side of his neck ripped apart. The young woman with him crawls backward up her seat trying to flee the horror. Carrying the orange case, the shooter exits the frame in the same lurching manner he entered it. The young woman 190wanders off, stunned, arms held out like a sleepwalker. The frame remains static but for rain and lightning coming in through the blown-out windows and the pooling red that slowly rings the dead like holes to Hell opening beneath them.

The tape was paused and the four detectives stepped back from the monitor.

‘Paramedics arrived seven minutes later. Both pronounced dead at the scene.’

The door to the security suite opened and the hotel manager entered, accompanied by a young man in a uniform carrying a tray of sandwiches, cakes, biscuits, coffee.

‘Some refreshments,’ the manager said.

The young man set down the tray and the manager looked expectantly at the detectives. ‘Can I get you anything else?’

They said no and she and the young man left.

Three of the detectives helped themselves.

‘Not hungry?’

Carlin looked at the tray. ‘No.’

‘The family has been contacted for the man, not for the woman. Didn’t have any ID on her. Reception said she checked into 201 under the name’—looking in his notebook—‘Hobbs, uh, Mildred Hobbs. Paid in cash. She was carrying a loaded pistol—a Glock—and missing an ear, hence the bandage.’

‘Christ.’

‘Tell them about the cuffs.’