As she walked, she ran her fingertips along the railings beside her. Their ancient paint was pitted and shiny, like wet coal. The spring wind shook the boughs of a sycamore tree above her and sprinkled her with a flurry of drops, which made her think of funerals, and the priest dipping the  little drumstick- shaped silver thing into the container of holy  water and  shaking it over the coffin. She had long ago given up re ligion, and hadn’t been to Mass since – oh, she couldn’t remem ber when. All that seemed so far off now, the cere-monial and the sacraments, the Communion of Saints, the kneeling and praying and repenting. The only part of it she had ever really believed in, as a child, was the doctrine of Hell. Since then, she had seen enough of mortal life to know that we do not need to wait for the hereafter to have our fill of horrors.

On Grafton Street, her attention was caught by a slight, narrow-faced young man standing outside the Eblana Bookshop, surveying the books on show in the  window with a bitterly contemptuous half-smile. He wore a pale-coloured neat little overcoat with all the buttons done up, well-pressed fawn trousers, the legs of which hardly reached below his ankles, and light-brown loafers with gilt buckles. There was something about him, she didn’t know what – perhaps it was those buckles, or the sharp creases in his trousers – that provoked in her a sudden, brief outrush of pity. He looked so cocksure, standing there sneering at the display of books he would  never read, that her heart went out to him. It was plain he wasn’t what he imagined himself to be, and didn’t dream the rest of the world only had to look at him to know it.

When she got to Pearse Street Garda barracks she stopped, as she always did, to look up at the miniature stone models of policemen’s heads set into the mortar above the doorway. They were from the old days, under British rule, and were supposed to represent vigilance and stern resolution, as they peered off frowningly to right and left. They were, in truth, too small and too naively fashioned to be anything other than endearing and faintly comical.

She gave her name to the desk sergeant, as she had been instructed, and he lifted the flap in the counter and waved her through.

Hackett’s office was on the top floor. It was cramped and wedge-shaped, with a window at the narrow end that gave on to a view of steeply slanted rooftops and grimy dormer windows.