“We’d have stuck with Pat Spain.”

In the darkness I could barely see him, just the angle of his head against the window, the tilt of his chin towards me. “Yeah. Probably we would have. And even if we’d had a hunch that someone else was involved … What do you think other people would have thought, if we couldn’t put out a description, couldn’t come up with one piece of evidence that he even existed? That Gogan woman, the whole of Brianstown, the man on the street watching this case on the news. Pat and Jenny’s families. What would they have assumed?”

Richie said, “Pat.”

“Exactly like we did.”

“And the real guy would’ve still been out there. Maybe getting ready to do it again.”

“Maybe, yeah. But that’s not my point. Even if he went home last night and found a nice place to hang himself, this guy would have made Pat Spain into a murderer. In the eyes of everyone who’ll ever hear his name, Pat would have been a man who killed the woman who lay down with him. The children they made together.” Even saying the words set that high hum moving in my skull: evil.

Richie said, almost gently, “He’s dead. It couldn’t hurt him.”

“Yeah, he’s dead. Twenty-nine years of life are all he’ll ever have. He should have had fifty more, sixty, but this guy decided to take them all away. And even that wasn’t enough for him: he wanted to go back in time and take away those pathetic twenty-nine years, too. Take away everything Pat had ever been. Leave him with nothing.” I saw that evil like a low cloud of sticky black dust spreading slowly out from this room to cover the houses, the fields, blotting out the moonlight. “That’s fucked up,” I said. “That’s so fucked up I don’t even have words for it.”

We sat there, not talking, while our Fiona found the dustpan and swept up shards of a plate that had smashed in a corner of the kitchen floor. After a while Richie opened his Hobnobs, offered me one and, when I shook my head, munched his way steadily through half the packet. After a while he said, “Can I ask something?”

“Seriously, Richie, you’re going to have to knock that off. It’s not going to inspire confidence in our man if you put up your hand in the middle of an interrogation and ask me if you’re allowed to talk now.”

This time he did grin. “Something personal, but.”

I don’t answer personal questions, not from trainees, but then the whole conversation was one I don’t have with trainees. It took me by surprise, how good it felt, and how easy: to let go of veteran and rookie and all the boundaries that come with them, slip into being just one of two men talking. “Fire away,” I said. “If you’re over the line, I’ll tell you.”

“What does your da do?”

“He’s retired. He was a traffic warden.”