“We’re all right for the moment, sir. If anything changes, I’ll let you know.”

“Do that,” O’Kelly said. He nodded at us, squared off the pages of our report and tossed it onto a stack: conversation over. “Now get out there and show the rest of that shower how it’s done.”

Out in the corridor, a safe distance from O’Kelly’s door, Richie caught my eye. He said, “So does this mean I’m allowed to wipe my own arse now, yeah?”

Plenty of people take the piss out of the Super, but he’s my boss and he’s always looked out for me, and I take both of those seriously. “It’s a metaphor,” I said.

“I got that. What’s the jacks roll meant to be?”

“Quigley?” I said, and we went back into the incident room laughing.

*

Conor’s place was a basement flat, in a tall brick house with the paint peeling off the window frames; his door was at the back, down a flight of narrow steps with rusted railings. Inside, the flat—bedroom, tiny living-room-cum-kitchen, tinier bathroom—looked like he had forgotten it existed a long time ago. It wasn’t filthy, or not quite, but there were cobwebs in the corners, food scraps in the kitchen sink and things ground into the linoleum. The fridge was ready-meals and Sprite. Conor’s clothes were good quality but a couple of years old, clean but half folded in crumpled heaps at the bottom of the wardrobe. His paperwork was in a cardboard box in a corner of the living room—bills, bank statements, receipts, all tossed in together; some of the envelopes hadn’t even been opened. With a little work, I could probably have put my finger on the exact month when he had let go of his life.

No obviously bloody clothes, no clothes in the washing machine, no clothes hanging up to dry; no bloody runners—no runners at all—but the two pairs of shoes in the wardrobe were a size ten. I said, “I’ve never seen a guy his age who doesn’t own a single pair of runners.”

“Ditched them,” Richie said. He had flipped Conor’s mattress up against the wall and was running a gloved hand over the underside. “I’d say that was the first thing he did, when he got home Monday night: got some clean clothes on and dumped the dirty ones as quick as he could.”

“Which means nearby, if we’re lucky. We’ll get a few of the lads to start searching the neighborhood bins.” I was going through the heaps of clothes, checking pockets and feeling seams for damp. It was cold in there: the heating—a plug-in oil heater—was off, and a chill struck straight up through the floor. “Even if we never find the bloody stuff, though, it could still come in useful. If young Conor tries to go for some kind of insanity defense—and let’s face it, that’s basically the only option he’s got left—then we point out that he tried to cover up what he’d done, which means he knew it was wrong, which means he was as sane as you and me. Legally, anyway.”