Another second of dead air, while Fiona tried to get hold of all this. “Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. Just, can I, can it wait a while? My mum went home, she’s getting some sleep, I don’t want to leave Jenny by herself—Mum’s coming back at six, I could be down to you by like seven. Would that be too late?”

Richie raised his eyebrows at me; I nodded. “That’s perfect,” he said. “And listen, Ms. Rafferty: do us a favor and don’t say it to your sister yet. Make sure your mother doesn’t, either. OK? Once the suspect’s been charged and all, we can tell her, but it’s still early days; we don’t want to be upsetting her if anything goes wrong. Will you promise me that?”

“Yeah. I won’t say anything.” A quick catch of breath. “This guy. Please. Who is he?”

Richie said gently, “We’ll talk later. Take care of your sister, yeah? And of yourself. See you soon.” He hung up before Fiona could keep asking.

I checked my watch. It was coming up to three o’clock: four hours to wait. “No free lunch for you, sunshine.”

Richie tucked his phone away and gave me a quick grin. “And here I was going to order the lobster.”

“Would you settle for tuna salad? I’d like to head up to Brianstown, check in with the search teams and give you another shot at the Gogan kid, but we should pick up something to eat on the way. It looks bad for me if you drop dead from starvation.”

“Tuna salad’s good. Wouldn’t want to wreck your rep.”

He was still grinning. Modesty or no, Richie was a happy man. “I appreciate your concern,” I said. “You finish up inside. I’ll give Larry a bell, tell him to bring his boys down here, and then we can get moving.”

Richie went bouncing back down the stairs two at a time. “Scorcher,” Larry said delightedly. “Have I told you lately that I love you?”

“It never gets old. What’ve I done now?”

“That car. Everything a man could want, and it’s not even my birthday.”

“Fill me in. If I’m sending you pressies, I deserve to know what’s in them.”

“Well, the first bit wasn’t in the car, exactly. When the boys went to tow it, a key ring fell out of the wheel well. We’ve got the car keys, we’ve got what looks like a pair of house keys—one Chubb, one Yale—and, drum roll please, we’ve got a key to the Spains’ back door.”

“Now that,” I said, “is sweet.” The alarm code, and now this: all we needed was where Conor had got the key—and one obvious answer was coming in for a chat in a few hours’ time—and the whole tangled question of access would be neatly tied up in a bow. Pat and Jenny’s nice solid house had been as secure as a tent on the open strand.

“I thought you’d like it. And once we actually got into the car, oh my. How I love cars. I’ve seen guys who practically took baths in pure bleach after they finished doing their business, but did they bother to clean their cars? No, they did not. This one’s an absolute nest of hairs and fibers and dirt and all things nice, and if I were a betting man, I’d bet you plenty that we’ll get at least one match between the car and the crime scene. We’ve also got a muddy shoe print on the driver’s floor mat: we’ll have to work it up to see how much detail we can get, but it’s from a man’s runner, size ten or eleven.”