“Hmm,” Dina said. “Good for him.” She reached for the wine bottle and topped up her glass.

“This is nice,” I said, and a part of me meant it. “Thanks, Dina.”

“I know it is. So why aren’t you drinking that? Are you scared I’m trying to poison you?” She grinned, little white cat teeth bared at me. “Like I’d be obvious enough to put it in the wine. Give me some credit.”

I smiled back. “I bet you’d be very creative. I can’t get pissed tonight, though. I’ve got work in the morning.”

Dina rolled her eyes. “Oh God, here we go, work work work, shoot me now. Just throw a sickie.”

“I wish.”

“So do it. We’ll do something nice. The Wax Museum just opened up again, do you know in my whole entire life I’ve never been to the Wax Museum?”

This wasn’t going to end well. “I’d love to, but it’ll have to be next week. I need to be in bright and early tomorrow, and it could be a long one.” I took a sip of the wine, held up the glass. “Lovely. We’ll finish this, and then I’m going to take you back to Geri’s. I know she’s boring, but she does her best. Cut her some slack, OK?”

Dina ignored that. “Why can’t you throw a sickie tomorrow? I bet you’ve got like a year of holidays saved up. I bet you’ve never thrown a sickie in your whole life. What are they going to do, fire you?”

The warm feeling was vanishing fast. I said, “I’ve got a guy in custody, and I’ve got till early Sunday morning to either charge him or release him. I’m going to need every minute of that to get my case sorted. I’m sorry, sweetheart. The Wax Museum’s going to have to wait.”

“Your case,” Dina said. Her face had sharpened. “The Broken Harbor thing?”

There was no point in denying it. “Yeah.”

“I thought you were going to swap with someone else.”

“Can’t be done.”

“Why not?”

“Because it doesn’t work that way. We’ll catch the Wax Museum as soon as I’ve wrapped things up, OK?”

“Fuck the Wax Museum. I’d rather stab myself in the eyes than go stare at some stupid doll of Ronan Keating.”

“Then we’ll do something else. Your choice.”

Dina shoved the wine bottle closer to me with the toe of her boot. “Have more.”

My glass was still full. “I have to drive you to Geri’s. I’ll stick with what I’ve got. Thanks.”

Dina flicked a fingernail off the edge of her glass, a sharp monotonous pinging, and watched me under her fringe. She said, “Geri gets the papers every morning. Of bloody course. So I read them.”

“Right,” I said. I pushed down the bubble of anger: Geri should have been paying more attention, but she’s a busy woman and Dina is a slippery one.

“What’s Broken Harbor like now? In the photo it looked like shit.”

“It is, pretty much. Someone started building what could have been a nice estate, but it never got finished. At this stage, it probably never will. The people living there aren’t happy.”