Conor had taken a breath to answer, but something caught him: I saw the sudden stiffening of his shoulders. He said, “I don’t remember.”

“Don’t even try that, chum. It’s not funny any more. When did you leave the badge?”

After a moment Conor said, “Sunday night.”

My eyes met Richie’s, across his head. I said, “This Sunday night just gone.”

“Yeah.”

“What time?”

“Five in the morning, maybe.”

“With all the Spains at home and asleep, a few yards away. I’ll say this for you, chum: you’ve certainly got a pair.”

“I just went in the back door, put it on the counter and left. I waited till Pat had gone to bed—he didn’t stay downstairs that night. No big deal.”

“What about the alarm?”

“I know the code. Watched Pat typing it in.”

Surprise, surprise. “Still,” I said. “It was risky. You must have been pretty desperate to get this done, am I right?”

“I wanted her to have it.”

“Of course you did. And twenty-four hours later, Jenny’s dying and her family’s dead. Don’t even try to tell me that’s a coincidence, Conor.”

“I’m not trying to tell you anything.”

“So what happened? She wasn’t happy with your little present? Wasn’t grateful enough? She shoved it in a drawer instead of wearing it?”

“She put it in her pocket. Don’t know what she did with it after that, and I don’t care. I just wanted her to have it.”

I got both hands on the back of Conor’s chair and said, low and hard and straight into his ear, “You’re so full of shit you make me want to flush your head down the jacks. You know damn well what Jenny thought of the badge. You knew it wasn’t going to scare her, because you put it into her hand yourself. Is that how you were working it, the two of you? She’d sneak downstairs late at night, leave Pat sleeping, and the two of you would fuck on the kids’ beanbag?”

He whipped round to face me, eyes like shards of ice. He wasn’t leaning back away from me, not this time; our faces were almost touching. “You make me sick. If you think that, if you honest to God think that, there’s something wrong with you.”

He wasn’t afraid. It came as a shock: you get used to people being afraid of you, guilty or innocent. Maybe, whether we admit it or not, all of us like it. Conor had no reason left to be afraid of me.

I said, “Fine: so it wasn’t on the beanbag. In your hideout? What are we going to find, when we swab that sleeping bag?”

“You swab away. Knock yourself out. She was never there.”

“Then where, Conor? On the beach? In Pat’s bed? Where did you and Jenny bump your uglies?”

He had his fists clenched on the folds of his jeans to stop himself from punching me. That couldn’t last, and I couldn’t wait. “I’d never have touched her. She’d never have touched me. Never. Are you too thick to get that?”