I wagged a finger at him. “Be nice, chum. She’s a lovely girl.”

“She’s a very lucky girl that I didn’t place her under arrest for the theft. Just as a favor to you, that was. I think you owe me a nice polite thank-you.”

“Sounds like she brightened up a boring morning. Maybe you’re the one who should be thanking me.”

This conversation wasn’t going the way Quigley had planned. “So,” he said, trying to get it back. He held up the evidence bag and gave the top a little squeeze between those fat white fingers. “Tell us, Detective. This yoke here. How bad do you need it?”

He hadn’t worked it out. The relief rushed over me like a breaker. I brushed rain off my sleeve and shrugged. “Who knows? Thanks for getting it off the young woman, and all that, but I can’t see it being exactly make-or-break stuff.”

“You’d want to be sure, wouldn’t you? Because as soon as the story goes on the record, it’s no good to you any more.”

We forget to hand in evidence, every once in a while. It’s not supposed to happen, but it does: you’re taking off your suit at night and find a bulge in your pocket where you shoved an envelope when a witness asked for a word, or you open your car boot and there’s the bag you meant to hand in the night before. As long as no one else has had access to your pockets or keys to your car, it’s not the end of the world. But Dina had had this in her possession, for hours or days. If we ever tried to bring it into court, a defense lawyer would argue that she could have done anything from breathing on the evidence to exchanging it for something completely different.

Evidence doesn’t always come to us pristine from the crime scene: witnesses hand it in weeks later, it lies in a field getting rained on for months until a dog noses it out. We work with what we’ve got and find ways to head off the defense arguments. This was different. We had tainted this ourselves, and so it tainted everything else we had touched. If we tried to bring it in, then every move we had made in this investigation would be up for grabs: that could have been planted, he could have been bullied, we could have invented that to suit ourselves. We had broken the rules once. Why should anyone believe that had been the only time?

I gave the bag a dismissive flick with one finger—touching it made my spine leap. “It might’ve been fun to have, if it turned out to link our suspect to the crime scene. But we’ve got plenty of stuff that does that anyway. I think we’ll survive.”

Quigley’s sharp little eyes crawled over my face, checking. “Either way,” he said, in the end. He was trying to hide a pissed-off note. I had convinced him. “Even if this doesn’t turn your case to shite, it could have done. The Super’ll hit the roof when he hears one of his dream team’s been handing out evidence like sweeties—and on this case, out of all the ones in the world. Those poor little kiddies.” He shook his head, clicked his tongue reproachfully. “You’re fond of young Curran, aren’t you? You wouldn’t want to see him reverted to uniform before he even gets off the starting blocks. All that promise, all that great working relationship the two of you have, all wasted. Wouldn’t that be a shame?”