Jayden had forgotten about his game. On the screen a zombie was frozen splayed in mid-fall, with scraps of its head mushrooming everywhere. I asked, “Do you have any reason to think he might go for her?”

That wary flick of her eyelids. She slumped back in the chair and folded her arms again. “I was only asking.”

“If you do, Mrs. Gogan, you need to tell us.”

“I don’t know and I don’t care.”

Bullshit, but I know that thick, lumpy stubborn: the harder I pushed, the more solid it would get. “Right,” I said. “In the last few months, have you seen anyone around the estate who you didn’t recognize?”

Jayden let out a high, sharp snicker. Sinéad said, “Never see anyone, hardly. And I wouldn’t recognize most of them anyway. We’re not, like, all buddy-buddy out here. I’ve friends of my own; I don’t need to be hanging off the neighbors.”

Translated, you couldn’t have paid the neighbors enough to hang out with the Gogans. They were probably all just jealous. “Then have you seen anyone who looked out of place? Anyone who worried you for any reason?”

“Only the non-nationals in the Close. There’s dozens of them in that house. I’d say the lot of them are illegal. You’re not going to check that out either, though, are you?”

“We’ll pass it on to the appropriate department. Has anyone called to the door? Selling something, maybe? Asking to check the pipes or the wiring?”

“Yeah, right. Like anyone cares about our wiring—Jaysus!” Sinéad shot upright. “Was it, like, some psycho that broke in? Like on that show on the telly, like a serial killer?”

All of a sudden she looked alive. Fear had knocked the blankness off her face. I said, “We can’t give details of—”

“’Cause if it’s that, you better tell me now, right? I’m not staying here waiting for some sick bastard to come in and torture us, yous lot would stand there and watch him go at it before you’d do a bleeding thing—”

It was the first actual emotion we’d seen out of her. The ghost-blue children next door: nothing but gossip fodder, no more real than some TV show, right up until the danger might be personal. I said, “I can promise you we won’t stand there and watch.”

“Don’t you disrespect me! I’ll get onto the radio, I will, I’ll ring the Joe Duffy Show—”

And we would spend the rest of this investigation battling our way through a media cyclone of cops-don’t-care-about-the-little-guy hysteria. I’ve been there. It feels like someone’s using a tennis ball machine to fire starving pug dogs at you. Before I could come up with something soothing, Richie leaned forward and said earnestly, “Mrs. Gogan, you’ve got every right to be worrying. Sure, you’re a mammy.”

“Exactly. I’ve got my kids to think about. I’m not gonna—”

“Was it a pedophile?” Jayden wanted to know. “What’d he do to them?”

I was starting to see why Sinéad ignored him. “Now, you know there’s a load we can’t be telling you,” Richie said, “but I can’t leave a mammy to worry, so I’m trusting you not to pass this on. Can I do that, yeah?”