“It’s my bloody arm. What do you care whose business is it?”

“I can’t concentrate while you’re doing that. And as long as I can’t concentrate, I can’t tell you what’s going on. It’s up to you.”

She shot me a defiant glare, bared small white teeth and bit down once more, hard, but when I didn’t react she wiped her arm on her T-shirt and sat on her hands. “There. Happy?”

I said, “It wasn’t just one body. It was a family of four. They were living out in Broken Harbor—it’s called Brianstown now. Someone broke into their house last night.”

“How’d he kill them?”

“We won’t be sure till the post-mortem. It looks like he used a knife.”

Dina stared at nothing and didn’t move, didn’t even breathe, while she thought that over. “Brianstown,” she said finally, abstractedly. “What a stupid fucking cretin name. Whoever came up with that, someone should push his head underneath a lawn mower and hold it there. Are you positive?”

“About the name?”

“No! Je-sus. About the dead people.”

I rubbed at the hinge of my jaw, trying to work some of the tension out of it. “Yeah. I’m positive.”

The focus had come back into her eyes: they were on me, unblinking. “You’re positive because you’re working on it.”

I didn’t answer.

“You said you didn’t want to look at it on the news because you’d been working on it all day. That’s what you said.”

“Looking at a murder case is work. Any murder case. That’s what I do.”

“Blah blah blah whatever, this murder case is your work. Right?”

“What difference does that make?”

“It makes a difference because if you tell me, I’ll let you change the subject.”

I said, “Yeah. I’m on the case. Me and a bunch of other detectives.”

“Hmm,” Dina said. She threw the towel in the general direction of the bathroom door, slid off the sofa and started moving around the room again, forceful automatic circles. I could almost hear the hum of the thing that lives inside her starting to build, a thin mosquito whine.

I said, “And now we change the subject.”

“Yeah,” Dina said. She picked up a little soapstone elephant that Laura and I brought back from holiday in Kenya one year, squeezed it hard and examined the red dents it left in her palm with interest. “I was thinking, before. While I was waiting for you. I want to change my flat.”

“Good,” I said. “We can go look for something online right now.” Dina’s flat is a shit hole. She could afford a perfectly decent place, I help her with the rent, but she says purpose-built apartment blocks make her want to bang her head off the walls, so she always ends up in some decrepit Georgian house that was converted into bedsits in the sixties, sharing a bathroom with some hairy loser who calls himself a musician and needs regular reminders that she has a cop for a brother.