I went up to the living room. With the remote in my hand, I skipped through my music library, playing snatches of different songs I liked. But I couldn’t settle, not even when I got a text from Sadie to say that Joey had been detained for questioning, not even for Merle’s ‘Mama Tried’. I paced the room like a prison cell until, at last, a lock opened in my mind.

I grabbed my phone and rang Sadie.

‘Good news about Joey O’Connor, right? And are you feeling better?’ she asked.

‘Yeah, good. I’m fine. No, I’m agitated. This morning’s been bothering me.’

‘I’m not surprised,’ Sadie said. ‘Like I said, it was––’

‘That’s not what I meant. I need to check what time Gill came to the station to make the complaint about me. You were up here about half elevenish, right?’

‘Yeah. He called in about 9.15, was gone a little after 10.20. I went up to you as soon as I could, after we’d done the paperwork and talked it through with the boss.’

‘Okay. He was gone from here by seven, no later. That means there are two hours unaccounted for. Sadie, he couldn’t have known in advance that I’d be putting out the bins at 6 a.m. or that he’d be able to gain access to my house so easily. It was pure chance.’

‘So what are you saying?’

‘What if he only called by here for a look and took the opportunity, when it presented, to come into my house? But what if it wasn’t me he came to Cork to see? And what was he doing during those missing two hours?’

38

Bottle green is the uniform of St Aloysius’s Secondary School, but that was as much as I knew about it, though I live not ten minutes from the place. I’m a northsider. While I was at St Angela’s, we had little or no contact with St Al’s. I didn’t know any of the teachers or any of the current pupils, apart from Carmel, the blonde girl from Gill’s film workshop, and I didn’t even know her last name. Other than loitering around on the street outside the school, or across the road outside St Maries of the Isle Primary, I had no fast way of making contact with her. The headmistress wasn’t going to allow me to chat to ‘Carmel X from Transition Year’. Sadie could have gone into the school and said she was investigating something or other, but she wasn’t going to, not unless I came up with something more than a hunch. I could tell she wasn’t taking what I’d said seriously. Or that she didn’t want to. Being my friend couldn’t have been easy for her this last while.