I exhaled slowly. The 13th. Evidence that he had stayed overnight on the 12th, the same night that Lorcan Lucey had seen Deirdre walking up the stairs to the bedrooms. It hadn’t been Joey O’Connor. Jeremy Gill was the one who had raped Deirdre. And his pattern of behaviour was an almost exact copy of what he had done with Rhona. I photographed the page and took a close-up of Gill’s message. I felt Davy at my shoulder.

‘Who’d believe it?’ he said. ‘A guy rapes a schoolgirl and takes time to write in the Visitors’ Book next morning. Unreal. But, hey, you’ve got proof now.’

It was a fair point. Who would believe it?

‘I’ve got proof of nothing. It’s only another piece of circumstantial evidence.’

Davy stepped back from me.

‘I’m sorry,’ I said. ‘What I should have said is that thanks to your efforts …’

‘Thanks to me you’ve got nothing worth talking about, by the look of it.’

‘That’s not what I meant. All I meant is that I need more. When you said who’d believe it, it brought it home to me. That’s all I meant.’

‘Come on, let’s go. This place seems to bring out the worst in us,’ Davy said.

‘The worst in me, maybe,’ I said.

Davy didn’t say anything to contradict me.

‘I didn’t mean it the way I said it,’ I said, on the way back to town.

‘I know,’ Davy said. ‘I understand. I do. You were talking professionally. I wasn’t.’

‘That’s not what I meant either,’ I said. ‘You made a good point. A point I should have seen, and instead of accepting it with good grace, I got mad with you.’

‘I told you it’s fine so would you leave it? You’re nearly there. Just be happy.’

‘Okay,’ I said, but it wasn’t fine, and I wasn’t happy.

‘You’re too hard on yourself, you know,’ Davy said.

Why was he being nice to me? I didn’t deserve it. But I was saved from further self-flagellation by the sound of my phone ringing. It was Garda Ruth Joyce.

‘Hi, Ruth. Are you calling to tell me you’re charging Joey in relation to my car?’

‘Not quite,’ she said. ‘It is about him, though. I wonder if you could come into the Bridewell as soon as possible?’

‘Is something wrong?’

‘I’ll explain when I see you.’

The arson attack on my car had looked like an open and shut, and relatively minor, case, headed for a guilty plea, after I’d fingered Joey on CCTV – so why the urgency?

‘I’ll be there in fifteen minutes,’ I said.

42