I was at 17–19 MacSwiney Street two minutes later. The flood barrier was still in place on the lower door, but there were lights on in the reception area. I walked up the front steps to the main entrance. At this hour on a Saturday, it could only be one person, Gabriel McGrath, founder and managing partner of the mainly commercial law firm of McGrath Lynch Cleary. Housed in a trio of converted eighteenth-century town houses, MLC had seven partners and fourteen associate solicitors, including me. I had worked there since being recruited by Gabriel as a trainee in the late nineties. I would always be grateful to him for taking a risk on me. I didn’t fit at MLC, I knew it and he knew it. But I was adaptable and discreet, useful for doing the messy but necessary work the other solicitors didn’t want to do. The partner’s daughter caught with twenty-seven Ecstasy tablets. The valued secretary’s brother fallen from improperly guarded scaffolding after drinking three cans of cider at lunchtime. The corporate client with marital problems on account of his inability to keep his hands off any woman under eighty. None of my workload conformed to the glossy image MLC tried to project, which didn’t bother me one little bit. The job pays the bills and some days are better than others.

I met Gabriel as I was going up the stairs.

‘You’re in bright and early,’ I said.

Gabriel was always in bright and early. Late fifties, and permanently anxious, he worked a lot harder than he needed to at this stage of his career.

‘No earlier than usual, Finola, as well you know. I’ve been in since half seven, wanted to get a bit of a head start on next week and to check on the flood situation, but it’s all grand, thanks be to God.’

That was another thing about Gabriel. He was always thanking God for things that, as far as I could see, wouldn’t have been a problem if God had been a bit more thoughtful in the first place. But I didn’t say that, or that I didn’t believe in God; not Gabriel’s traditional Irish Catholic version anyway.

‘What brings you in on a Saturday?’

‘New client late yesterday evening, after everyone else had gone home,’ I said.

‘What kind of work?’

‘Hand-holding. Advice. That kind of thing.’

‘Hmmm. Right,’ Gabriel said. ‘Don’t waste too much time on it now. You know that you’re a valued employee and that you play an, em, important role for us but, of course, your fee income is, em, a concern, all the same, and, er, well, you know yourself.’

‘I know, Gabriel, I do,’ I said.