‘A couple of hours won’t matter much, and it’ll give him time to catch up with video games.’ He sat back in his chair. ‘So I’m guessing that this has more to do with what happened in Northern Ireland than it does with a biannual review that may or may not exist.’

‘It exists, Dan,’ said Stockmann. ‘That wasn’t a porky. But yes, Charlie wants me to raise what happened with you.’

‘What happened? I shot two men, Caroline. Shot them and killed them. And please don’t ask me how I feel about that.’

‘Why? Because feelings don’t come into it?’

‘Because it’s the standard psychiatrist’s question, isn’t it?’ He held up his hand. ‘And before you correct me, I know that you’re a psychologist.’

‘Do you know the difference between a psychologist and a psychiatrist?’ She answered the question for him. ‘About fifty pounds an hour.’

‘And who gets the better pay?’

Stockmann smiled. ‘The psychiatrist, of course. They’re the real doctors. We psychologists, we’re the ones with the doctorates who can’t prescribe drugs.’

‘I’m sure that Charlie pays you well.’

She shrugged. ‘Frankly, Dan, I don’t do this for the money.’

‘So why do you do it? Public service?’

She smiled thinly. ‘Something like that,’ she said. ‘I do value what you and your colleagues do, and in my own small way I like to think that I’m helping.’ She swirled her beer around her glass. ‘So, have there been any repercussions? After what happened in Northern Ireland.’

‘Job-wise?’

‘You know what I mean, Dan.’

‘Am I sleeping? Yes, like a baby. Am I eating? Like a horse. Do I waste even one second regretting what I did? No.’

‘I’m not sure that’s true, Dan,’ she said quietly. ‘I mean, I’m sure you’re sleeping and that you haven’t lost your appetite, but I know you well enough to know that you don’t take a life without it affecting you in some way.’

Shepherd shrugged. ‘OK, if anything it pisses me off.’

‘It makes you angry?’

‘Being put into the situation is what I’m annoyed at. The guys I killed were stone-cold killers and they’d have killed me if I hadn’t killed them, but it could have been handled differently.’ He drank some of his shandy, not because he wanted to drink but to give himself time to gather his thoughts. Caroline Stockmann had a very easy way about her, but at the end of the day she was there to compile a report on his ability to do his job and she had a mind like a steel trap. ‘How much did Charlie tell you?’

‘Pretty much everything,’ she said.

‘Including the fact that the whole operation was a cock-up?’

‘That’s not the word she used,’ said Stockmann. ‘But I gather that was the drift.’

‘I went into a situation where there was another undercover operative that I wasn’t aware of. The men I were with were going to execute him.’

‘You saved his life.’