Another hour wasn’t going to get Holly and Olivia any more pissed off than they already were. I threw my smoke away and got moving.

Cooper hates most people, and most people think he hates them at random. What they haven’t figured out is this: Cooper doesn’t like being bored, and he has a low threshold. Bore him once—and Scorch had obviously managed to do that, somewhere along the way—and you’re out forever. Keep him interested, and he’s all yours. I’ve been called many things, but I’ve never been called boring.

The City Morgue is a quick walk down the quays from my apartment, round the back of the bus station, in a beautiful piece of redbrick more than a hundred years old. I don’t often have occasion to go in there, but usually the thought of the place makes me happy, the same way it makes me happy that Murder works out of Dublin Castle: what we all do runs through the heart of this city like the river, we deserve the good parts of its history and its architecture. That day, though, not so much. Somewhere in there, with Cooper weighing and measuring and examining every remaining bit of her, was a girl who might be Rosie.

Cooper came to the reception desk when I asked for him, but, like most people that weekend, he wasn’t over the moon to see me. “Detective Kennedy,” he informed me, pronouncing the name delicately as if it tasted bad, “specifically informed me that you were not a part of his investigative team, and had no need for any information about the case.”

And after I’d bought him a pint, too. The ungrateful little bollix. “Detective Kennedy needs to take himself a tad less seriously,” I said. “I don’t have to be on his little team to be interested. It’s an interesting case. And . . . well, I’d rather this didn’t get around, but if the victim’s who we think it is, I grew up with her.”

That put a sparkle in Cooper’s beady little eye, just like I’d known it would. “Indeed?”

I looked down and played reluctant, to tickle his curiosity. “Actually,” I said, examining my thumbnail, “for a while, when we were teenagers, I went out with her.”

That hooked him: his eyebrows hit his hairline, and the sparkle got brighter. If he hadn’t so obviously found himself the perfect job, I’d have been worried about what this guy got up to in his spare time. “So,” I said, “you can see how I’d really like to know what happened to her—that’s if you’re not too busy to talk me through it. What Kennedy doesn’t know won’t hurt him.”

The corners of Cooper’s mouth tucked in, which is as close as he gets to a smile. He said, “Do come in.”