“When you put Rosie’s suitcase in Number Sixteen for her, where’d you leave it exactly?”

The instant blank look, half mule and half moron, brought it home to me all over again just where I stood now. Nothing in the world quite canceled out the fact that Imelda was, against every instinct in her body, talking to a cop. She said, inevitably, “What suitcase?”

“Ah, c’mon, Imelda,” I said, easy and grinning—one wrong note and this whole trip would sink into a waste of time. “Me and Rosie, we’d been planning this for months. You think she didn’t tell me how she was getting stuff done?”

Slowly some of the blank look dissolved off Imelda’s face; not all of it, but enough. She said, “I’m not getting in any hassle about this. If anyone else asks me, I never saw no suitcase.”

“Not a problem, babe. I’m not about to drop you in the shite; you were doing us a favor, and I appreciate that. All I want to know is whether anyone messed with the case after you dropped it off. Do you remember where you left it? And when?”

She watched me sharply, under her thin lashes, figuring out what this meant. Finally she reached into a pocket for her smoke packet and said, “Rosie said it to me three days before yous were heading off. She never said nothing before that; me and Mandy guessed something was up, like, but we didn’t know anything for definite. Have you seen Mandy, yeah?”

“Yep. She’s looking in great form.”

“Snobby cow,” Imelda said, through the click of the lighter. “Smoke?”

“Yeah, thanks. I thought you and Mandy were mates.”

A hard snort of laughter, as she held the lighter for me. “Not any more. She’s too good for the likes of me. I don’t know were we ever really mates to begin with; we just both used to hang out with Rosie, and after she left . . .”

I said, “You were always the one she was closest to.”

Imelda gave me a look that said better men had tried to soft-soap her and failed. “If we’d been that close, she’d have told me from the start what yous had planned, wouldn’t she? She only said anything because her da had his eye on her, so she couldn’t get her gear out on her own. The two of us used to walk back and forth from the factory together some days, talk about whatever girls talk about, I don’t remember. This one day she said to me she needed a favor.”

I said, “How’d you get the suitcase out of their flat?”