The little beauty. It was coming up towards five. I texted him back, Well done. Meet you in Cosmo’s ASAP.

Cosmo’s is a shitty little sandwich joint tucked away in the tangle of lanes off Grafton Street. None of the Murder Squad would be caught dead there, which was one big plus. The other was that Cosmo’s is one of the few places in town that still hire Irish staff, meaning none of them will lower themselves to look directly at you. There are occasions when this is a good thing. I meet my CIs there sometimes.

By the time I got there the kid was already at a table, nursing a mug of coffee and drawing patterns in a sugar spill with one fingertip. He didn’t look up when I sat down. I said, “Good to see you again, Detective. Thanks for getting in touch.”

Stephen shrugged. “Yeah. Well. I said I would.”

“Ah. Are we having issues?”

“This feels sleazy.”

“I promise I’ll respect you in the morning.”

He said, “Back in Templemore, they told us the force was our family now. I paid attention to that, you know? I took it seriously.”

“And so you should. It is your family. This is what families do to each other, sunshine. Hadn’t you noticed?”

“No. I hadn’t.”

“Well, lucky old you. A happy childhood is a beautiful thing. This is how the other half lives. What’ve you got for me?”

Stephen bit down on the inside of his cheek. I watched with interest and let him work through the conscience thing all by himself, and finally, of course, rather than grabbing his knapsack and legging it out of Cosmo’s, he leaned over and pulled out a slim green folder. “The post-mortem,” he said, and handed it over.

I flicked through the pages with a thumbnail. Diagrams of Kev’s injuries jumped out at me, organ weights, cerebral contusions, not your ideal coffee-shop reading. “Nicely done,” I said. “And much appreciated. Summarize it for me, thirty seconds or less.”

That startled him. He had probably done family notification before, but not in full technical detail. When I didn’t blink, he said, “Um . . . OK. He—I mean, the deceased; um, your brother . . . he fell from a window, head first. There were no defensive injuries or combat injuries, nothing that would point to another person being involved. The fall was approximately twenty feet, onto hard earth. He hit the ground just to one side of the top of his head, around here. The fall fractured his skull, which damaged his brain, and broke his neck, which would have paralyzed his breathing. One or the other killed him. Very quickly.”