Which was exactly what I had asked for, but all the same I almost fell in love with the overgroomed waitress for showing up right at that moment. I ordered coffee and some kind of sandwich. She wrote down the wrong thing twice to prove that she was too good for this job, rolled her eyes at my stupidity and nearly knocked Stephen’s mug into his lap whipping my menu away, but by the time she wiggled off, I had managed to unclench my jaw at least partway. I said, “No surprises there. Got the fingerprint reports?”

Stephen nodded and pulled out another file, thicker. Scorcher had put some serious pressure on the Bureau, to get results this fast. He wanted this case over and done with. I said, “Give me the good parts.”

“The outside of the suitcase was a mess: all that time up the chimney rubbed off most of whatever was there before, and then we’ve got the builders and the family who—your family.” He ducked his head, embarrassed. “There’s still a few prints that match Rose Daly, plus one matching her sister Nora, plus three unknowns—probably from the same hand and made at the same time, going by the position. On the inside, we’ve got more or less the same: lots of Rose on everything that’ll hold prints, lots of Nora all over the Walkman, a couple from Theresa Daly on the inside of the actual case—which makes sense, I mean, it used to be hers—and loads from all the Mackey family, mostly Josephine Mackey. Is that, um, your mother?”

“Yep,” I said. Ma would definitely have been the one to unpack that suitcase. I could hear her: Jim Mackey, you get your great dirty hands out of that yoke, that’s knickers in there, are you some kind of pervert? “Any unknowns?”

“Not inside. We’ve also got, um, a few of your prints on the envelope the tickets were in.”

Even after the last few days, I had just enough room for that to hurt: my prints from that gobsmackingly innocent evening in O’Neill’s, still fresh as yesterday after twenty years hidden in the dark, ready for the Bureau techs to play with. I said, “Yeah, you do. It didn’t occur to me to wear gloves when I bought them. Anything else?”

“That’s it for the suitcase. And it looks like the note was wiped clean. On the second page, the one that was found in 1985, we’ve got Matthew, Theresa and Nora Daly, the three lads who found it and brought it to them, and you. Not one print from Rose. On the first page, the one from Kevin’s pocket, we’ve got nothing. Like, no prints at all. Clean as a whistle.”

“And the window he went out of?”