Stephen shook his head. “Maybe I would, only I’ve still got the same problem with the fingerprints as I had before. Unless Imelda Tierney can explain the note being wiped, it outweighs her story as far as I’m concerned. People lie; evidence doesn’t.”

The kid was worth ten of Scorcher, and probably of me. I said, “I like the way you think, Detective. Unfortunately, I’m pretty sure Scorcher Kennedy’s not going to start thinking the same way anytime soon.”

“Not unless we come up with an alternative theory that’s too solid for him to ignore.” He still put a shy little twist on the “we,” like a teenager talking about his first girlfriend. Working with me had been a big deal to him. “So that’s what I’ve been concentrating on. I’ve spent a lot of time going over this case in my head, looking for what we could’ve missed, and last night something hit me.”

“Yeah? What would that be?”

“OK.” Stephen took a deep breath: he had rehearsed this, ready to impress me. “So far, we’ve none of us paid any attention to the fact that Rose Daly’s body was concealed, yeah? We’ve thought about the implications of where it was concealed, but not the fact that it was concealed to start with. And I think that should’ve told us something. Everyone’s agreed that this looks like an unplanned crime, right? Our fella just snapped?”

“That’s what it looks like.”

“So his head must’ve been well wrecked once he saw what he’d done. Me, I’d have legged it out of that house as fast as I could go. Instead, our guy got up the willpower to stay put, find a hiding place, stash a heavy body under a heavy concrete slab . . . That took time and effort, loads of it. He needed that body hidden. Like, badly. Why? Why not just leave her for someone to find in the morning?”

He’d make a profiler yet. I said, “You tell me.”

Stephen was leaning forward across the table, eyes fixed on mine, all wrapped up in the story. “Because he knew someone out there could link him either to Rose or to the house. Has to be. If her body had been found the next day, someone out there would’ve said, ‘Hang on, I saw So-and-so going into Number Sixteen last night,’ or ‘I think So-and-so was planning on meeting Rose Daly.’ He couldn’t afford to let her be found.”

“Sounds about right to me.”