There wasn’t much I could do about the black eyes or the lump on his jaw, but when I was done he was at least a few steps closer to presentable. I refolded the J-cloth and went at my own face. “How’s that?”

He barely glanced at me. “You’re grand.”

“If you say so. Like I said, it’s no skin off my nose what the Place sees.”

That made him take a proper look. After a moment he jabbed a finger, almost reluctantly, at the corner of his mouth. “There.”

I gave my cheek another scrub and raised an eyebrow at him. He nodded.

“OK,” I said. The cloth was smeared with great spreading splotches of blood, blooming crimson all over again where the water had revived them, soaking through the folds. It was starting to come off on my hands. “OK. Hang on there a sec.”

“Like I’ve a choice.”

I rinsed the cloth a bunch of times in the kitchen sink, tossed it in the bin for the search team to find later on, and scrubbed my hands hard. Then I went back out to the front room. The ashtray was under a chair in a scatter of gray ash, my smokes were in a corner and Shay was where I had left him. I sat down on the floor opposite him, like we were a couple of teenagers at a party, and put the ashtray between us. I lit two smokes and stuck one between his lips.

Shay inhaled hard, eyes closing, and let his head fall back on the sofa. I leaned back against the wall. After a while he asked, “Why didn’t you shoot me?”

“Are you complaining?”

“Don’t be a bleeding sap. I’m only asking.”

I peeled myself off the wall—it took an effort; my muscles were starting to stiffen up—and reached across to the ashtray. “I guess you were right all along,” I said. “I guess, when you get down to it, I’m a cop now.”

He nodded, without opening his eyes. The two of us sat there in silence, listening to the rhythm of each other’s breathing and to that faint elusive music coming from somewhere, only moving to lean forward and flick ash. It was the nearest to peaceful we’d ever been together. When the buzzer yelled, it almost felt like an intrusion.

I answered fast, before anyone could spot Stephen waiting outside. He ran up the stairs as lightly as Holly running down; the stream of voices from Ma’s never changed. I said, “Shay, meet Detective Stephen Moran. Detective, this is my brother, Seamus Mackey.”

The kid’s face said he had already got that far. Shay looked at Stephen with no expression at all in those swollen eyes, no curiosity, nothing but a kind of distilled exhaustion that made my spine want to sag just looking at it.