My jaw was clenched so tight I was sure my teeth were going to break. I didn’t care; I wanted to feel that snap. The thing in the hole was curled up like a kid asleep, face tucked down in its arms. Maybe that saved my mind. I heard Rosie’s voice say Francis, clear and amazed by my ear, our first time.

Someone said something snippy about contamination and a hand shoved a mask in my face. I backed away and ran my wrist over my mouth, hard. The cracks in the ceiling were skidding, jumping like a telly screen gone bad. I think I heard myself say, very softly, “Ah, shit.”

One of the techs asked, “Are you OK?”

He was on his feet, way too close to me, and he sounded like he had asked it a couple of times. I said, “Yeah.”

“Gets to you at first, yeah?” one of his team said smugly. “We’ve seen way worse.”

“Are you the one who called it in?” the tech asked me.

“Yeah. Detective Frank Mackey.”

“Are you Murder?”

It took me a second to work out what he was talking about. My mind had slowed down to a standstill. “No,” I said.

The tech gave me a weird look. He was a geeky little object about half my age and half my size, probably the useless prick from earlier. “We called Murder,” he said. “And the pathologist.”

“Safe enough bet,” said his sidekick cheerfully. “She didn’t get in here all by herself.”

He was holding an evidence bag. If one of them touched her in front of me I knew I would batter the living shit out of him. “Good for you,” I said. “I’m sure they’ll be along any minute. I’ll go give the uniforms a hand.”

On my way up the stairs I heard the geek say something about the natives getting restless, and a spatter of snickers from his team. They sounded like a bunch of teenagers, and for one last shard of a second I would have sworn that it was Shay and his mates down in that basement smoking spliff and laughing at dark-edged jokes, that the hall door opened onto the life I had been born in, that none of this was happening.

Outside, the circle of people had thickened and closed in tighter, necks stretching, only a few feet away from my friend the guard dog. His mate had come down from the door to stand next to him at the railings. The clouds had moved in lower over the rooftops and the light had changed, turned a bruised, dangerous purplish-white.

Something moved, at the back of the crowd. Mr. Daly was coming through, straight-arming people out of the way like he barely saw them, eyes fixed on me.

“Mackey—” He was trying to shout, but his voice cracked and came out hoarse and hollow. “What’s in there?”