McAvoy pauses, one hand on the door. He knows he shouldn’t be here. When he saw Roisin’s face in the CCTV image he should have contacted the unit dealing with the Puck murder and told them everything he knows. He could earn himself no shortage of plaudits and add a big tick next to his name in the eyes of the investigators, were he to serve up chapter and verse on the pretty young girl who may be able to get them a swift result. But to do so, he risks everything. These past years he has persuaded himself to stop thinking about what happened in that tumbledown barn off the Brampton Road. The things he did in temper: the pain he inflicted on the bastards who violated a twelve-year-old girl just because her people had parked up on private land and made themselves at home. Images flash in his mind. Scraps of sound. Her, screeching, biting, fighting; telling them what her daddy would do when he found out. And the landowner, laughing in her face, pushing her cheek into the cobwebs and rotten wood of a pile of old palettes. His lads, waiting their turn. McAvoy had hit them so hard that it left his arms numb all the way to the shoulder. Had thrown the biggest of them through the sagging wooden wall and followed him outside to continue pounding him into the earth. He left all three broken, bloodied, pressed into the dirt. He didn’t return to himself until he was arriving at the family caravan and handing her over to her family. He didn’t know how to tell them what had happened. Papa Teague saw it all in his eyes. Flicked a gaze over the blood on his hands, the sweat soaking his shirt, and knew. Just took his daughter from the rookie police officer and held her like a baby. Then he told McAvoy to go. Said he would take care of it all. He was as good as his word. There was never a police report filed. Months later, McAvoy heard that the three men claimed to have been in a bad car accident. That, at least, accounted for the shattered legs and the terrible scars. McAvoy has never known whether he did the right thing or the wrong thing on that hellish day. But he knows that the Teagues have something over him, and worse, that Roisin has already endured more in her life than anybody should have to. He feels an overwhelming need to see her. To seek her blessing before he betrays her to cops who might see her as nothing more than a no-good thieving Tinker.

He pushes open the door and steps into the cold, grimy light of the murder room. Quiet, despite the urgency of the case. Two civilian members of staff tapping away at computers, and a detective constable talking on the phone, her back to him, gazing through her own reflection into the dark, rain-streaked night.