I heard this phrase once maybe five years ago. Nobody uses it any more.

‘Booty call, Detective?’

‘Fuck buddy. How does that suit you?’

From hijinks to fuck buddy in a couple of heartbeats. We’re down to this level already? I expected another minute of civility, but this is how it goes. It’s not personal, except with Deacon I have the feeling that maybe it is.

‘Okay, I get it, Detective. I know, she’s . . . she was twenty-eight and I’m . . .’

‘You’re what? Seventy?’

I don’t get riled. ‘I’m forty-two. I counted my lucky stars, believe me.’

Deacon goes for it. ‘You want to know what I think? I think you were fixated on Miss DeLyne. Obsessed. She kept turning you down. It’s disgusting, right? You’re an old man in a silly hat. So you freaked and shot her. Why don’t you sign the paper and we can call it a day?’

I can’t see myself, but I bet my jaw is jutting stubbornly. ‘Not that easy, Deacon. You’re going to have to work on this one.’

‘Come on, Danny, give it up. I’m tired and the coffee stinks.’

‘What? You think I’m going to break down and blubber out a confession?’ I turn to Goran. ‘She always this lazy?’

I shouldn’t be smart-arsing, but Deacon needs to refine her style a little. This shooting has to be solved and the detective is throwing spears into the ocean hoping to hit something.

Goran shields her face with a file and I suspect she’s smiling. ‘You know the young ’uns, Mister McEvoy. Instant gratification.’

And suddenly Deacon is smiling too and I realise that this bull-in-a-china-shop attitude of hers is the oldest trick in the book.

‘You do bad cop pretty good,’ I tell her. ‘But time’s a-wastin’ and I am not the guy.’

Deacon flips open a field laptop. ‘Really? You have quite a file here, Mister Daniel McEvoy. And looky here, an interview with the FBI tagged on at the end.’

Groan. Word travels fast over the internet. Some tool in the army records department e-mailed my info to the FBI last year. Not so much as a court order and he shoots it across the pond.

‘I know what the file says. If you look at the end of that page, you’ll find it was a case of totally mistaken identity. I got an official apology, for Christ’s sake.’

Deacon ignores this, reading with great melodrama like she doesn’t already know what’s on the screen.

‘Company Sergeant Daniel McEvoy. Active service in the Lebanon.’ She says Lebanon with jazz hands, like it’s Disneyland. ‘Extremely dangerous individual. Trained in close-quarter combat. Expert knife man.’

‘I don’t like bazookas,’ I say, straight-faced. Luckily my file doesn’t mention sniper and marksman skills. I learned those on my own.

‘You’ve done some things, Daniel.’

‘Not murder.’