‘Not in Waterford City. I’d know. We’re well liked here, the husband and me. Somebody would have told us if he’d come back. He left a few months after Pauline disappeared and we were glad to see the back of him.’

‘Do you know where he went?’

Unconsciously, Barbara had removed and lit a fresh cigarette from the pack.

She waved the smoke away and raised the chewed nail to her mouth again. It was bitten to the quick. Any more worrying at it and she’d draw blood.

‘I’m sorry, I can’t take this in. I mean, I did worry about Pauline. Not at the start. But as the years went by I wondered why she wasn’t getting in touch. Especially why she wasn’t checking up on her nephew. She was going to be his godmother. She is, as it happens. We had somebody stand in for her at the baptism.

‘When I gave birth to my little girl, I really missed Pauline. She would have loved having a niece. I kept accepting scam friends when I first got my Facebook account, the ones without profile pictures, because I thought one of them might be her, trying to make contact. Sometimes I was angry with her for making me worry. But you’re saying now that all this time …’

Barbara placed her hand on her chest as though to calm herself and her eyes widened. Her voice when she spoke again was shrill.

‘Wait a minute. Are you sure it’s even her? How do you know? Nobody’s asked me to identify a body.’

‘Barbara, I’m afraid the DNA samples given at the time of Pauline’s disappearance match one of the bodies found in Glendalough. It’s definite.’

‘But the guards went to Steve for Pauline’s DNA samples,’ she protested. ‘He gave them her toothbrush and a hairbrush or something. I didn’t give them anything. I didn’t think anything had happened to her. He’s not a man to be trusted; maybe he got the hair from another girl or something. Steve could easily have been having an affair.’

Tom held Barbara’s gaze and leaned across the table towards her, speaking gently but firmly.

‘We’ve also checked the dental records. It’s Pauline.’

Barbara slumped again, her shoulders hunched, cigarette forgotten in the ashtray. She massaged the side of her head. After a long pause, she looked straight at Tom.

‘I don’t know where that bastard went. Did he do it? Did he kill her?’

The inspector kept his features composed. They had no proof of that, yet. Just a theory about a man who dated and abused the women he ultimately murdered. The anomaly in this instance was that Steve had actually reported Pauline missing. But that could have been a sick attempt to put himself at the centre of the investigation into her disappearance.