‘Why did you want to speak to me?’ she asked Farmer. She noticed there was a dark bruise on his cheek. And a small cut.

‘It’s about a detective inspector who disappeared. His wife thinks you may know him. DI Donny Maguire.’

145

Now she’d lied to the police on top of everything else. She’d sat there and with a completely straight face she’d told the cop that she didn’t know any DI Maguire, that she’d never heard of him.

‘Really?’ he’d said, his eyes burning into hers.

Her throat was so dry, she was so guilt-ridden, that she could only nod. Then Aunt June showed up.

‘Christ!’ she exclaimed when she saw the mess the flat was in.

Once the fingerprint man had taken her dabs too and departed, Lil and June had started on straightening everything out, and Farmer was still there. His eyes kept flickering back to rest on Angel. Like he didn’t believe her. Like he knew she was lying. As soon as she could, she stood up and said to Aunt Lil that she would go on over to the house, she was a bit shaken up.

Lil patted her arm. June tutted, looking around at the place, thinking – Angel knew it – that Angel thought she was too good to do housework. Which wasn’t the case. Angel merely thought that if she didn’t get away from DI Farmer right now, she might give herself away. She might even panic and confess. So she had to go. But he’d asked for the address of Lil and June’s house, and taken note of the phone number, so that he could contact her again if he needed to. She couldn’t escape him. She felt that, very strongly.

‘You make yourself comfortable. Couple of hours, we’ll be with you. OK?’ said Lil kindly.

Like she actually deserved kindness, when she was a murderess and a liar.

Angel was glad to leave, glad to flag down a cab and sit in the back in her own space, away from Lil and June and that policeman.

DI Donny Maguire.

She only had to hear that name to shiver. Christ, how she’d hated him. The hell he’d made her and her mother live through. And then . . . she’d killed him. She still felt her stomach churn when she thought of him lying there in a pool of blood, crawling toward her. That image still haunted her dreams, but she had no regrets. Now, she felt like he was coming back to torment her all over again – that you could kill DI Donny Maguire as many times as you liked, he would always return like the undead to make you pay.

She’d lied to the police.

She’d killed a man.

A faint whimper escaped her lips, causing the cab driver to glance back at her.

‘You OK there, love?’ he asked.

‘Fine,’ she lied.

146

When Farmer and Paddy got back to the police station, it was Paddy who wrote out the report regarding the trashed flat, Paddy who sorted out the arrangements for the repairs to the flat door. Farmer went into his office and sat there thinking, trying to process all this in his usual rational manner. He unlocked his bottom desk drawer and pulled out the thick yellow file of information he’d thus far accumulated on the case of the missing Donny Maguire, then he sat there staring at it, unopened.