She went on to tell him about all the problems at Anglesea Street that were currently putting her under so much stress. She didn’t mention Brendan, or his rape, or the pictures that he had arranged for his crony to take of her and Kyna together. However, she did tell him about the grumpy sexual discrimination she was still suffering every day from some of her senior male officers, and the hostile media reports she had been given by Owen Dineen. It was his blistering attack in the Irish Sun that had upset her the most, because it accused her of being incompetent in a job to which she was devoted.

Kieran laid his hand on top of hers. ‘Listen, Katie, crime is on the increase everywhere – not only in Cork, not only in Ireland, but all over the globe. It’s the drugs trade, it’s the people-trafficking, it’s the prostitution, and more than anything else it’s the social media that make it so much easier for gangsters to run a criminal racket. On top of that, it’s the cuts in government spending on law and order, with so many local Garda stations closing down – what is it, a hundred and forty stations shut in the past ten years? You know all this as well as I do. But so long as you’re confident that you’re doing the very best you can under the circumstances, you should pay no attention at all to the shite that the newspapers and your senior officers are giving you. You know you’re good, Katie. To be totally crude about it, just give them all the middle finger.’

Katie couldn’t help smiling. ‘I think I’ll ask you to repeat that, so that I can record it, and play it back to myself when I go to bed tonight.’

Kieran stared at her, and she felt a tingle up the back of her neck. He didn’t say it, and maybe he wasn’t even thinking it. Maybe it was only her imagination, and her grief, and her jumbled confusion. But she almost expected him to suggest that when she went to bed tonight he could be lying next to her to repeat it for her in person, if she wanted him to.

They drank coffee, and Kieran paid the bill, and then they walked back across the river to Anglesea Street. Slate-grey clouds were looming overhead like a dark collapsing roof, and the orange streetlights were already starting to flicker on. Outside the law courts Kieran took hold of Katie’s hand again and said, ‘I might as well tell you that we’ll be giving Hagerty life. That’s mandatory. But we’re going to be imposing a sentence of twenty-two years.’

‘If he’d come out and informed on whoever paid him to do it, would you have recommended less?’