‘I’m grand altogether, Moirin, thanks. The world isn’t about to come to an end yet.’

Katie sat down at her desk and looked through the memos and the files that had been left for her. Revenue had been tipped off about a large shipment of heroin that might be smuggled in through Ringaskiddy in the next two or three days. Apart from that, there was nothing of desperate urgency.

She couldn’t stop thinking about the Lee Pusher. Maybe it was the ghostly picture of him that she had in her mind, rushing up to innocent people in his grey tracksuit and knocking them into the river. Maybe it was the concept that Dr Power had given her of a lonely, isolated man who always felt that he was rejected by society and needed to take out his frustration on people who looked happy.

She thought, too, about Billy Hagerty, originally Aoife Hagerty, and how lonely and isolated she must have felt, never fitting in, because she always felt like a boy.

In one of those unexpected flashes of recall, she remembered a friend of hers at her secondary school, Margaret Finlay, who had been relentlessly teased by all the other girls because she was so tall. One day when they were walking home together Margaret had sobbed all the way back to her house, saying that she wished she had been born a boy if she was going to be so tall. Either that, or she wished that she had never been born at all. She hated everybody, she wept, because she had no friends apart from Katie, and none of the other girls would share secrets with her or let her join their clubs.

Two weeks later Margaret had wrapped her school scarf around her neck and hanged herself in her bedroom.

Katie went to the window and looked out at the rain dredging across the car park. The hooded crows were still there, huddled on the rooftop opposite. Her mind was all jumbled up like a kaleidoscope. ‘I’d kill all those bullies if I could,’ Margaret had told her. ‘They’ve taken my life, why shouldn’t I take theirs?’

Katie went back to her desk and switched on her computer. She looked up St Catherine’s Secondary School in Ardpatrick and found photos of this year’s athletics team. They were all wearing grey tracksuits, but none of them could have been much taller than five foot four and most of them had long hair or plaits so it was highly unlikely that any of them could have been mistaken for a man.