‘Well, you never know,’ Katie told him. ‘You might have seen something important without even realizing it. That often happens.’

The lad looked at his watch. ‘So long as they don’t keep us here too much longer. I’m supposed to be meeting the ould doll at six, and she’ll have my mebs for meatballs if I’m late.’

Katie knocked and went into the interview room where Detectives Walsh and Cullen were talking to a young girl with a tangly blonde Madonna hairstyle.

‘You saw him fall over, then?’ Detective Cullen was asking her. ‘Did he say anything before he fell over?’

‘If he did, I wouldn’t have been able to hear it, like. The music was like deafening. I thought he was buckled at first, and I was dancing around him. It’s happened before, like, when one of the lads gets off his face. But then I felt this squelching and I looked down and I tell you I almost gawked.’

‘How’s the form, Cailin?’ Katie asked her.

Detective Walsh looked up and gave her a jaded smile. ‘We’re slowly getting through them, ma’am. Only another forty-seven to go, after this. It’s been a bit like a jigsaw, one twinchy piece at a time, but I’d say we’re gradually building up a picture of what happened.’

‘Good work,’ said Katie. ‘We’ll have a full briefing tomorrow afternoon, when you’ve finished.’

She went into the adjacent office, where Detectives Caffrey and O’Crean were trying to get some sense out of a boy with gingery dreadlocks and a baggy green tracksuit. He was slumped in his chair and obviously half-stoned.

‘What’s the story?’ she asked them.

‘Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, according to this feller,’ said Detective O’Crean. ‘He’s mad out of it.’

‘Oh well, do your best. I’ll catch up with you in the morning so.’

Katie left the Zombie Lounge and drove north across St Patrick’s Bridge to MacCurtain Street and then north-eastwards up Summerhill, passing the guest house where she and Conor had first made love. She didn’t look at it, because it was too painful to think that it was less than a year ago, and how little time they had been able to spend together.

She remembered something else that he had said to her. ‘I didn’t realize until I met you that I was living in pitchy-black darkness. When I first saw you, it was like I was opening up the curtains in the morning and the sun came bursting in.’

*

She drove to Tivoli Park and stopped outside the Quinn house. It was a six-bedroomed mansion, painted pale green, with a terraced garden lined with sculpted yew hedges and a view to the south over the River Lee and the distant hills beyond. The lights were on and inside she could hear the indistinct burbling of the Six One News.