Katie was about to say something else when she heard Superintendent Pearse’s phones starting to ring, and then two of her own phones started to ring, too, and within seconds phones all over the station were ringing.

She picked up the nearest phone. It was Detective Sergeant Begley.

‘There’s been a bomb at UCC. The Cavanagh building. It’s a major explosion by what’s been reported, with multiple casualties.’

‘All right, Sean. We need to get out there right away. Who do you have available?’

Before he could answer, Katie heard sirens from the fire station across the road, first one engine and then another, followed by a third.

Mother of God, can this week get any more catastrophic?

23

Katie stood on the pavement outside the School of Pharmacy on College Road with Kyna and Detective Sergeant Begley for over three hours. It was sunny but the wind had a bitter edge to it. Her breath smoked and she wished she had worn her gloves.

Detective O’Donovan came over from Anglesea Street to view the devastation first-hand and to collect the CCTV hard drive from the Cavanagh building’s reception area. He didn’t stay long. Katie had also assigned him to look for any footage from the Lough area that might show the delivery van that had brought the box containing the bomb, and hopefully its driver, too.

Kyna and Detective Sergeant Begley had interviewed the school’s principal and its two receptionists, as well as five other witnesses who had been in the lobby when the driver had carried in the ‘centrifuge’. His delivery note from Medisure had appeared to be genuine, and the receptionists had agreed to him taking it up to the laboratory himself because it was so heavy.

They hadn’t been able to describe his face clearly, because the peak of his red baseball cap had been pulled down low over his forehead and he had kept his head down and his collar turned up. All they could distinctly remember was his worn black leather jacket and that he smelled strongly of stale cigarettes and Fisherman’s Friend lozenges, as if he had been trying to mask the fact that he had bad breath, or that he had been drinking alcohol.

Inspector Francis O’Rourke had deployed sixteen uniformed gardaí around the building and cordoned it off with crime scene tapes. Ambulances had taken away the injured to the Mercy Urgent Care Centre at St Mary’s, although the dead had been left untouched until Bill Phinner’s technical experts could photograph and examine them, and Dr Mary Kelley could arrive to give them a preliminary post-mortem. First of all they had to wait until the bomb squad from Collins Barracks could give them the all-clear to enter the devastated laboratory, in case a secondary device had been planted there to catch the first responders.