She walked across the road to where the reporters were all waiting behind an orange plastic Bord Gáis barrier. They were always eager to question her when she held a news conference, but this morning they looked more than eager, they looked like a ravenous pack of wolves who couldn’t wait to get their teeth into her. Even Fionnuala Sweeney from RTÉ was holding out her microphone as if she were a character in Game of Thrones, holding out a sword.

‘I’ve a short statement to make,’ Katie told them. ‘After that I’ll answer questions, but we’ll have to be brief because this is the golden hour and we can’t waste a minute of it.’

‘Can you confirm that it was a bomb?’ called out Rionach Barr, from the Echo. ‘The gas engineer who was here said it sounded more like a gas main explosion.’

‘How many casualties?’ asked Douglas Kelly, from the Irish Times. ‘Is there many dead?’

Katie waited until the reporters had all stopped shouting out. Then, slowly and clearly, she said, ‘An explosive device was planted in the junior laboratory on the first floor of the UCC’s School of Pharmacy and it was detonated at nine-sixteen this morning, probably remotely. I’m sorry to tell you that eleven pharmacy students and their professor were killed instantly and three suffered life-changing injuries.’

‘Was there any warning given at all?’

‘Not that we’re aware of.’

‘Has anybody claimed responsibility for it?’

‘Not yet.’

‘Do you have any theories about who might have planted it?’

‘As in all investigations, we’re pursuing several possibilities.’

‘Such as?’ called out Owen Dineen, from the back of the crowd.

‘It’s too early for me to speculate, Mr Dineen.’

‘But come here to me, ma’am, who would plant a bomb in a college pharmacy laboratory unless they had good reason to put a decisive stop to what was going on there? Like the students in there cooking up their own recreational drugs, for example, to sell in the discos, and putting the noses of Cork’s esteemed drug gangs out of joint?’

‘As I’ve just said, Mr Dineen, we’re looking into a number of different scenarios. You’re entitled to your interpretation of what happened here, but it would be poor police work if we were to jump to conclusions at this early stage without irrefutable proof.’

‘I love hearing you saying those words “irrefutable proof”, DS Maguire. They trip off your tongue like a line out of a poem by Yeats. But it seems to me these days that you and your detectives have fierce difficulty in finding any proof at all about anything, irrefutable or not. Why aren’t all these drug gangs already behind bars? Why aren’t the streets of Cork safe any more?’