‘All we know so far is that he was a traveller from the Water Lane halting site, by the name of Timbo Coffey. He’d been living there for nearly five years, first of all with his wife, but then she passed away and since then his only partner has been Paddy’s, from what we can tell. He was well respected in the traveller community before he hit the bottle. He was mentioned in that famous book about bare-knuckle boxers. Coffey the Conker, they called him.’

‘But he was shot in the back of the head, like an execution, almost?’

‘That’s what it looks like. But I’ll be going up to Water Lane later with Buckley and O’Sullivan and maybe we can find out if there was anybody who held a grudge against him.’

‘Good luck with that. The day I meet a traveller who’s prepared to co-operate with the Garda, I swear to you, I’ll go on a pilgrimage and light a candle for Black Sara, the patron saint of all the gypsies. No – make that five candles, and I’ll sew her a dress. With bells on.’

Robert nodded towards the three couches under Katie’s office window. Spread out untidily on the coffee table in between them were this morning’s newspapers – all of them open at the pages that carried critical reports about Katie’s detection rate. On top of them was the Sun story, ‘Detective Who Hasn’t Got The Guts’.

‘I hope you’re not letting these gowls get to you, ma’am. If they knew only half of what we have to deal with, day in, day out.’

‘I’m trying to put a brave face on it, Robert. But what really gets to me is why they’ve suddenly turned on me like this. Especially that Owen Dineen.’

Her phone rang. It was Assistant Commissioner Frank Magorian, asking for an update on the bombing. He was about to go into a security meeting about domestic terrorism at Dublin Castle, and he wanted to know if there was any suggestion that the bomb might have been planted for political or religious reasons.

‘We’ve no firm evidence yet, sir. But I can’t see any political terror group or any bunch of religious fanatics being behind it. Well – apart from Jehovah’s Witnesses and that’s about as far from likely as I can think of. What point would any terrorists be making by blowing up the School of Pharmacy? Even jihadis have to take Imodium, now and again. More than most of us, probably.’

She didn’t know why she had made a joke of it. She had rarely felt more harassed in her whole career. But almost as soon as she had hung up on Frank Magorian, her phone rang again. It was Bill Phinner, and he sounded unusually upbeat.