After what had happened to Garrett Quinn, though, there was no question that both she and Kyna would have to return to Garda headquarters. Before she had left Ballincollie Road, she had already put in a call to the Anglesea Street control room and told Sergeant Murphy to check his CCTV screens to see if he could trace how Garrett’s car had ended up at White’s Cross. To reach the courthouse, he should have been driving directly down to the city centre from his home in Tivoli by way of the Lower Glanmire Road, which ran westwards along the north bank of the River Lee. White’s Cross was more than six kilometres due north.

Katie had also spoken briefly with the Garda press officer, Mathew McElvey, telling him to arrange a media conference at 5:15, well in time for RTÉ to feature a report about Garrett on the Six One News. A newsflash that he had been fatally injured had already been given out on Cork FM, but she intended to announce only that he had been involved in a traffic incident, and that a Garda investigation was ongoing. She was not going to say that he had been cremated as he sat inside his car.

She parked in her usual place behind the Garda station, but before they went inside she said to Kyna, ‘I think we need to pay a visit to Stephen Herlihy first. I’d like to know when they’re going to reschedule Donal Hagerty’s committal hearing. Apart from giving him my condolences.’

They crossed over to the new criminal courthouse. The administrative offices were facing the street, in renovated red-brick buildings from the Model School of 1864, with a sixty-foot campanile, in which the older pupils used to be taken up to look at the stars. A squarish modern limestone block had been erected behind these buildings to house the courtrooms and the custodial suite and the judges’ accommodation. Inside the pale wood-panelled interior, still smelling of fresh varnish and echoing with footsteps, they found Stephen Herlihy, the court office manager, standing in the corridor talking to two of his clerks.

‘DS Maguire,’ he greeted her in his baritone voice. ‘I’ve been expecting you so.’

He was a large man, barrel-chested in his sober black suit, with wiry grey hair. He reminded Katie of Robert Mitchum – big and slow-spoken and very masculine – and yet she knew that he had reason to be guarded. In the short time that she and Garrett Quinn had been close, she had learned a lot about the workings of the court, and who owed favours to whom, and why.