‘Oh, but you’re so wrong there. It would have made all the difference in the world. If your affair had come to light then Phinean Joyce would have been able to appeal for that reason alone. But of course he suffered a stroke after only six weeks in jail, which rendered him speechless and unable to lodge an appeal, and less than a year after that he passed away. Detective Inspector Kathleen Maguire, on the other hand, was feted for her detective work and promoted to detective superintendent – the first female detective superintendent in Cork.’

Katie stood silent for a while. She could see herself reflected in the mirror over the fireplace, and the back of Orla’s head with its coronet of tightly braided hair, as if the two of them were figures in a surrealist painting by René Magritte.

Orla said, ‘I can’t imagine that you’re so dim that you haven’t caught on to why I’m telling you this. If you arrest me and try to charge me with anything relating to Garrett’s death, I’ll find myself obliged to make it known that he was having an affair with you when he was hearing the charges against Phinean Joyce, and that you would never have been promoted if Garrett hadn’t convicted him.’

Katie wasn’t sure how to respond to that. She felt a surge of anger at Orla’s superior attitude, and she was tempted to say that Garrett wouldn’t have needed to seek out the comfort of other women if she had been anything like the perfect wife that she clearly imagined herself to be.

Her first instinct was to tell Orla to do her worst. She was sure that Phinean Joyce’s conviction had been sound. In the footprint that Bill Phinner’s technicians had found on the parquet flooring in the Lord Mayor’s hallway, there had been a fish-hook shaped cleft, and this had exactly matched a nick in the sole of Phinean Joyce’s left loafer. Plenty of other criminals had been convicted on evidence as slight as that.

Apart from the footprint, no other forensic evidence had been found to confirm Phinean Joyce’s presence in the house, but he had been unable to give Katie and her detectives a plausible explanation of where he had been on the night of the murder. In fact, he had given them three different explanations, and every one of them had turned out to be a lie. Along with his repeated threats to make the Lord Mayor’s life ‘hell on earth’, both verbal and written, that evasiveness had been sufficient to send him down.