Katie called Moirin and asked for another cappuccino. It had been 2:15 in the morning before she had been able to leave MacCurtain Street. Only twenty minutes after the shooting, a team from the Technical Bureau had arrived to search for forensic evidence, as well as three squad cars and two unmarked Garda cars, all with their sirens screaming and their headlights flashing, closely followed by a Garda Transit. Along with Detectives Caffrey and Buckley, Katie herself had spent over two hours interviewing passers-by and customers from Isaacs and Dan Lowrey’s.

Kieran had stayed with her until she had finished, his coat collar turned up against the rain, although he had plainly been tired and shaken by being shot at. Eventually, a taxi had taken him back up to the Ambassador Hotel, where he was staying, and Katie had returned to Anglesea Street, to spend the night there. She had rung her neighbour, Jenny Tierney, and asked her if she would take Barney and Foltchain out for their late-night walk.

Her phone rang again. It was Brendan’s assistant, Bridie, telling her that Brendan had returned from Dublin and had just walked into his office.

‘Please tell him I’ll be along in about ten minutes, Bridie.’

‘He has a rake of catching-up to be catching up with, ma’am.’

‘I can understand that. But this is urgent.’

As detective superintendent, she had full authority to set up her operation to surprise the Riordans when they raided The Weavers this afternoon to ‘mess up’ Maddie O’Flynn’s birthday party. All the same, she needed to brief Brendan about it, if only as a matter of protocol. It would also give her some insurance if anything were to go catastrophically wrong, and either a gang member or a garda got shot. If Brendan knew about it beforehand, she couldn’t be held solely responsible.

Had her relationship with Brendan been less than daggers drawn, she would have rung him or emailed him yesterday evening when he was up at Phoenix Park, or even early this morning, and told him all about it. But she strongly suspected that he might have vetoed the operation to make her appear indecisive and incompetent – if only in the eyes of her fellow officers.

It didn’t help that this morning’s Irish Sun carried a front-page story about last night’s attempt on her life – POTSHOT AT TOP COP. It was written under the byline of Owen Dineen, and it strongly suggested that Cork was now so lawless that criminals could shoot with impunity at the city’s leading detective.