‘I saw the Sun this morning, ma’am,’ said Inspector O’Rourke, as they sat and waited in the car with the rain drumming on the roof. ‘They have some axe to grind with you, like, don’t they?’

‘Oh, water off a frog’s back,’ Katie told him. Nobody corrected her and said ‘duck’. They didn’t realize that her father had always liked to mangle well-known expressions and that she had never known any different.

She sorely wished that she could tell Inspector O’Rourke about Brendan bribing Owen Dineen to write derogatory stories about her, but she knew that she had to bide her time. She would have to choose her moment with the utmost care if she was going to protect her reputation, and her career.

At 2:21 p.m., a grey Volvo came up Gerald Griffin Street and parked on the wide pavement beside the playground railings. This was the last of the unmarked Garda cars.

‘All in position now, ma’am,’ said Inspector O’Rourke. ‘All we have to do now is wait for the Riordans to show up. That’s unless somebody’s tipped them off.’

‘That lippy young barman at The Weavers, isn’t he in with Barry Riordan?’ asked Detective O’Donovan.

‘Lenny Malone, you mean?’ said Detective Buckley. ‘Sure. He sells Es and coke for him under the counter. “Two pints of Murphy’s, a package of cheese-and-onion Taytos and a bag of crack, please!”’

‘Surely he would have found out that the party’s been cancelled, wouldn’t he?’ asked Katie. ‘The landlord would have rung him and told him not to come into work.’

‘Oh no, I shouldn’t think so. Lenny’s only part-time. Weekends he’s down at Kinsale, mostly, working on the yachts for the yacht club and scamming the amateur sailors with coke mixed with cow-worming powder. Half of them are sailing round Old Head stoned out of their minds and with a chronic case of the runs, with nowhere to go but over the side. I’ve pulled Lenny in three times myself, but somehow mysteriously he always seems to get away with nothing more than a fine and a finger-wagging.’

Inspector O’ Rourke shook his head. ‘They really have things sewn up between them, don’t they, the Riordans and the O’Flynns?’

‘Not any more,’ said Katie. ‘This is where they start to get unstitched.’

*

When it happened, it happened with dreamlike speed. A white VW Passat estate car came up Gerald Griffin Street at nearly fifty, and slewed to a halt a few metres past the entrance to The Weavers. It was followed by a Ford Mondeo and a Datsun.