‘Are you okay, ma’am?’ asked Sergeant Mullally. First of all he bent down to pick up the Glock automatic, hooking his finger through the trigger guard, but when he stood up straight again he saw the attic door hanging open and the aluminium ladder. Katie could tell by the expression on his face that he was cursing himself for not having thought of searching the attic himself. It had seemed so unlikely that anybody could have sprung open the door, brought down the ladder and climbed up out of sight, closing the door behind them, all in such a short space of time. But Sharky was drunk and his bladder had been bursting and he must have acted with all the jerky frenetic speed of a man who is desperately trying not to wet himself.

‘You can call in the paramedics now, sergeant,’ said Katie. ‘Kyna – Patrick – you don’t reck this character, do you?’

Kyna shook her head and Detective O’Donovan said, ‘No, ma’am, I can’t say that I do. But then the Riordans have never strutted around town throwing shapes, have they? Not like the O’Flynns.’

‘When I asked him for his name he refused to tell me, but he said that a clue was “Sharky”, so I’m making a wild guess that his first name is Feargal. You know – like Feargal Sharkey the singer.’

The man on the floor continued to groan and curse, and when Detective O’Donovan leaned over him to take a photograph of his face, he spat at him and said, ‘Feck off, will you? Go and shite yourself, you fecking shade!’ He then brought up about a tablespoonful of cream-coloured vomit.

It was only a few minutes before two paramedics came panting up the stairs, lugging their emergency trauma bags.

‘Your man’s been shot in the hand and the knee,’ Katie told them. ‘I don’t think you’ll have any trouble stopping the bleeding but I don’t know how you’re going to stop the stream of filth that’s coming out of his mouth.’

‘Not a bother, ma’am,’ said the older paramedic placidly, as if he had handled cases like this a hundred times before. ‘We’ll give him a hefty shot of fentanyl and that’ll shut him up.’

Katie waited for a while, watching the paramedics clean the hole in the man’s hand and cut open his sodden jeans to expose the lumpy bullet wound in his knee. She found it hard to take her eyes off the man who may have been responsible for murdering Garrett. Eventually, though, she turned and went back downstairs to join Kyna and Detective O’Donovan. As she went, the man lifted his head and shouted out, ‘Cailleach!’ one more time. ‘Witch!’