Brendan sipped more coffee, and then he said, ‘Can’t we bury the hatchet? I mean – are we really going to spend the rest of our careers at loggerheads?’

‘The rest of our careers? Who knows how long that’s going to be. Or how short, for that matter.’

‘In this case anyway, yes, you can lead the media briefing. I’ll be frank with you, though. It’s mainly because I don’t want the press to think that I was the one who set up Operation Hubbard.’

‘They might well applaud me for it, sir, and then you’d get no credit at all. “And so the poor dog had none.”’

Brendan looked at Katie in almost exactly the same way that Feargal Grífin had looked at her after she had shot him, and she could imagine him thinking the same word that Feargal Grífin had spat at her: ‘Cailleach!’

*

Katie asked Mathew McElvey to arrange the media briefing as late as he possibly could, so that the reporters would be pushed for time to make their deadlines for the Six One News and tomorrow morning’s papers.

As it was, they were much more interested in the gory details of the shootings that had killed three of Barry Riordan’s gang than the wider picture of what this could mean for crime-fighting in Cork and the safety of her citizens.

Only Owen Dineen asked her a critical question, and now she knew that he was being paid to write negative articles about her, she wasn’t upset by it at all. He would have his comeuppance. Once his editors at the Irish Sun discovered that he had taken bribes to twist his stories, it was unlikely that he would ever be employed by them again. They liked sensational news, but they were always punctilious about the facts.

Owen raised his hand like Bottler the schoolboy. ‘Would you not admit that you’ve put your own officers and the population of this city as a whole in very grave danger, DS Maguire?’

‘In what way, Owen?’

‘Sure like, those Riordans are going to be thirsting for revenge, aren’t they? I know Barry Riordan well, and there’s no way he’s going to be taking this lying down. Why do you think Billy Hagerty was shot? That was payback for Michael Riordan and his family being murdered by his brother Donal, and I challenge you to tell me anything different.’

‘We have no proof yet who shot Billy Hagerty, or why. It’s conceivable that whoever shot him was aiming for Thomas O’Flynn, who was right behind him at the time, and missed.’

Katie looked across at Brendan, who was sitting on the other side of Detective O’Donovan, and said, ‘You know what a stickler I am for hard evidence, Owen. Guesswork is all well and good, but guesswork doesn’t stand up in front of a judge and jury.’