‘Feargal Grífin,’ said Katie. ‘He was the fellow I brought down at The Weavers. He virtually confessed that it was him who tried to kill us in MacCurtain Street. He may well retract what he said or try to make out that he only said it under stress, but he should be fit enough to be questioned tomorrow. Grand work, Aoife. All I need to find out now is why he shot Billy Hagerty and Timbo Coffey and why he wanted to shoot us. He’s also my prime suspect in the murder of Justice Quinn.’

‘He was the fellow in the car, in that CCTV footage?’

‘That’s right. Either him or his identical twin brother.’

Bill picked up the Glock and turned it this way and that. ‘Whatever you say about your man, then, you can’t accuse him of not being prolific.’

*

It was less than half an hour before she was brought more evidence – this time from Detectives Walsh and Cullen. They had obviously come straight up to see her from outside: Detective Walsh was still bundled up in her fur-collared anorak and Detective Cullen had not yet taken off his droopy camel-coloured duffel coat. They both appeared pleased and excited.

‘Holy Mary,’ said Detective Walsh. ‘We must have visited every single sports kit shop within a twenty-kilometre radius.’

‘If I never again see a GAA T-shirt or smell the smell of Nike runners, I tell you, that’ll be too soon for me,’ Detective Cullen put in. He was normally so glum but today he couldn’t stop smiling and running his hand through his curly red hair.

‘Well, come on,’ said Katie. ‘You look like you’ve made some kind of a breakthrough.’

‘We have, yes – at least we think so,’ Detective Walsh told her. ‘Until yesterday afternoon we thought we’d drawn a total blank. We’d been in and out of every sports outfitters all the way from Sports Direct in Ballincollig to the Mahon Point shopping centre. But then we called into the FitNess shop in Wilton. We noticed that they sell a light grey Donnay tracksuit with a thin white stripe down the leg and also a pair of runners with an N on the side – New Balance, that’s who makes them. But what caught our attention was – they’re the only shop that sells both.’

‘The manager had already gone off home so we couldn’t go through the sales records there and then,’ said Detective Cullen. ‘But we went back there as soon as they opened this morning, like, and he couldn’t have been more obliging. It turned out that only one customer in the past month had bought both that tracksuit and those runners together in the same purchase.’

‘He showed us the “be” Visa card receipt and guess who that card is registered to.’

‘Go on. Don’t keep me in suspense.’

‘Nolan Carroll. Roisin Carroll’s father.’