‘Oh, listen to yourself. Do you think I’m going to tell you that? But I’ll tell you something that I will do, and that’s inform your editors at the Sun that you’ve been accepting bribes to write derogatory and malicious articles about a senior Garda officer. I don’t think they’ll be overjoyed about that, do you?’

Owen was silent for over a minute. Then at last he said, ‘What do you want? I can’t go back and unwrite those stories, and I can’t see the Sun publishing any kind of correction. They were slanted, those stories, okay, but they weren’t factually inaccurate.’

‘I want a letter from you admitting that you accepted payment from Chief Superintendent O’Kane to write stories that deliberately cast me in a bad light. I want you to list how much money he paid you, and when, and I want you to sign it.’

‘If I do that for you, will you hold off from telling my editor about it?’

‘I don’t know. But I’ll consider it. It depends what kind of a response I get from Chief Superintendent O’Kane.’

‘He’s going to be having some kind of a seizure, isn’t he?’

‘More than likely. I hope so. He’s been working away at undermining me ever since he arrived at Anglesea Street.’

Owen was silent for another minute. He sipped more of his beer and Katie could see that he was thinking hard.

Eventually, he said, ‘If I give you that letter, how are you going to use that against him? Are you going to get him the sack? Or are you just going to hold it over him, like, so that he stops trying to discredit you?’

Katie was quite impressed with him when he said that. It showed how astutely he had assessed the situation between Katie and Brendan, and how he was trying to work out a way to protect himself from losing his job.

‘Again,’ she said, ‘it depends.’

He leaned closer, so that she could smell the beer and cigarettes on his breath. ‘If you undertake only to use my letter as a threat, and you promise not to disclose it to anybody else, like the Assistant Commissioner, say, or the Garda Ombudsman, or the Sun—’

‘Then what?’

‘Then I could give you some information that could help you to convict Barry Riordan of murder. Or conspiracy to murder, anyhow.’

‘Serious?’

‘Dead serious. But you’ll have to swear on at least sixty-seven Bibles that you’ll never let anybody know where you heard it from. If you do, I might as well put on my best suit and go round to Jerh O’Connor’s funeral home and lie in a coffin all ready for my wake.’