Katie picked up the phone and left Bill Phinner’s office. As she walked across the laboratory, she saw a young bespectacled man with brushed-up ginger hair sitting at a computer in front of the window. He turned to look at her and although he said nothing and almost immediately turned back to his PC, she wondered if he was Conall. If so, he now knew more about her private life than almost anybody except for Bill Phinner and the intruder who had taken all those intimate pictures of her and Kyna together. And, of course, Brendan O’Kane.

*

She returned to her office and sat down at her desk. She took one more look at the photographs on the phone. Each picture was so clear and so graphic that there was no possible way that Kyna’s nakedness and the passionate kiss that they were sharing could be explained away as accidental, or simply a platonic cuddle between friends.

She switched off the phone, dropped it into her secure drawer and locked it. Then she stood up and walked over to the window. Down in the station car park, she could see Brendan talking to Superintendent Pearse and Councillor Douglas O’Banion from the county council’s joint policing committee, and it looked as if they were laughing about something. She knew that it was highly unlikely that Brendan was showing them the pictures of her and Kyna, but all the same she couldn’t help thinking that he might be.

Her first reaction had been that she and Kyna could both be dismissed from An Garda Síochána, or severely reprimanded at the very least. Maybe one of them might be posted to another Garda station, as far away as possible. It would be hard to see how she could continue in her position as detective superintendent here at Anglesea Street if those pictures were to be sent to the Garda Ombudsman, or if even one of them went viral on the internet.

She could just imagine how criminals would taunt her if that happened. ‘Oh, you’re the carpet-munching cop, are you?’

But then she thought: Don’t panic, and think this through. How could Brendan possibly explain how he had come by such pictures? The phone itself was proof that as soon as the intruder had taken them, he had sent them directly to Brendan’s personal email address. So had Brendan paid him to follow her home, on the off-chance that he could take any incriminating photographs of her and Kyna together? Maybe he had wanted them to blackmail her, to make sure that she wouldn’t lodge a formal complaint about his rape.

That seemed highly likely – and if it were, Brendan would be equally far up the creek without a paddle, as her late husband, Paul, used to say, and he would be just as much at risk of being sacked.