It looked as if they were deadlocked. The only way they could both hold on to their jobs would be for both of them to say nothing. Brendan might have got his way after all, and escape the consequences of raping her, but losing her career and her reputation would be a very high price to pay for seeing him punished.

She would have to confront him about it, however. It would be absurd for them to carry on with their daily routine without them openly facing up to the hold they now had over each other. When she went to call on him, though, she would make sure she left his door wide open.

*

She called Kyna up to her office.

Kyna looked around and said, ‘Oh. I thought Dr Power had showed up.’

‘She should be here in twenty minutes or so. But I needed to talk to you in private first. Do you mind closing the door?’

‘What is it?’ asked Kyna, approaching her desk. ‘What’s wrong?’

Katie took out the phone and showed her the pictures. Kyna flicked through all of them in silence, and then said, ‘Oh… my… God.’

‘It gets worse. Before your man lost the phone, he emailed all those pictures to Chief Superintendent O’Kane.’

Kyna dropped down into one of the couches by the window, still holding the phone. She stared at Katie wide-eyed for a moment, and then she said, ‘What are you going to do? What are we going to do?’

‘For now, nothing.’

‘But what if O’Kane passes them on to Frank Magorian, or to Dublin Castle, or the GSOC? Or the media, even?’

‘I don’t think he will. At least I’m hoping he won’t. I don’t think he’ll want Frank Magorian finding out that he arranged for some gowl to sneak into my garden at night and take compromising photographs, do you? Because I’m sure that’s what he’s done. There’s another reason, too.’

She hadn’t meant to tell Kyna about Brendan raping her. She had been unconscious when he had first penetrated her, but she still blamed herself for drinking herself into a stupor that night, even though she had only been trying to numb the shock and the grief of Conor’s sudden death.

There was another more secretive reason why she hadn’t wanted to tell her. If and when she and Kyna ever became intimate again, she didn’t want Kyna put off by the thought that Brendan had been inside her. She knew that Kyna disliked Brendan intensely, not only because he had cheated on Katie when they were young cadets at Templemore, but because she thought that he was glib and vain, and she found dark-haired over-groomed men like him physically repellent. ‘They’re like snakes,’ she had said.