"You brought me down here to discuss my fashion sense?" I inquired. I found an ancient red beret in my satchel and waved it at him.

"Nah, we'll get back to that some other time. Here, have these." Frank pulled sunglasses out of his pocket, repulsive mirrored things that belonged on Don Johnson in 1985, and passed them to me.

"If I'm going to go around looking like that much of a dork," I said, eyeing them, "there had better be a damn good explanation."

"We'll get to that. If you don't like those, you can always wear your helmet. " Frank waited till I shrugged and put on the dork gear. The buzz of seeing him had dissolved and my back was tensing up again. Sam looking sick, Frank on the case and not wanting me spotted at the scene: it read a lot like an undercover had got killed.

"Gorgeous as always," Frank said. He held the crime-scene tape for me to duck under, and it was so familiar, I had made that quick easy movement so many times, that for a split second it felt like coming home. I automatically settled my gun at my belt and glanced over my shoulder for my partner, as if this was my own case I were coming to, before I remembered.

"Here's the story," Sam said. "At about quarter past six this morning, a local fella called Richard Doyle was walking his dog along this lane. He let it off the lead to have a run about in the fields. There's a ruined house not far off the lane, and the dog went in and wouldn't come out; in the end, Doyle had to go after it. He found the dog sniffing around the body of a woman. Doyle grabbed the dog, legged it out of there and rang the uniforms."

I relaxed a little: I didn't know any other women from Undercover. "And I'm here why?" I asked. "Not to mention you, sunshine. Did you transfer into Murder and no one told me?"

"You'll see," Frank said. I was following him down the lane and I could only see the back of his head. "Believe me, you'll see."

I glanced over my shoulder at Sam. "Nothing to worry about," he said quietly. He was getting his color back, in bright uneven splotches. "You'll be grand."

The lane sloped upwards, too narrow for two people to walk abreast, just a muddy track with ragged hawthorn hedges spilling in on both sides. Where they broke, the hillside was crazy-quilted into green fields scattered with sheep--a brand-new lamb was bleating somewhere, far off. The air was cold and rich enough to drink, and the sun sifted long and gold through the hawthorn; I considered just keeping on walking, over the brow of the hill and on, letting Sam and Frank deal with whatever seething dark blotch was waiting for us under the morning. "Here we go," Frank said.

The hedge fell away to a broken-down stone wall bordering a field left to run wild. The house was thirty or forty yards off the lane: one of the Famine cottages that still litter Ireland, emptied in the nineteenth century by death or emigration and never reclaimed. One look added another layer to my feeling that I wanted to be very far away from whatever was going on here. The whole field should have been alive with focused, unhurried movement--uniforms working their way across the grass with their heads bent, Technical Bureau crew in white coveralls busy with cameras and rulers and print dust, morgue guys unloading their stretcher. Instead there were two uniforms, shifting from foot to foot on either side of the cottage door and looking slightly out of their depth, and a pair of pissed-off robins bouncing around the eaves making outraged noises.