I never used to be like that. I always figured nerves were for Jane Austen characters and helium-voiced girls who never buy their round; I would no more have turned shaky in a crisis than I would have carried smelling salts around in my reticule. Getting stabbed by the Drug Demon of UCD barely even fazed me. The department shrink spent weeks trying to convince me I was deeply traumatized, but eventually he had to give up, admit I was fine (sort of regretfully; he doesn't get a lot of stabbed cops to play with, I think he was hoping I would have some kind of fancy complex) and let me go back to work.

Embarrassingly, the one that got me wasn't a spectacular mass murder or a hostage crisis gone bad or a nice quiet guy with human organs in his Tupperware. My last case in Murder was such a simple one, so much like dozens of others, nothing to warn us: just a little girl dead on a summer morning, and my partner and me goofing off in the squad room when the call came in. From outside, it even went well. Officially, we got a solve in barely a month, society was saved from the evildoer, it looked all pretty in the media and in the end-of-year stats. There was no dramatic car chase, no shootout, nothing like that; I was the one who came off worst, physically anyway, and all I had was a couple of scratches on my face. They didn't even leave scars. Such a happy ending, all round.

Underneath, though. Operation Vestal: say it to one of the Murder squad, even now, even one of the guys who don't know the whole story, and you'll get that instant look, hands and eyebrows going up meaningfully as he distances himself from the clusterfuck and the collateral damage. In every way that mattered, we lost and we lost big. Some people are little Chernobyls, shimmering with silent, spreading poison: get anywhere near them and every breath you take will wreck you from the inside out. Some cases--ask any cop--are malignant and incurable, devouring everything they touch.

I came out with a variety of symptoms that would have made the shrink bounce up and down in his little leather sandals, except that mercifully it didn't occur to anyone to send me to the shrink for a scratched face. It was your standard-issue trauma stuff--shaking, not eating, sticking to the ceiling every time the doorbell or the phone rang--with a few ornamentations of my own. My coordination went funny; for the first time in my life I was tripping on my own feet, bumping into doorjambs, bonking my head off cupboards. And I stopped dreaming. Before, I had always dreamed in great wild streams of images, pillars of fire spinning across dark mountains, vines exploding through solid brick, deer leaping down Sandymount beach wrapped in ropes of light; afterwards, I got thick black sleep that hit me like a mallet the second my head touched the pillow. Sam--my boyfriend, although that idea still startled me sometimes--said to give it time, it would all wear off. When I told him I wasn't so sure, he nodded peacefully and said that would wear off too. Every now and then Sam got right up my nose.