My ego’s not that weak; it won’t collapse without a daily workout. Out of the car, two coffees to go, even got a smile out of the depressed waitress. ‘There you go,’ I said, sliding into the passenger seat.

Conway took a swig. ‘Tastes like shit.’

‘You picked the place. Lucky they didn’t make it out of beansprouts.’

She almost smiled, clamped it back. ‘They did. Bin it. Both of them; I don’t want that stink in my car.’

The bin was across the road. Out, dodge traffic, bin, dodge traffic, back into the car, starting to see why Conway was still flying solo. She hit the pedal before I had my leg in the door.

‘So,’ she said. A little thawed out, but only a little. ‘You know the case, yeah? The basics?’

‘Yeah.’ Dogs on the street knew the basics.

‘You know we got no one. Grapevine say anything about why?’

The grapevine said plenty. Me, I said, ‘Some cases go that way.’

‘We hit a wall, is why. You know how it works: you’ve got the scene, you’ve got whatever witnesses you can pick up, and you’ve got the victim’s life, and one of those better give you something. They gave us a fuckton of nothing.’ Conway spotted a bike-sized gap in the lane she wanted, manoeuvred us in with a spin of the wheel. ‘Basically, there was no reason anyone would want to kill Chris Harper. He was a good kid, by all accounts. People say that anyway, but this time they might’ve actually meant it. Sixteen, in fourth year at St Colm’s, boarder – he’s from down the road, practically, but his da figured he wouldn’t get the full benefit of the Colm’s experience unless he boarded. Places like that, they’re all about the contacts; make the right friends at Colm’s, and you’ll never have to work for less than a hundred K a year.’ The twist to Conway’s mouth said what she thought about that.

I said, ‘Kids cooped up together, you can get bad situations. Bullying. Nothing like that on the radar, no?’

Over the canal, into Rathmines. ‘Nada. Chris was popular at school, plenty of mates, no enemies. The odd fight, but boys that age, that’s what they do; nothing major, nothing that took us anywhere. No girlfriend, not officially anyway. Three exes – they start young, nowadays – but we’re not talking true love, we’re talking a couple of snogs at the cinema and then everyone moves on; all the breakups were more than a year back and no hard feelings, as far as we could find out. He got on fine with the teachers – they said he got rowdy sometimes, but it was just too much energy, not badness. Average brains, no genius, no idiot; average worker. Got on fine with his parents, the little he saw of them. One sister, a lot younger, got on well with her. We pushed all of them – not because we thought there was anything there; because they were all we’d got. Nothing. Not a sniff of anything.’