One of the reasons I don’t trust O’Kelly is because of his office. It’s full of naff crap – a framed crayon drawing that says world’s best granddad, pissant local golf trophies, a shiny executive toy in case he gets the urge to make clicky noises with swingy balls – and stacks of dusty files that never move. The whole room says he’s some outdated time-server who spends the day practising his golf swing and polishing his nameplate and working out fussy ways to tell if someone’s touched his stash bottle of single malt. If O’Kelly was that, he wouldn’t have been running Murder for coming up on twenty years. The office has to be window dressing, to put people off their guard. And the only people who see it are the squad.

O’Kelly is leaning back in his fancy ergonomic chair, with his arms draped on its arms, like some banana-republic dictator granting an audience. ‘Conway. Moran,’ he says. ‘Tell me about Aislinn Murray.’

Steve holds out the report the way you would wave raw meat at a mean dog. O’Kelly jerks his chin at his desk. ‘Leave that there. I’ll read it later. Now I want to hear it from you.’

He hasn’t told us to sit – which has to be a good sign: this isn’t going to take all night – so we stay standing. ‘We’re still waiting on the post-mortem,’ I say, ‘but Cooper’s preliminary says someone punched her in the face and she hit the back of her head on the fireplace. She was expecting a guy called Rory Fallon over for dinner. He admits he was on the spot at the relevant time, but he says she didn’t answer her door and he hadn’t a clue she was dead till we told him this afternoon.’

‘Huh,’ O’Kelly says. The hard sideways light from his desk lamp throws heavy shadows across his face, turning him one-eyed and unreadable. ‘Do you believe him?’

I shrug. ‘Half and half. Our main theory is she did answer her door, they had some kind of argument and Fallon threw the punch. He could be telling the truth about not knowing she was dead, though.’

‘Got any hard evidence?’

Less than twelve hours in, and I’m taking shit for not having a DNA match. I dig my hands into my jacket pockets so I won’t slap O’Kelly’s stupid spider plant off his desk.