I flick my coat off the back of my chair and swing it on. The floaters upped their rhythm when we came in; the room is all clicking keys and rustling paper. ‘That was the gaffer getting all up in our grille. What bit did you miss?’

‘Yeah, but why? He’s never given a damn about any of our cases before, unless we weren’t doing the business and he wanted to give us a bollocking.’

I throw my scarf around my neck and tuck the ends in tight: the dark at the window has a condensed look that says it’s cold out there. O’Kelly’s taken the shine off our bright new idea; gangsters and bent cops feel like a gymnast-level stretch, compared to just more people trying to screw me over. ‘Right. And even after the bollockings, I’m still here. Maybe the gaffer figures he needs to up his game.’

‘Or,’ Steve says, quieter. He hasn’t started packing up yet; he’s standing by his desk, one finger tapping an absent tattoo on the edge. ‘If he’s been wondering the same stuff we’ve been wondering, maybe for a while now, but he doesn’t want to say anything till he’s sure . . .’

I say, ‘I’m going home.’

From the outside, my gaff looks a lot like Aislinn Murray’s: a one-storey Victorian terraced cottage, thick-walled and low-ceilinged. It fits me just about right; when I let someone stay over – which isn’t often – I’m twitchy by morning, starting to feel the two of us barging up against the walls. The 1901 census says back then a couple were raising eight kids in it.

Get inside and my place has fuck-all in common with Aislinn’s. I have the original floorboards – sanded them and polished them myself, when I first bought the gaff – and the original fireplace, none of this gas fire and laminate shite; the walls are scraped back to bare brick – I did that myself, too – and whitewashed. The mortgage and my car payments eat enough of my paycheque that my furniture comes from Oxfam and the low end of Ikea, but at least nothing is gingham.