Nothing: just my patio. The white light and the tossing shadows turn it sinister: bare paving stones, high walls, the spreading tracing where an ivy plant used to be and the dark looming up all around. For a second I think I see something move over the back wall, the top of a head bobbing out in the laneway. When I blink, it’s gone.

My heart is going hard. I think of Aislinn: young single woman, cottage in Stoneybatter, rear access via a laneway. Of the intruder who did a legger over her patio wall when he got spotted. I think of that spunkbubble Crowley splashing my photo across his front page, just in case anyone felt like waiting outside Dublin Castle and following me home.

I switch off the patio lights and check my gun. Then I slam my back door open, lunge across the patio, get a toehold on the wall and throw myself up onto the top.

I’m all ready to come face to face with anything from a junkie to Freddy Kruger. Instead I get the narrow laneway, dim in the faint yellow light from the streetlamp out on the road, and empty. Shadows and crisp packets banked along the edges, some kid’s fourth-rate tag scrawled in blue on the wall. I listen: what could be fast footsteps, somewhere out on the road, or could be just the wind bouncing rubbish.

The kick of anger is half letdown – I was starving for that fight – and half at myself for being a moron. Even if this case magically turns out to be some serial killer’s warm-up, tonight he’s at home having some hard-earned R&R, not out looking for high-grade action. The bobbing head in the laneway was either fatigue warping my vision or some drunk having a piss; my motion sensor got tripped by the wind messing with rubbish, or the local half-wild cat on the scrounge.

I go back to my laptop. I sit there with my finger on the button for a long time, listening to the wind move outside my house and keeping one eye on the kitchen for the patio lights, before I hit Send.

Chapter 6

Chapter 6

First thing Monday morning, I get to track down my witness from the scumbagfest, haul him out of bed and coax him into coming in to the squad to give his statement all over again, this time with narky jabs about how he pays my wages – via the dole, somehow – and how I should have more respect than to go wasting his time like this. We both know that if I tell him to shut his face, he’ll develop a bad case of amnesia about Saturday night. Even this little fucker can smell weakness off me. A couple of slaps would sort out his attitude, but I make myself save them for someone who matters.