Only half my mind is on him anyway. The day started off strange. It was still dark when I was leaving my gaff, thick cold fog filling the road, rolling it back to its secretive Victorian self: cars faded to smudges, lit windows and streetlamps hanging in the middle of nothing. And a guy at the top of the road, just standing there, on a morning when no sane person would be just standing. He was too far away for me to catch much; just a tall guy, facing my way, with a dark overcoat and a dark trilby and a set to his shoulders that said he wasn’t young. Last night’s adrenaline shot hit me again. I thought of the report on the guy climbing over Aislinn’s wall: medium build, dark coat, the neighbour thought he might be middle-aged . . . By the time I manoeuvred my car out of the parking space and gunned it up the road, he was gone.

What sent something extra through me, what leaves me edgy and watching cars in my rear-view mirror all the way to the car pool and to the scumbag’s place and back to work with him whining in the back seat, was the overcoat. Steve was right, there are a lot of guys who wear dark overcoats. They include just about every D I know.

There are a few reasons why a D could be staking out my road. Some of them are a lot more fun than others.

Just to brighten my day, Creepy Crowley is still trying to pump Aislinn into the story of the year. He’s dug up a couple more photos of her – all post-makeover; Crowley and his readers don’t get into a panting lather over dumpy brunettes in polyester skirt-suits – and a flood of hot-button clichés to pour over them, and he’s got the front page of the Courier all to himself. A fair bit of it is hints about the cops, specifically me, not taking this seriously because we’re too busy protecting the politicians and the elite to care about decent working people. Crowley has somehow got hold of a blurry shot of me back in uniform, policing a protest; the protest was a couple of hundred people rightfully pissed off about an emergency room closing and there was zero aggro, but there I am with a stab vest and a baton, which is all Crowley needs to prove his point. Unless we make the collar soon, the brass are gonna start feeling the pressure, they’re gonna kick the gaffer, and the gaffer is gonna kick me.