‘I know.’ Or he could have, on Saturday night. ‘We’ll get onto the phone company and get her records – I’d say Steve’s doing that now. Send me her e-mail account details – cc Steve – and can you talk to her e-mail providers? Get the logs, so we can compare them to what’s actually left on her accounts?’

‘My computer guy’s got friends in high places. I’ll get him onto it as soon as I’ve finished this fucking vase. You should see it: four feet tall, porcelain pug dogs sticking out everywhere, covered in blood spatter. Which actually improves it.’

‘What about my vic’s laptop? Tell me there’s something good on her laptop.’ I’m cold; tasteless instant coffee from the incident-room kettle is starting to sound good.

‘You want interesting evidence, get me an interesting victim. This woman lived a boring life. She spent a lot of time online, but she wasn’t playing in any dodgy corners of the internet, as far as we can tell – my computer guy had a good look through the last couple of months of her history. A lot of time – like, a lot – on travel sites: she was reading up on Australia, India, California, Portugal, Croatia . . . She ran some searches on evening classes in Dublin, looked at arts courses in universities, did a load of shopping for discount designer clothes, read all the coverage on a couple of gangland trials. Desperate for thrills; fuck knows she wasn’t getting them anywhere else.’

Which is what I thought when I found Aislinn’s little true-crime library. I’ve forgotten all about coffee. ‘Right,’ I say, keeping that out of my voice. ‘Can you remember what cases?’

‘Francie Hannon, and Whatsisname with his tongue cut out. I’d forgotten what a field day the papers had with that one. I think it gave some of the reporters an actual hard-on.’

Both those guys were from the same gang, a nasty bunch of northside boys run by a raving psycho called Cueball Lanigan. Both of them were Breslin and McCann’s cases.

‘Sounds like it did the business for our vic, too,’ I say. If Aislinn got mixed up with Cueball’s boys, she got off lightly. ‘Anything else on the laptop?’

More energetic bubble-wrap rustles from Sophie. ‘She read a lot of fan fiction. The sappy kind, not the sexy kind; my guy was sort of disappointed about that. He said he stopped reading after one where Juliet wakes up early, and she and Romeo live happily ever after.’

‘Cute,’ I say. ‘Any dating sites?’

‘Nah.’

‘Message boards?’

‘Nope. And my guy says no one’s been messing with the internet history.’

‘Can you take the search back a bit further? We need her history for at least the last six months. A year would be even better.’