The incident room is getting on grand without me, which probably should feel like a good thing. The floaters are busy little bees and making sure it shows: Gaffney is scribbling, Meehan’s finishing up a phone call; Kellegher and Reilly are hunched towards their monitors, fast-forwarding through jerky CCTV footage. Stanton and Deasy are somewhere else, presumably at Aislinn’s work. Steve has our boss desk all to himself, he’s turned it into a nest of printouts and Kit Kat bars, and he’s whistling peacefully while he works his way through them. He looks happy.

‘Morning, all,’ I say, throwing my stuff onto my desk. The floaters whip out smiles like they love me. If anyone’s got to any of them – and someone almost definitely has: whatever Breslin’s agenda is, the first thing he would need is at least one floater in his pocket – they’re good at hiding it.

‘Howya,’ Steve says. ‘Sorted?’

‘Yeah.’ I didn’t give him details, just said I wanted some extra from the scumbag witness, and he didn’t ask. ‘Anything I should know?’

‘Sophie e-mailed us some stuff, just now.’ He lifts a page.

‘I was talking to her, yeah.’ I sling my coat over the back of my chair. ‘One of her guys is gonna wangle us Aislinn’s e-mail records. Have you got her phone logs?’

‘Yeah. My guy at Meteor sent them over.’ Steve examines his heaps of paper, pats the right one. ‘Breslin pulled Rory’s; he says there’s nothing that jumps out, no calls to anyone but Aislinn on Saturday night, no call to Stoneybatter station yesterday morning, and no link to Lucy Riordan. He’s working on getting the actual texts, see if there’s anything in there.’

‘Gaffney,’ I say. ‘Any word on the number that called it in?’

Gaffney jumps. ‘Yeah – yes; I’ve done that, yes. I got hold of the number. But it’s unregistered.’

Steve says, ‘I can’t see any reason why Rory would have a spare unregistered mobile. One that didn’t show up in the search of his flat.’

While most of the gang boys have more unregistered phones than they can keep track of. ‘You never know,’ I say. ‘But yeah: it looks like Rory probably wasn’t the one who called it in. We’ll pull full records for the phone, see if those give us some clue who owns it. Moran, can you get onto that?’

Steve nods, writing. Gaffney looks wounded, but that’s tough: if that phone log is full of calls to drug dealers, me and Steve need to know before anyone else does.

‘Meehan,’ I say, ‘you were timing the route Fallon says he took around Stoneybatter. How’d that go?’