The tip line rings; Stanton dives for it, listens, and explains that we don’t think Aislinn Murray was ordering a vodka and diet Coke in a club in Waterford last night, on account of her deadness, but thanks for calling. A couple of the other floaters snort, down at their desks. No one looks up.

‘Whoa,’ Steve says – quietly, but the note in his voice snaps my head up. ‘Here we go.’

I shove my foot off the desk, spin my chair over to his side. ‘Let’s see.’

It’s a report on another of the contacts off Desmond Murray’s phone. The number was a mobile registered to a Vanessa O’Shaughnessy, but it took the Ds a while to track her down. This turned out to be because she had left the country. She had taken a boat to England, on the sixth of February.

‘Oh yeah,’ I say. ‘Bet that got everyone’s attention.’ It definitely gets mine. The ferry to England leaves from Dún Laoghaire.

Steve flips pages: report on Vanessa O’Shaughnessy. We skim fast. She was twenty-eight, a dental nurse, sharing a house in Dublin with a couple of other women. The photo shows a freckly redhead with a wicked, vivid grin – nowhere near the looker Evelyn was, but I’m betting you’d get a lot more crack out of Vanessa. Almost two years before Desmond Murray went missing, she had started ringing or texting him every Sunday afternoon. According to her flatmates, he had brought her to visit her ma, who had Parkinson’s disease and was in a nursing home somewhere in West Dublin with no bus service, and they had agreed to make it a regular gig. The actual texts, once they came in from the phone company, bore that out: Hi des, vanessa here, just checking are you still ok to pick me up at 3? . . . Hi vanessa, yes i’ll be there, see you then.

After a few months, the phone calls and texts started getting more frequent – twice a week, three times, then almost every day. The flatmates said Vanessa’s ma had been getting sicker, so Vanessa had been visiting her more often. There was still nothing incriminating in the texts. Hi, are we still on for tomorrow evening? and Yes please, I’ll be ready at 7. The odd smiley face; nothing more intimate than that.

‘All business,’ Steve says.

‘It would be, either way. The wife knew he had a mobile. And she sounds like the type who’d check it.’

On the second of January, five weeks before Des Murray went missing, Vanessa’s ma died. After the funeral, she told her housemates and her boss that she was ditching her job and moving to England, for a fresh start. On the sixth of February, she was gone and so was Des.