Four minutes later the door opens and Steve nips out, trying to keep a massive armful of paper under control and close the door behind him without letting it bang. ‘About time,’ I say, catching a page that’s escaping.

‘Let’s get out of here. I’m supposed to be photocopying this shite. If Breslin goes looking for me—’

‘That’s the best you could come up with? Come on, quick—’ We dodge around the corner of the building, laughing at our bold selves like schoolkids mitching, which I suppose is better than thinking too hard about the fact that Incident Room C is supposedly all mine and yet here I am freezing my hole off.

You can see the gardens from our windows, and in the courtyard we might meet Gaffney coming back from Stoneybatter. We head up to the square outside the main Castle buildings, where only tourists go – not that there are any tourists in this weather – and find a corner out of the wind. The buildings feel a hundred feet tall around us; the floodlights strip out colour and texture till they could be made of anything, beaten metal or slick plastic or thin air.

Steve dumps his paper on the ground, with a foot on the pile to stop it blowing away. He’s in his shirtsleeves; he’s gonna freeze. I hold the phone between us, dial and hit speaker.

‘Hey,’ Gary says. ‘You got the stuff, yeah?’

Gary is ten years older than me and perfect for his job. A big chunk of Missing Persons is getting people who stay far from cops to talk to you – street hookers to tell you about the new girl who matches that teenager on the news, homeless addicts to drop by and mention the guy who tried to sleep on their patch last night and looked a lot like that poster and do they get a reward? Everyone talks to Gary, and he’ll talk to anyone, which is one reason I pointed Aislinn his way. Another big chunk of the job is wrangling the friends and families, and Gary can calm down a room just by walking into it; I once saw him trace an idiot teenage runaway in ten minutes flat, by getting her hysterical idiot best friend to chill out enough to remember the internet boyfriend’s name. He’s a big guy, he looks like he could build a shed if you needed one, and he has the kind of voice – quiet, deep, a touch of countryside – that makes you want to close your eyes and fall asleep to the sound of it. Just hearing that voice winds me down a notch.