The one thing that’s still kicking feebly inside my head: Lucy’s story about Aislinn’s secret boyfriend. That’s where all the gang bollix started, and now that we’ve cleared away the bollix, the story is still there and it still needs explaining. It occurs to me, which it should’ve done two days ago, that there are other reasons why Lucy could’ve been cagey. Maybe the boyfriend is a married guy she works with – Aislinn met Rory through Lucy, after all; if she met someone else too, there’s a decent chance it was the same way – and Lucy doesn’t want drama on the job if he finds out she dobbed him in. Or maybe, just like I thought at first, he never existed. I think about hauling Lucy out of her flat and going at her hard, so she can tell me the boyfriend story was revenge on one of Aislinn’s exes or a way to make sure we didn’t neglect any possibilities, and I can take this whole staggering wheezing sidetrack out back and put it out of its misery.

That’s when Steve’s head jerks up. ‘Antoinette,’ he says. He’s forgotten all about sulking.

‘What?’

He pushes a statement sheet across the desk. His eyebrows are halfway up his forehead.

I look down, where he’s pointing. The statement is one of his photocopies from the day before, an alibi from one of Desmond Murray’s taxi customers. The reporting officer’s signature is a scrawl, but the name typed underneath is Detective Garda Joseph McCann.

My eyes meet Steve’s. He says, very softly, ‘What the hell?’

Ireland is small, the pool of Ds is small, it would be weirder if there wasn’t at least one guy from the Desmond Murray case working Murder now. This explains why Gary was so keen for me to keep my mouth shut, anyway: if I go stirring up trouble, it’s gonna be close to home. Beyond that I can’t tell, through the last few months and the struggling light at the windows, whether this is another handful of nothing or whether it should set all my alarms screaming.

I say, ‘We need to check the rest of what you’ve got from that file. Give me half.’

We flip fast and with one eye on the door. That scrawl is everywhere. If we’d been in less of a rush, we would never have missed it yesterday: McCann, McCann, McCann. He didn’t get drafted in to give a hand with the initial push, like Gary did. He was right at the heart of this case.

Aislinn leaning over my desk, all big eyes and twisting fingers, going on about the detective who had patted her on the head and told her You have great memories of him; we don’t want to change that, do we? Sometimes these things are better left as they are . . . That could have been McCann.

Steve is holding out a thick sheaf of pages, easily a third of what he started with. He says quietly, ‘All of these.’