Like I said: O’Kelly is a lot sharper than he likes pretending. I smash the expression off my face. ‘Gaffer?’

‘Never mind.’ He stretches out his hand over the bin and opens it. The rubbish falls in with a dry rattle. ‘Go on. I’ll see ye tomorrow. Try and get somewhere.’

Driving chills me out better than almost anything, but this evening it’s not working. The wind is pulling nasty tricks, dying down just long enough to let me relax, then slamming into the car like a shoulder-tackle, throwing gritty rain at the windows. It turns the traffic jumpy, everyone hitting their horns too fast and taking off from red lights too early, and throws off the pedestrians’ timing so they’re skittering between cars at all the wrong moments.

I get pulled over before I even get across the river. I’ve just gunned it through a yellow and at first I figure the uniform is having a twitchy day too, but the spit-take he does when I pull out my ID tells me there’s more going on. He spills straightaway: someone called in my car for dangerous driving, probably DUI. Some driver could have misread a reg number, in the rain and the traffic, except they described the car as well: black ’08 Audi TT. No one misread that.

The uniform wants to run for his life, but I make him breathalyse me and put the whole thing down in writing, before someone rings Creepy Crowley and tells him I used my badge to duck a DUI. I could try tracking down the number that rang the station, but I already know it’ll be unregistered – plenty of cops have burner phones, for one thing and another. I spend the rest of my nice relaxing drive looking over my shoulder for the next blue light. It doesn’t come, which means I get to look forward to meeting it in the morning instead.

At least there’s no one hanging around the top of my road this time, which is something. I unlock my door, switch on the light, drop my satchel, slam the door behind me, and as I turn back into the sitting room the three things hit me one after the other and all faster than a blink. Smell of coffee. Silence where my alarm system should be beeping. Movement, just a brush, in the dark kitchen.

I get my gun out – it feels zero-gravity slow, even though I know I’m going at top speed – and aim it at the kitchen door. I say, ‘Armed Garda. Drop any weapons, keep your hands where I can see them and come out slowly.’