The next morning I lie in bed and think about staying there. I didn’t get a lot of sleep; after I rang my ma and told her about Aislinn’s mouthful of blood clots and smashed teeth (‘Huh’), I spent half the night leaping up to investigate random noises – in this weather, there were plenty of those – and the other half trying to lie still and trying to decide who deserves a punch in the gob more, Steve for coming up with the gang theory or me for actually going along with it. By six in the morning my body is one hard knot. I haven’t mitched off since school, but today I can’t remember why not. Two things stop me: if I don’t go to work, I’ll run till my legs give out and then sit at home driving myself mental; and if I don’t go to work, that’s one more day I’ll have to spend on this shitpile of a case.

I get into my running gear without turning on a light. Then I switch off the motion-sensor lights, slip out to my patio and go over the back wall. It’s dark, the flat drained dark that comes before dawn, when even the night things – foxes, bats, drunks and dangers – have finished their business and gone to sleep; even the wind has died down to an uneasy, feeble twitch. I move up the laneway without making a sound and flatten myself in shadows to peer around the corner and down the street. There’s no one hanging around at the top of my road; no one anywhere, in either direction, as far as I can see in the sick yellowish light. I go take a look down my road: no one there either.

Normally my run leaves me feeling like nothing but long muscles streaming with strength, able and beckoning for more, for anything, bring it on. That feeling is what gets me through my shift. Today the strength is nowhere. I’m lurching like a flabby first-timer; my legs drag like they’re wrapped in wet sandbags, my arms flop and my breathing can’t find a rhythm. I push harder, till my chest feels like it’s ripping and a thick red seethes up over my eyes. I hang onto a lamppost, doubled over, waiting for it to clear.

I make it home at a jog – some part of my head tells me that if I drop to a walk, I’m screwed in ways I can’t put my finger on. By the time I get back to my road, my legs have stopped shaking. The first layers of dark are starting to peel away, and windows are lighting up. There’s still no one there.