It doesn’t hit me all at once. It comes like the slow cold of an IV crawling up a vein.

Steve, pushing from the start for us to gallop off chasing a nonexistent gang angle that could have cost me the case and turned me into a laughing-stock. Steve, who loves to be liked and is longing to belong in Murder, and who could have both in a heartbeat if only I was out of the way. Steve, in the car on the way to the scene, asking if I was going to take up my mate on the offer of the security job.

Steve, wandering off on his own into Aislinn Murray’s kitchen, where he could have texted Creepy Crowley anything he wanted to.

There are stories about Steve. Small stuff, from years back, but people remember. Way back when we were in training college, I heard things: Steve writing half the essays for some inspector’s kid, brown-nosing for good postings down the line. I put most of it down to the farm boys pouting about being beaten by a Dub one step from a skanger, and I didn’t know Steve well enough to care either way. But then, when we were working that first case together, I heard more. Steve screwing over the lead D on a case so he could put some shiny stuff on his own CV, earn himself a payback favour or two, haul himself out of the floater pool into a squad. The guy who told me had an agenda of his own; I took a chance, ignored him and trusted Steve. I was right, that time.

That time, Steve had plenty to gain by sticking with me. He was looking for a way into Murder, starting to panic he was never going to find one. One day of working together, and I found it for him.

We felt right together, I thought. I liked the way, when one of us knocked down the other’s idea, it always led into a new one, not a dead end. I liked how we were starting to know, without thinking, how to balance each other: what angle the other one would take in an interview, when I needed to ease back and let Steve do the work, when to come in and change the note. I liked the way he called me on my crap, not because his ego was tangled in his undies but because the crap was getting in our way. I liked the laughs. Once or twice – more – I caught myself daydreaming like a sappy teenager about our future together: about someday when we would get the decent cases, the genius plans we’d dream up to trap the cunning psychos, the interrogations that would go down in squad history. Big tough Conway going all misty-eyed; how the lads would have laughed.