Which is exactly what I expected. The interviews were good ones; I Cool Girled the exes into opening up about stuff they never planned on spilling. None of it is any use to me.

I walk back to my car through wide cold hush, the sound of wind in long grass building up from farther away than I can see, rolling in across the empty fields, over me and on. Normally it would make me edgy – too much nature gives me the creeps – but at last my head has the wiped-clean clarity I was looking for in my run, this morning. For the first time in days, maybe months, I can think.

I can’t shake the feeling that it’s because I’ve run Steve out of it. Without him at my elbow – tugging and yammering and pointing in every direction, peppering me with bits of babble that might or might not mean something and I have to figure out which – I finally have room to see straight. Under all that, all the maybes and the mirages, there are only two things worth seeing.

Rory Fallon, the sad little wimp. He’s it; all there is to this case. That’s why it keeps spitting up great clots of nothing: because there’s nothing else to find.

And the second thing: this is my last case in Murder. I can outmanoeuvre Breslin and McCann and Roche and the whole foaming mob, for one more day, one more week, one more month; but sooner or later I’m going to put a toe wrong, and they’ll have me. I think of a boxer, ducking and weaving away from every punch, faster and faster, till one blink and bang, blackness.

I’m not going to wait for the knockout, give Breslin or Roche or whoever the chance to do his smirking lap of honour around me. I’m going on my own terms. I’ll finish this case and finish it right, tie Rory Fallon down so tight the best defence barrister in the country couldn’t wriggle him free, go out with my head up. Then I’ll ring my mate with the security firm and ask him if that job is still on the table. And somewhere in there, I’m gonna tell O’Kelly to fuck himself and punch Roche’s teeth in.