Steve takes a deep breath and runs a hand down his face. ‘It could be nothing. Right? It could. Breslin was shagging Aislinn, he went down there late Saturday night looking for his hole and found her dead, and he freaked out. Like anyone would. The rest is coincidence and rubbish. It could be.’

‘It could, yeah.’ It isn’t.

‘It could. This is all fairy tale. There’s no solid evidence; it’s all maybe-what-ifs.’

He’s grinning at me, but the grin is a complicated one. Steve knows some, at least, of what’s gone on in my head over the last few hours. He’s here anyway.

‘Yeah yeah yeah,’ I say. It comes out easy, but he’s right, and it catches at me in places I can’t see. ‘Your money’s still on the big bad drugs gang, is it?’

‘Jesus,’ Steve says. The grin is fading. ‘I actually wish that had panned out. Just to keep our lives simple.’

‘Ah, no. If our lives were simple, I’d still be bitching about it, and you’d be bitching about me bitching about it. This is way better.’

He makes a helpless sound somewhere between a laugh and a groan. ‘God. All that shite with the fifty-quid notes . . .’

‘Yeah,’ I say. ‘All that shite.’ All Breslin’s fancy hints that he was on the take: all to give me and Steve a nice dead end to chase. The first day, when I asked the whole squad room who had run Aislinn through the system, McCann must’ve shat a brick. First chance he got, he grabbed Breslin and the two of them came up with something that would account for the check on Aislinn, account for anything else we found that linked her to them, keep us occupied till Breslin could break Rory, and lead us exactly nowhere. Breslin must’ve had fun, muttering darkly into his phone, layering on the obvious fake stories about stopping off for a shag to let us dig out the non-obvious fake story underneath, watching us lick it all up.

And now I know exactly why Breslin threw away his red herring, this morning. It wasn’t because he could tell I was ready to jump. It was because when he got back in from interviewing Rory’s exes, his pocket floater – and if that wasn’t Reilly, I’m gonna find out who it is – told him that me and Steve had had a row and Steve had walked out. Breslin knew I was the one who’d been closer to sold on Rory from the start, he made an educated guess that that had been a big part of the row, and he knew I’d be itching to have the last word on Steve. And to help me do exactly that, he had the CCTV evidence of Rory stalking Aislinn. He dropped the bent-cop bullshit and played hard to that, aiming to get Rory arrested fast and to keep me and Steve apart till the file had gone to the prosecutors.