In the second before I turn away, to get Steve so we can pretend we’re still partners while we report to the gaffer, the incident room grabs me by the gut. For that second it glows warm and steady from every corner with twenty years’ worth of might-have-beens. Every time I could have walked in there laughing with Steve, every shout of triumph when I could have held up the phone record or the DNA result we’d been waiting for, every thank-you speech I could have made at the end of a big case: all of those rise up to find me, now that they’re unreachable.

I don’t do that shite. I’ve got half a dozen excuses handy – no sleep, no food, pressure, big decision, blah blah blah – but still, that against-nature feeling prickles my skin like nettlerash. ‘Let’s go,’ I say to Steve. ‘The gaffer.’ I head out the door without waiting for him, so we won’t have to walk down the corridor together.

O’Kelly is polishing the dust off his spider plant, with one of those fiddly little cloths that people use to clean their glasses. ‘Conway. Moran,’ he says, barely glancing up. ‘Tell me you’re getting somewhere.’

‘Yeah,’ I say. ‘Looks like we are.’

‘About fucking time. Let’s hear it.’

I give him the rundown. He listens, turning the plant to the light to make sure he gets every angle. ‘Huh,’ he says, when I’m done. ‘And you’re happy enough with that.’

One sideways eye has come up to me. I say, ‘We’ll have another shot at the confession tomorrow. Don’t worry: we won’t send the file to the prosecutors till we’ve got it locked down tight.’

‘I didn’t mean are you happy enough to send the file. I mean are you happy enough that Fallon did it.’

‘Yeah,’ I say. That eye, edged wet and red where the eyelid’s starting to droop like an old man’s. I can’t read him; I can’t make myself care whether or not he’s in on Breslin’s game. ‘He did it.’ I feel Steve’s weight shift beside me, but he says nothing.

The gaffer eyes me for another long moment before he turns back to his plant. He tilts a leaf to examine it, gives one spot an extra dab. ‘I thought you were waiting for something that wasn’t circumstantial.’

Last night, I told him that, back when this case was a wild thing shooting out curls of possibility in every direction. It feels like years ago. ‘That or till we eliminated everything else. We’ve done that.’

‘You have.’

I say, ‘There’s zero reason to think that anyone other than Rory Fallon was involved.’

O’Kelly tests the point of a leaf on the pad of his thumb. ‘All right,’ he says. ‘All right.’