Steve chokes halfway through his shot and doubles over, which sets me off again. He spills half of it, and my whiskey is too good to waste, but I don’t care. I feel better than I have in a long time. ‘The state of you,’ I say, whipping the glass off him. ‘You need to learn to hold your drink. Here.’ I hand him his refill and head for the sofa.

‘You genuinely are grand,’ Steve says, turning serious and giving me a proper once-over. ‘Aren’t you?’

‘Told you.’ I lean back into the cushions and take a sip of my booze, tasting it properly this time. I can feel things shifting, in the back corners of my head: a change in the angles of light, weights rebalancing. Maybe tomorrow when I ring my ma, I’ll tell her how I spent my evening. Now that ought to get a reaction.

Steve says, ‘Then . . . ?’ Meaning, Then what am I doing here?

I sit up. I say, and I’ve gone sober too, ‘Something’s after hitting me. About the case.’

That moment, when my vision slid and stuttered and I saw what Aislinn was chasing, in all its miraculous excruciating glow. In that moment I saw what me and Steve should have spotted a good twenty-four hours ago: what Aislinn saw when her chat with Gary sent her Daddy daydream splattering across the floor. When that soothing lifeline voice of Gary’s reached her, in the middle of the wreckage. She saw the obvious next place to look.

Steve takes the other end of the sofa. He balances his glass between his fingers, not drinking, and watches me.

I say, ‘Remember what Gary said, on the phone? He told Aislinn her da was dead, and she went to bits. So he kept talking, to calm her down: went on about how much her da had loved her, how he was obviously a great guy. Does that sound like it’d put her off missing her da? Make her go, Ah, what the hell, I’ll just leave it?’

‘Nah. Someone like her, that’d make her feel like she couldn’t let go; there had to be something there worth finding. That’s what I’ve been saying.’

‘Remember what else Gary said to her? He went on about the guys working the case. How they were good Ds, how thorough they’d been. How if there was anything to find, they’d have found it.’

Steve shakes his head, eyebrows pulling together: And?

‘If I was Aislinn,’ I say. My heart is banging. ‘If I was someone like her. I wouldn’t go off chasing some half-baked gang fantasy for no good reason. I’d go after someone who I knew could give me actual info. I’d go looking for one of those Ds.’

There’s a silence. Faint wind struggles in the chimney.

Steve says, ‘How would you find them?’