‘Yeah. Right over there, in the children’s section. She told me she loved bookshops. Magic, she said, specially small ones like this; you always felt like you might find the one book you’d been looking for all your life, at the back of some shelf . . .’ Rory rubs at the inside corners of his eyes. ‘If Saturday night had gone well, I was going to invite her here next time.’

And she could have helped him alphabetise the feng shui section. Jaysus, the romance. ‘I was going to do a picnic,’ Rory says. ‘On the floor – I was going to move shelves to make room. Explore the second-hand stuff, see if we could find that book she’d been looking for . . .’ Another rub at his eyes, harder. ‘Sorry. I’m babbling. I didn’t get any sleep.’

‘You’re grand,’ Steve says. I take out my notebook and fade back a few steps, between a shelf full of sepia guys running in helmets and a shelf full of laughing women with good hair giving babies adoring looks. The dimness makes them stir and twitch in the corners of my eyes. ‘Could we have the lights on in here?’

‘Oh. Yeah.’ Rory finds a switch by the door, and the lights flicker on. He looks even worse in the light, hunched and red-eyed, like he’s been barricaded in here for years hiding from the zombie apocalypse.

‘Thanks,’ Steve says. ‘Are you doing OK?’

Rory does some kind of movement that could mean anything.

‘We won’t take a lot of your time. I just wanted to ask you about your theory? The dumped guy watching Aislinn, getting upset when he found out she was preparing for dinner with you?’ Rory flinches, remembering the slagging that theory took off me and Breslin. ‘Yesterday, you started to say something about how you had a bit of evidence to back that up. Yeah?’

Rory glances over involuntarily to see if I’m gonna point and laugh again, but I’m all ears. ‘A guy, you said,’ Steve says, moving to catch his attention back. ‘A guy you saw in the street on Saturday night. Yeah?’

‘Yeah. There was a guy. I wasn’t making it up. I saw him.’

Steve nods, leaning against a bookshelf. ‘OK. When was this?’

‘When I was leaving Viking Gardens. When I’d given up on Aislinn. I turned down Astrid Road, towards the main road, and I passed the entrance to the laneway that runs behind Viking Gardens. The laneway where . . .’

That involuntary glance at me again. ‘Where you’d been hanging out to watch Aislinn,’ Steve says matter-of-factly. ‘And?’

‘And there was a man coming out of the laneway. We startled each other – both of us jumped.’

Steve nods. ‘What’d he look like?’

‘Middle-aged. A bit taller than me, but probably shorter than you? He had curly dark hair, going grey. Average build, I suppose.’

McCann, coming from Aislinn’s house.