Sophie slurps something. ‘I’ll forward you the stuff as soon as I get in the car. Basically, it’s a couple of dozen photos of Post-it notes with numbers and letters on them, plus one photo of a piece of paper with what looks like a kiddie fairy tale. I don’t know what you were hoping for, but this better be worth screwing up my day.’

‘I can’t tell till I see it,’ I say, ‘but it’s gotta be worth something if she bothered hiding it, right? Thanks a million, Sophie. Forward me the stuff – throw in the dates and times when the pics were taken, if you’ve got time. I promise to tell you it’s cracked the case wide open.’

‘You better. I have to go because I can’t find my other boot and I’m about to start smashing shit. See you ’round.’ And she hangs up.

I check the Courier online, in case I need to block out some time to go break Crowley’s face, but there’s nothing there about my personal life. Apparently even an arrogant fuck like last night’s knows when to back away. There’s another vomit-blast of Aislinn stuff – Crowley’s tracked down some old classmate to make generic sobbing noises about what a lovely girl Aislinn was; Lucy, good woman, must have told him to get stuffed. And there’s a sidebar of unsolved murders from the last couple of years – for a second I think The gaffer’s gonna love that, before I remember that by the end of the day this article is gonna be the least of O’Kelly’s problems. I can’t even start imagining what he’ll think of me by then. It bugs me that that even occurs to me. O’Kelly’s opinion isn’t gonna play a big role in my future, but some base-of-the-skull part of my brain hasn’t caught up with that yet.