Just for kicks, I experiment with wondering what last night’s smug fucker will think when – if – he sees my name at the heart of the story on every front page. I try it delicately at first, like biting down on a broken tooth you’ve been avoiding for a long time. It takes me a minute to figure out I’m feeling nothing. I bite harder, wonder whether he’ll be proud of me for taking down the bad guy, impressed with all the work I put into it, disappointed at what this’ll do to my career, disgusted with me for ratting out my own: turns out I don’t care. I go meta, try to resent that he left it too late even to let me have a reaction: nothing. All I feel is stupid, for wasting brain space on this shite. When I ring my ma this evening, I’m gonna dig up some old rubber-hamster story from Missing Persons, make her laugh, and say not one word about last night.

Steve comes through the park gate talking into his phone and looking around for me – the nannies give him the once-over, then go back to their conversation when they see me lifting a hand to him. He drops onto the bench beside me, shoving his phone into his pocket.

‘Story?’ I say.

‘I left a message for my guy at the mobile company, the one who’s tracking down full records on the phone that called in the attack to Stoneybatter. I’m hoping there’s something on there to help us prove it’s Breslin’s phone. We should be so lucky, but . . .’ The corner of his mouth twists down. ‘Any news?’

‘Sophie’s guy got into Aislinn’s password-protected folder. She says it’s mostly numbers on Post-its; she’s gonna e-mail me the pics now.’

Steve’s face crunches into a quick grimace. ‘Ah, shite. Shite. We needed that to be something good.’

‘It still could be. Who’s the pessimist now?’

‘’Cause Rory’s ID . . . it won’t be worth a lot. Any defence barrister’s going to say Rory had passed McCann in the corridor at HQ, on his way in or out, so he knew his face from there and got mixed up.’

‘Yep,’ I say. ‘Or he didn’t just get mixed up: he was frantically trying to invent a fall guy, so he pictured someone he’d seen recently, to make the description sound realistic.’

‘Yeah.’ Steve hasn’t moved since he sat down, not even to resettle his arse on the damp bench. He’s concentrating hard. ‘We need to try for a voice ID, off the uniform who took the call.’