‘Scared he was going through her laptop, too, or she wouldn’t have bothered with the password – not on something she wanted found. Sounds like a lovely romance all round.’ I’m checking the dates on the note pics, too, while I’m at it. Ninth of September, 5.51pm. Fifteenth of September, 6.08pm. Eighteenth of September, 6.14pm. Aislinn getting home from work, finding a note, taking a photo, uploading it onto her computer and deleting it off her phone. Planning something.

‘And her reversing the spell on him is her trapping him, somehow. Getting him locked up, maybe?’ Steve has his eyebrows pulled together and his hands clasped on top of his head, thinking it through. ‘The whole Rory thing was Aislinn trying to provoke Breslin into beating the shite out of her, so he’d go to prison, because that was the only way she could think of to get rid of him? Except she didn’t think things would go this far?’

I consider that. It fits with what we know about Aislinn: naïve enough to think an idiot plan like that could actually work, just because it played so nicely in her head; spent such a big chunk of her life trapped by someone else’s demands, she could have panicked when it happened again. ‘It’d explain why Aislinn kept pics of the notes. Evidence of the affair, in case Breslin tried to claim he’d never seen her in his life.’

‘Except why just the notes? Why not, I don’t know, set her phone to voice-record a conversation? Or take photos of him naked in her bed when he crashed out?’

I could’ve gone my whole life without that mental image. The things this job puts you through. ‘Scared he’d catch her at it,’ I say. ‘Or go through her phone before she could upload the file and delete it.’

‘Dammit,’ Steve says. ‘Even one nude pic would’ve been hard evidence. This stuff . . .’ He blows out a breath. ‘Unless Lucy’s got something amazing up her sleeve, we’ll be lucky if we ever have enough for a charge. Never mind a conviction.’

He’s watching the kids put dirt in their hair, with his hands clasped between his knees. The tense hunch of his spine says he’s not happy.

I say, ‘You don’t need to do this.’

It needs saying. Last night, with me and Steve caught up in our adrenaline hurricane from the hunt and the realisation, I took it for granted we were in this together, all the way to the finish line. I think he did too. Today, with Steve dumping doom and gloom into this morning made of flat chilly sky and Deasy’s watchful eyes and leftover rain dripping inside the park hedges, it feels like he should have a chance to change his mind.