His face turns towards me. Not blank; he’s not trying to pretend the thought’s never crossed his mind. Complicated.

He says, ‘Neither do you.’

‘I don’t have a lot to lose here. You do. And it’s my case.’ It gives me a quick flash of something like pain, the fact that part of me can’t stop thinking like a detective: my case, my responsibility. It’ll wear off, somewhere down the line. ‘You can throw a sickie. Get food poisoning. Go home, come back in a couple of days when the dust’s settled.’

‘We could both still get out of it. Tell Breslin that Rory’s ID’d McCann as being on the scene, and we know McCann’s not involved but we don’t want to fuck him up by letting him get dragged into court as an alternative theory of the crime, so we’re going to back off Rory and mark this one unsolved. Then tell Rory the ID didn’t go anywhere. The gaffer’ll give us a bit of shite for not getting the solve, but Breslin’ll put in a good word for us. Bang: we’re done. Like the whole thing never happened.’

He’s watching me, and his face has that same immobility it took on last night. The scraping light finds crow’s-feet and smile-lines I never noticed before. I can’t tell whether he wants me to say yes; yes, let’s flush this toxic godawful mess and walk away.

He’s right: we could do it. We could even square it with our consciences, near enough. Like he said, we’ll get a conviction around the same time we get a Lotto win. Even if we do, justice does nothing for the dead; nothing we do will make any difference to Aislinn. There’s no family needing answers, not this time. And it’s not like McCann and Breslin are going to turn into a rampaging serial-killer team if we don’t take them down; they’ll go back to being who they always were, and Breslin will go back to keeping it in his pants. No harm done, all round.

Except that, when you get down to it, I’m right where I thought I was when we figured Breslin and McCann were bent. If I keep my mouth shut, then they’ve put their hands on me and knotted me into someone else, living a whole different life, even if from outside it looks just like the old one. Breslin and McCann will be running me and my every day after all, whether they even wanted to or not.