Lucy says, ‘She Googled them. She found Detective Feeney’s obituary – she only vaguely recognised the photo, but it said he’d spent twenty-three years in Missing Persons, so she knew it had to be him. So that was a dead end. But Detective McCann . . . it took Ash a while to find anything on him, but finally she came up with a news video of him leaving court after some murder case – so she knew he was on the Murder squad now. And him she recognised straightaway. She’d forgotten his name – she just knew it was McSomething – but she remembered him spending a fair bit of time at her house, trying to talk her mum down. And she remembered him patting her on the head and saying, “Sometimes things are better off left. You’ve got great memories of your daddy, don’t you? We wouldn’t want to change that.” Aislinn kept saying, “That has to mean he knows something, doesn’t it? He definitely knew something.” I said maybe, maybe not, maybe he was just trying to make you feel better about them not knowing anything, right? But she wouldn’t let go of it. For weeks, that was all she talked about. Finally I was like, “For fuck’s sake, just track down the guy and ask him.” ’

‘And did she?’

Lucy shakes her head. ‘No. She said if he hadn’t told her back then, why would he tell her now? And it wasn’t like she could force him to – the Missing Persons detectives had told her you couldn’t use the Freedom of Information Act to find out about investigations. So Aislinn decided she’d have to go at him a different way: meet him “by accident”, not tell him who she was, and get him talking.’

I’ve got an eyebrow up. Lucy says, ‘I know, yeah. But Aislinn wasn’t just planning to bounce up to him the next morning and hope he spilled his guts. She was thorough. This was her last chance; she wasn’t going to blow it. She wrote down everything she could remember about Detective McCann – she had this notebook. She hadn’t paid a lot of attention to him, himself, because she didn’t think he mattered; but she used to sit at the bottom of the stairs in the dark, listening in while he and her mother were talking in the sitting room, hoping she’d get some clue to where her dad had gone. So she remembered bits about him. She remembered he was from Drogheda, and he took his tea with just a drop of milk, no sugar.’