He laughs, a ferocious bark, loud enough to startle all three of us. He’s trying too hard. ‘Jaysus fuck. You believed that?’

‘Are you saying you never told Aislinn you loved her?’ Before he can answer: ‘Careful. We’ve got texts from Aislinn to Lucy.’

‘Maybe I did. I’ve got news for you, Conway: when a fella who’s trying to get into your knickers says it’s love, there’s a chance he might be bullshitting you. Or has no fella ever bothered?’

‘According to the texts,’ I say, ‘you and Aislinn saw each other a bunch of times in August, but yous didn’t start doing the do until the beginning of September. If you were only there for the riding, what was that all about?’

McCann shuts down again, takes his time weighing up his options. In the end he says, ‘I liked Aislinn. She was a good girl. Sweet. She was looking for thrills, like I told you, but she wasn’t some vampire type getting off on the guts and gore. She hadn’t had an easy life; her da died when she was only little, her ma had multiple sclerosis, Aislinn was one of those carer kids till the ma died a few years back. There hadn’t been a lot of excitement in her life, so she wanted to hear about mine.’

I’d swear he believes that. I can feel Steve clocking it too: we’ve still got our grenade.

She told Rory the same story: dead da, MS ma. No wonder she skidded away from it so fast. Using it to get McCann where she wanted him was one thing; using it on someone she wanted in her real life, that was something else. But the story was getting stronger, getting away from her. It came out anyway.

‘Me and the wife, we’ve been having a rough patch. It was nice to be around a woman who liked my company; nice to have somewhere peaceful to go, no one giving it all that about what a waste of space I am. Made everything that bit easier. That was what it was about, at first. Just the bit of peace.’

The pull at the corner of his mouth says we don’t need to point out the irony here. I say, ‘Where’d you hang out?’

‘I’d pick Aislinn up somewhere near her place, and we’d go for a drive. It was summer; she’d bring food, we’d take it for a picnic down the country. We’d find somewhere with a view where we could sit and talk.’ McCann’s trying to keep his voice flat, but the longing rises up and he can’t force it back down. He stops talking.

‘Aah,’ I say. ‘Sweet. You never brought the poor girl for an actual meal, no? Or a drink, even? Just had her make you sandwiches and sit on the grass getting ants in her knickers?’