‘Yeah,’ I say. ‘I totally get it.’ Out of nowhere I think of my first morning on Murder. Me in my new suit cut for victory, satchel swinging and shining, my heels on the footpath laying down a fast rhythm on the city swirl of buses and voices as I sliced straight through them heading for the Murder squad room waiting for me, finally, finally all my own. I could have done the walk to the door in ten-foot leaps. That morning I could have pointed at the Castle and made its roofs unfurl in great gold petals and trumpet blasts.

Lucy says, jamming out her cigarette, ‘And then Rory came along.’

I say, ‘Rory wasn’t in the plan, no?’

‘The Plan . . .’ She spreads her hands with a flourish. ‘I’d started thinking of it like that, in capital letters: THE PLAN, da-da-da-dum. No: Rory definitely wasn’t in the plan. Rory was my fault. I dragged Aislinn out to that book launch – and it took some dragging – because I was hoping if she had a night off from sitting at home obsessing over whether Joe would call round, if she went out and had a laugh and a chat about normal stuff with people our age, then she might get some perspective. Realise how mental this whole thing was.’

‘Meet a nice normal guy,’ I say.

‘It never occurred to me that she’d get that far. I was just hoping she’d have a non-insane evening. But one hour with Rory, and Ash was head over heels. She was totally freaked out by it – this was the last thing she was looking for, specially just when she was getting Joe where she wanted him. She couldn’t even believe she’d spent that long talking to Rory. She had this rule about not talking to a guy for too long, in case he thought he was in with a chance – Ash figured that wasn’t fair, when she wasn’t on for a relationship—’

‘You told us the reason she had that rule was because she liked to make guys work for it.’

Lucy shrugs. ‘That was the best I could come up with. I had to tell you she cut off her chat with Rory halfway through the evening, because other people might’ve noticed that; but I wasn’t about to tell you she wasn’t into relationships, or you wouldn’t have gone looking for her secret guy. And I couldn’t exactly go into the whole thing.’

‘Fair enough,’ I say. For someone who doesn’t like coming up with scripts, Lucy’s done a lot of it, the last while. Aislinn got good at sucking people in, all right. ‘So Aislinn didn’t know what to do about Rory?’