‘Nope.’ A small jerky shrug. Even through everything else, that still stings. ‘Aislinn said sure, OK, she’d drop in a mention of me, make sure Joe thought I was just some sort-of-friend left over from school. But she was only doing it to shut me up. She didn’t think it was important. Like I said: all she could hear was the story in her head. Anything outside that was just . . .’ Lucy makes a yappy-mouth sign with one hand. ‘Just noise. And I should’ve known that.’

‘Aislinn had got herself in deep,’ I say. ‘You did your best.’

She shakes her head like I don’t get it. ‘No. Where I went wrong was, I never thought of this. I knew Aislinn was playing with fire, and I knew Joe was the wrong guy to pull this shite on – someone who thinks he’s got the right to decide whether or not you know where your own father’s gone, how’s he going to react when someone else does the same thing to him? But I never thought of this. I thought maybe when Ash dumped him he might hit her, yeah. But mainly I was worried that he’d decide to fuck up her life. Have her arrested for some bogus reason, land her in jail, make her spend years and thousands of quid fighting made-up charges, then start all over again. That was what I thought, when you guys showed up here on Sunday: that Joe had called round to Aislinn’s, he’d seen Rory there, and he’d found some way to have her arrested for something.’

‘Makes sense,’ I say. ‘That’s what I would’ve worried about, too.’

‘And instead it was this.’ Lucy has her fingers wound in the fringe of the throw, so tight they’ve gone white and lumpy. ‘And now I keep wondering . . . what if I’d said the opposite to Aislinn, that night? If I’d said, “You make sure Joe knows how close we are.” If he’d known that Ash was probably telling me the whole story. Do you think he’d have . . . ? Would he have stopped himself from . . . ?’

It would have made no difference. The split second where McCann decided to throw that punch was too small to fit any calculations. But I need Lucy feeling guilty.

‘No way to tell,’ I say. ‘And no point in beating yourself up over it now. You just do everything you can to help me get him.’

Lucy’s eyes come up to meet mine. She says bluntly, ‘You said the other detectives want you out. Are you going to be around to get him?’

I say, ‘I never have given one solitary fuck what the other detectives want.’

‘Seriously. Because I’m not going to go in there and sign a statement about all this, and maybe have Joe fucking up my life, if it’s not even going to do any good.’