That pulls a hard crack of laughter out of me. ‘And then he came in and gave us a lecture about squad loyalty. What a load of bollix. Breslin figured if the pressure around this case got turned up high enough, I’d sign off on Rory Fallon just to get it off my desk. He knew that little cocksucker Crowley would jump on the chance to give me shite, and he shoved me straight under Crowley’s wheels. Gave Crowley the scoop, told him to go all out: hints that I wasn’t up to the job, photos that made me look like a raving lunatic. The bleeding shitehawk.’

‘Sounds about right,’ Steve says. The tight-wound note to his voice means something’s at him, but my mind’s not on that. My Crowley problem didn’t begin on Sunday morning.

‘When were the other calls from that phone to Crowley?’ I ask.

‘There’s just the one call. Eight to other journos, over the last year or so, but just the Sunday-morning one to Crowley.’

Crowley’s magic appearances started last summer, and there’ve been four or five of them since. If Breslin’s been using that phone to run his journos, he’s not the one who’s been running Crowley into my scenes; not until this one. Me sulking at my desk, convinced everything about this case was part of a big dark conspiracy against me. I feel like a gobshite all over again.

‘Here’s the thing,’ Steve says. His voice has tightened another notch. ‘How’d Breslin know we had the case?’

‘Because he’d called it in to Stoneybatter almost two hours earlier. Even allowing for delays, paramedics, uniforms, whatever, it had to be hitting the squad by then.’

‘No. How’d he know it was you and me? Crowley’s a cute hoor; he knows the score. He wouldn’t give serious trouble to O’Neill, say, or Winters, if one of them had pulled the case; he wouldn’t want to burn his bridges with them and all their mates. You and I are the only ones he’d be willing to hassle. Ringing Crowley wouldn’t have done Breslin any good, unless he already knew the case was going to us. And the gaffer only gave it to us just before seven.’

The silence lands hard. Down the line between me and Steve I hear wind, and a faraway kid screaming, and the hiss of emptiness.

‘Maybe Breslin knew we were on night shift,’ I say. ‘He knows the gaffer always throws us the domestics . . .’

I can hear in my own voice how weak it is. Steve says, ‘How’d he know the case wouldn’t come in ten minutes later and go to one of the day shift?’