You come into an interview carrying a ten-pound stack of papers, so the suspect thinks you’ve got that much against him. You stick a videotape on top, so he’ll think you’ve got video evidence. You flip through the papers, put your finger down and start to say something, catch yourself – Nah, we’ll save that for later – and move on, leaving him to fret about what you’re saving. You pull out a voice recorder – My handwriting’s only terrible, mind if I use this instead? – so that later, when you turn it off and lean in confidentially, he’ll think you’re off the record; he’ll forget all about the interview-room recorders, whirring away. You read imaginary texts on your phone and swap cryptic comments (Happy days, the searchers got lucky) with your partner. You do the fake lie-detector test with an app these days: give the guy some bollix about electromagnetic fields and have him press his thumb on your phone screen after each question, and when you get to the one where he’s lying, you shift a finger and it flashes red graphs and LIE LIE LIE. You tell him the live victim is dead and can’t contradict him, or the dead one is alive and talking. You tell him you can’t let him leave till the two of you work this out, but if he’ll just tell you what happened, he can be home on his sofa with a nice cup of tea in time for Downton Abbey. You tell him it wasn’t his fault, you tell him the vic was asking for it, you tell him anyone would’ve done the same thing. You tell him witnesses heard him talk about how he loved kiddie porn, you tell him the pathologist says he rode the dead body till it started falling apart, you pummel him with the sickest shite you can come up with until he can’t stop himself from shouting at you that that’s all bollix, that wasn’t the way it went; and then you lift one eyebrow and say Yeah, right, then how did it go? and you listen while he tells you.

All our weapons are useless this time. McCann’s known the feel of them by heart, he’s had them shaped to his hands by wear, since long before we ever laid eyes on them. We’re going in bare.

I say, ‘We talk to him. That’s all we can do.’

‘He won’t talk back.’

‘He wants to tell us his story. They all do. Deep down, he wants us to know that him and Aislinn, that was true love, and whatever she was playing at with Rory was a load of shite that was begging for a punch. So let’s see how much of that we can get him to tell us.’