Lucy lights another smoke. I love nicotine. It puts witnesses back in their comfort zone when things get tricky, it keeps the vic’s friends and family from going to pieces, it means we can make suspects as antsy as we want and then throw them an instant chill pill when we want them calm again. Non-smokers are double the hassle; you have to find other ways to adjust their dials. If it was my call, everyone involved in murders would be on a pack a day. She says, ‘When we started secondary school. So when we were twelve.’

‘You’re from the same place, yeah? Where’s that?’

‘Greystones.’

Just outside Dublin; smallish town, but big enough that Lucy and Aislinn were hanging out together by choice, not because there was no one else. Steve asks, ‘And what was Aislinn like, back then? If you had to describe her in one word, what would you pick?’

Lucy thinks back. That affection warms her face again. ‘Shy. Really shy. I mean, that wasn’t the most important thing about her, not by miles, but back then it covered up practically everything else.’

‘Any particular reason? Or just the way she was?’

‘Partly just the way she was, and being that age. But I think mostly it was because of her mother.’

‘Yeah? What was she like?’ This is what I mean about Steve being good with witnesses. The way he’s leaning forward on the sofa, the tilt of his head, the note in his voice: even I could believe he’s genuinely, personally interested.

‘She was messed up,’ Lucy says. ‘Mrs Murray, not Ash. Like, properly messed up; she should’ve been in therapy, or on medication. Or both.’

Steve nods away. ‘What kind of messed up?’

‘Ash said she used to be fine, back before we knew each other. But when Ash was almost ten, her dad walked out on them.’ Lucy should be relaxing, now that we’ve moved away from the murder and the hash and whatever she’s hiding, but her fingers are still rigid on her smoke and her feet are still braced on the paint-splattered floorboards like she might need to run any minute. ‘They never knew why, exactly. He didn’t say. Just . . . gone.’

‘And that wrecked Mrs Murray’s head.’

‘She never got over it. She just started going downhill and couldn’t stop. Ash said she was ashamed; she felt like it had to have been her fault.’ That twist to Lucy’s mouth again, through her cigarette, but this time the warmth isn’t there. ‘That generation, you know? Everything was the woman’s fault somehow, and if you didn’t get how, then you probably needed to pray harder. So Ash’s mum basically cut herself off. From everyone. She still went to the shops and to Mass, but that was it. So by the time we met, Ash had had two years where she spent most of her life stuck in the house, just her and her mum and the telly – she’s an only child. I never even wanted to go over there because her mum creeped me out so much – you’d hear her crying in her bedroom, or else you’d go into the kitchen and she’d just be standing there staring at a spoon while something went up in smoke on the cooker, and the curtains were always closed in case someone saw her through a window and, I don’t know, thought bad things about her . . . And Aislinn had to live there.’