‘I’ll go see her. Soon as we’re done.’

McCann nods again. He stands up. Stays by the chair, arms hanging at his sides, waiting to be told where to go next.

The gaffer tugs down his jacket, carefully, like he’s got somewhere important to be. He switches off the desk lamp and looks around his office, absently, touching his pockets. His eyes fall on me and Steve like he forgot we were there.

‘Go home,’ he says.

We don’t talk. Down the long silent corridor, the padding of our feet on the carpet like muffled heartbeats. Down the stairs, through the cold draught that fidgets in the stairwell, to the locker room: coats on, satchels on shoulders, locker doors closing. Back upstairs, the smiles and the nods and the few words with Bernadette at reception stuffing tissue packets and throat lozenges into her bag, ready to go home. And outside, to the wide sharp blast of city-smell and cold.

The great courtyard, the floodlights, the civil servants scurrying home. It all looks strange: small stark paper things, far away. A big solve does that to you, leaves the world scoured dawn-white, sand-white, empty except for the solve smooth and heavy as a deep-dived rock in your hand.

Only it’s more than that, this time. The cobblestones feel wrong under my feet, thin skins of stone over bottomless fog. The squad I’ve spent the last two years hating, the mob of sniggering fucktards backstabbing the solo warrior while she gallantly fought her doomed battle: that’s gone, peeled away like a smeared film that was stuck down hard over the real thing. The squad I would’ve chopped off an arm to join, the shining line of ass-kicking superheroes, that went a long time ago. What’s left underneath is smaller than either of those, quieter and more complicated, done in finer detail. Roche, begging for a punch in the gob, which is high on my to-do list. The lads, each of them deep in his own mix of dodgy alibis and messy fibre evidence and the baby’s chickenpox, occasionally glancing up to roll their eyes at Roche’s bullshit or mine. The gaffer – it occurs to me that just maybe the gaffer throws the odd domestic our way, not because they piss me off, but because they have a good clearance rate and he wants our stats solid; or maybe, even simpler, because he knows we’ll work the hell out of them. All of them, and Steve. And me.