‘Hey,’ Steve says. ‘Here’s something.’

It takes me a second to remember what he’s on about – I’m so angry I want to bite chunks off my desk. Steve glances up. ‘You OK?’

‘Yeah. What’ve you got? Aislinn’s in the system?’

‘Not her, no. It’s probably nothing, but her address comes up. Twentieth of October last, one o’clock in the morning, her neighbour in Number 24 rang Stoneybatter station. He was out on his patio having a last smoke before bed, and he saw someone go over Aislinn’s back wall, from her patio out into the laneway. The description’s not great – there’s a streetlamp at the end of the laneway, but the neighbour only saw the intruder for a second, from the back. Male, medium build, dark coat, the neighbour thought he might be middle-aged from the way he climbed; he thought fair hair, but that could’ve been the way the light reflected. Stoneybatter sent a couple of lads round to have a look, but by then he was well gone. No signs of an attempted break-in, so they figured the neighbour had disturbed him before he got started. They counselled Aislinn on security measures and dropped the whole thing.’

‘Huh,’ I say. It doesn’t tell me where I’ve seen Aislinn before, but it’s interesting enough to push the missing page to one side of my mind. ‘Anything in there about how she took it? Scared, panicky? Went round to Lucy’s for the night?’

‘Nah. Just, “Resident has a house alarm and locks in place but was advised to consider a monitored alarm system and a dog.” ’

‘Which she didn’t get.’ Roche is trying to earwig; I give him the finger and lower my voice. ‘For a woman on her own, Aislinn was pretty chilled out about the whole intruder thing. She sound to you like someone who had balls that big?’

Steve says, ‘She sounds like someone who knew there was nothing to be scared of.’

I say, ‘Because that wasn’t a burglar; it was the secret boyfriend. Will you look at that. Maybe he actually did exist.’ That excitement lunges up inside me again. I smack it down. ‘Even if he did, though, that doesn’t let Rory Fallon off the hook. Maybe he found out Aislinn was two-timing him, and he didn’t like it. Let’s go ask him.’

‘One sec, I just want to check one more thing—’ Steve dives back into his computer.

I shove what’s left of my statements into my desk drawer, which locks and which is where they would have been to begin with, if O’Kelly hadn’t caught us on the hop this morning. I stick the key in my trouser pocket. Then I flip through my notebook and try to suss out the squad room from behind it.

No one is obviously watching for me to lose the head, but then they wouldn’t be obvious. Quigley has found his file and is picking his ear while he reads it, which probably means he doesn’t expect anyone to be looking at him, although you never know. Quigley is a turd, O’Gorman is an ape, Roche is the best of both worlds: any of them, or all of them, would think it was hilarious to fuck up my day. McCann looks like he’s in too much pain to think about anything else, and O’Neill has always seemed sound enough, but I can’t rule anyone out.