Steve says, lower, ‘Or else it was on the QT, but it wasn’t personal. That would fit with the gang thing. Say someone from Organised Crime wants to check her out without his squad knowing about it, for whatever reason, so he gets a mate in Murder to do it for him . . .’

I have trouble seeing a way that one could be harmless. The room feels tricky, twisted: corners warping out of shape, shadows flexing. I say, ‘And the mate’s never gonna tell us about it.’

Steve says, even lower, ‘I know a fella in Computer Crime. He should be able to find out what computer the request came from.’

‘What computer. Not who was using it. If we had individual logins, instead of this one-squad-one-password shite—’

‘You want me to get onto him anyway?’

‘No,’ I say. ‘Not yet.’ Everyone’s gone back to their conversations or their paperwork; no one is even looking at us. All the same, I wish I’d kept my big mouth shut.

The observation room is small and shitty. It has a sticky table, one lopsided chair and a water cooler that’s usually empty. There’s no window and the air vent hasn’t worked in years; if that was an interview room, the solicitors would start bitching about their clients’ right to breathe and it would get fixed pronto, but since no one cares about our breathing, the vent stays banjaxed. The place smells of sweat, years of spilled coffee, aftershave from guys who retired when me and Steve were in training, cigarette smoke from back before the ban. It’s worse in winter, when the heating brings out the full bouquet.

Breslin isn’t there yet. I throw my coat on the back of the chair – I don’t feel like leaving it in the squad room and having to wonder if someone’s wiped his dick on it – and head over to have a look at Rory Fallon. Steve moves in beside me, close enough to the one-way glass that our breath leaves mist.

Fallon looks younger than twenty-nine. He’s on the short side, maybe five eight, and slight with it. I could take him down one-handed, but all this took was one good punch, and even a wimp can get worked up enough for that. He’s got floppy brown hair that just got cut special for his big date, glasses with fake-tortoiseshell frames so old the plastic’s gone cloudy, a cream grandfather shirt tucked neatly into faded jeans, and fine, pointy features that make him look like either a lovely sensitive artiste or a wimp, depending on your perspective. He’s OK-looking, but he’s not what I was expecting Aislinn to go for, any more than Lucy is. I was all ready for a great big chunk of designer-label thicko who worked for an estate agent and couldn’t shut up about rugby. Rory looks like the kind of guy who thinks the good bit of a video game is when you’re exploring the terrain and admiring the state-of-the-art graphics, before you get to the crude part where you have to blow the baddies away.