I hang up. ‘See?’ I say to Steve.
‘That was gorgeous. If you’d put in a kiss at the end, it would’ve been perfect.’
‘Funny guy.’ I want to get going. The bare trees feel lower, closer, like while I was focusing on Breslin they grabbed their chance to move in around us. ‘Let’s find out what kind of crap floaters they’ve dumped on us.’
Steve is already dialling. Bernadette the admin gives him numbers for our floaters – six of them: O’Kelly pulled out all the stops there. A couple of them are good guys, useful; at least one isn’t. If we want more, we’re gonna have to fill out requests in triplicate, explain why we can’t do our own dirty work, and generally sit up and beg like a pair of poodles.
Later on we’ll have the first case meeting: me and Steve and Breslin and all the floaters in the incident room, everyone taking notes while I give a rundown of the case and we assign jobs. There’s stuff that needs doing fast, though, no time to wait. Steve sends two of our lucky floaters to do a preliminary door-to-door on Viking Gardens, find out what everyone knows about Aislinn Murray and what they saw and heard last night, and another two to pull all the local CCTV footage they can get, before anyone records over it. Meanwhile I send the last two off to get Rory Fallon’s address, find out if he’s home, sit on the house if he is, track him if he goes anywhere, and try to be discreet about the whole thing. They could just bring him in straightaway, but my plans don’t include Breslin spotting him in the corridors and deciding to do me and Steve a favour by getting a confession before we even make it back to the squad. Breslin rings me back; I let it go to voicemail.
The chewed-up night-shift look on Steve gives me some idea what I look like, so before we head for Lucy Riordan’s place we do a fast reboot: brush wrinkles out of our jackets and night-food crumbs off our shirts, Steve combs his hair, I take down what’s left of my bun and pull it back smooth and tight again. I don’t do makeup on the job, but the slice of me in the rear-view mirror seems decent enough. On a good day I look good, and on a bad day you’d still notice me. I take after my da, or I assume I do: I got the height from my ma, but not the thick shiny black hair, or the cheekbones, or the skin that’s never gonna need fake tan. I wear good suits, stuff that’s cut right and works with my shape – long and strong – and anyone who thinks I should be schlepping around in a sack to protect him from his own bad thoughts can fuck himself. The stuff people think I should try to hide – being tall, being a woman, being half whatever – is the stuff I keep up front and in their faces. If they can’t handle it, I can use that.
‘Yeah?’ Steve says, pointing at himself.
He looks like his mammy spit-shined him for Mass, but he plays that up on purpose. You use what you’ve got, and what Steve’s got is that your parents would be delighted if you brought him home. ‘Have to do,’ I say, readjusting the mirror. ‘Let’s go.’
I hit the pedal hard and let the Kadett pretend it’s a real car while it gets us out of there. I get a sudden nasty feeling like the trees behind us have snapped together and come down, with a silent roar and a smash of branches, onto the spot where we were parked.
Lucy Riordan lives in one of those tall old terraced houses split into flats. A lot of those are shitholes, but hers looks OK: the front garden’s been weeded, the window-frames have been painted in the last decade, and there are six bells by the door instead of a dozen, meaning the landlord isn’t jamming people into nine-foot-square bedsits and making them all share a jacks.
It takes two rings before Lucy answers the intercom, in a voice coated with sleep. ‘’Lo?’
Steve says, ‘Lucy Riordan?’
‘Who’s this?’
‘Detective Garda Stephen Moran. Could we have a word?’
A long second. Then Lucy says, and the sleep’s fallen off her voice, ‘I’ll be down in a minute.’
She opens the door fast and wide awake. She’s short and fit, the kind of fit you get from life, not from the gym – she wears it like it’s owned, not rented. Cropped platinum hair with a long sweep of fringe falling in her face – pale face with clean quick features, smudges of last night’s mascara. She’s wearing a black hoodie, paint-splashed black combats, nothing on her feet, a lot of silver ear jewellery and what looks to me like a fair-sized hangover. She has bugger-all in common with Aislinn Murray, or with what I was expecting.
We have our IDs out and ready. ‘I’m Detective Garda Stephen Moran,’ Steve says, ‘and this is my partner, Detective Garda Antoinette Conway.’ And he pauses. You always leave a gap there.
Lucy doesn’t even look at the IDs. She says, sharp, ‘Is it Aislinn?’ Which is why you leave the gap: it’s unbelievable what people will spill into it.
Steve says, ‘Could we come in for a few minutes?’
She looks at the IDs then; takes her time checking them out, or making some decision. Then: ‘Yeah,’ she says. ‘OK. Come in.’ And she turns and heads up the stairs.
Her flat is on the first floor and I was right, it’s decent: a small sitting room with a kitchenette to one side and two doors leading off the others, for the bedroom and the jacks. She had people over last night – empty cans on the coffee table and under it, thick layer of smoke in the air – but even before that, this place was nothing like Aislinn’s. The curtains are made out of old postcards sewn together with twine, the furniture is a banged-up wooden coffee table and a couple of lopsided sofas covered in Mexican-looking woven throws, and there are four 1970s phones and a stuffed fox on top of a coil of cable beside the telly. Nobody ordered this place through an app.
Me and Steve go for the sofa with its back to the high sash window, leaving Lucy with the limp excuse for daylight hitting her face. I get out my notebook, but I sit forward, letting Steve know that I’m not gonna be sitting this one out altogether. O’Kelly was full of shite, Steve is great with witnesses – not as flashy with it as Breslin, but he can make just about anyone believe he’s on their side – but I used to be pretty good too, not all that long ago, and Lucy doesn’t seem like she’s gonna piss me off. This girl is no idiot.
‘Anyone else home?’ Steve asks. After this conversation, Lucy is going to want backup.