I flip to a clean page and ring Sophie. It’s just gone half-eight, but she picks up on the second ring. ‘Hey. I was going to ring you as soon as I got to work.’
‘Hey,’ I say. ‘Does that mean you’ve got something?’
‘It means you’re on my shit list.’ She’s chewing and moving at the same time: breakfast standing up, while she throws her stuff together. Sophie’s running late. ‘Four o’clock this morning, my phone starts going apeshit: texts, e-mails, more texts, all from my computer guy. When I ignored them, because I’m normal, he started ringing me. The guy’s great at his job, but when it comes to being a human, he’s a total fucking incompetent. I finally had to turn off the phone. And so obviously the bloody alarm didn’t go off, and I woke up like ten seconds ago.’ Bang of a cupboard door.
‘Ah, shite,’ I say. ‘Sorry. Want to give me the computer guy’s number and I’ll ring him every half-hour for a week or two?’
That gets a snort of laughter out of Sophie. ‘If I thought he’d even notice, I’d say yeah. Listen, though: he got into your vic’s double-super-secret pics folder. That’s what he was doing till stupid o’clock. You were right: the password was “missingmymissingdaddy”, with a few substitutions thrown in for kicks.’
The shot of disgust catches me by surprise. It’s the first thing I’ve felt all day. ‘Brilliant,’ I say. ‘I love it when they’re predictable. What’s in there?’
Sophie slurps something. ‘I’ll forward you the stuff as soon as I get in the car. Basically, it’s a couple of dozen photos of Post-it notes with numbers and letters on them, plus one photo of a piece of paper with what looks like a kiddie fairy tale. I don’t know what you were hoping for, but this better be worth screwing up my day.’
‘I can’t tell till I see it,’ I say, ‘but it’s gotta be worth something if she bothered hiding it, right? Thanks a million, Sophie. Forward me the stuff – throw in the dates and times when the pics were taken, if you’ve got time. I promise to tell you it’s cracked the case wide open.’
‘You better. I have to go because I can’t find my other boot and I’m about to start smashing shit. See you ’round.’ And she hangs up.
I check the Courier online, in case I need to block out some time to go break Crowley’s face, but there’s nothing there about my personal life. Apparently even an arrogant fuck like last night’s knows when to back away. There’s another vomit-blast of Aislinn stuff – Crowley’s tracked down some old classmate to make generic sobbing noises about what a lovely girl Aislinn was; Lucy, good woman, must have told him to get stuffed. And there’s a sidebar of unsolved murders from the last couple of years – for a second I think The gaffer’s gonna love that, before I remember that by the end of the day this article is gonna be the least of O’Kelly’s problems. I can’t even start imagining what he’ll think of me by then. It bugs me that that even occurs to me. O’Kelly’s opinion isn’t gonna play a big role in my future, but some base-of-the-skull part of my brain hasn’t caught up with that yet.
Just for kicks, I experiment with wondering what last night’s smug fucker will think when – if – he sees my name at the heart of the story on every front page. I try it delicately at first, like biting down on a broken tooth you’ve been avoiding for a long time. It takes me a minute to figure out I’m feeling nothing. I bite harder, wonder whether he’ll be proud of me for taking down the bad guy, impressed with all the work I put into it, disappointed at what this’ll do to my career, disgusted with me for ratting out my own: turns out I don’t care. I go meta, try to resent that he left it too late even to let me have a reaction: nothing. All I feel is stupid, for wasting brain space on this shite. When I ring my ma this evening, I’m gonna dig up some old rubber-hamster story from Missing Persons, make her laugh, and say not one word about last night.
Steve comes through the park gate talking into his phone and looking around for me – the nannies give him the once-over, then go back to their conversation when they see me lifting a hand to him. He drops onto the bench beside me, shoving his phone into his pocket.
‘Story?’ I say.
‘I left a message for my guy at the mobile company, the one who’s tracking down full records on the phone that called in the attack to Stoneybatter. I’m hoping there’s something on there to help us prove it’s Breslin’s phone. We should be so lucky, but . . .’ The corner of his mouth twists down. ‘Any news?’
‘Sophie’s guy got into Aislinn’s password-protected folder. She says it’s mostly numbers on Post-its; she’s gonna e-mail me the pics now.’
Steve’s face crunches into a quick grimace. ‘Ah, shite. Shite. We needed that to be something good.’
‘It still could be. Who’s the pessimist now?’
‘’Cause Rory’s ID . . . it won’t be worth a lot. Any defence barrister’s going to say Rory had passed McCann in the corridor at HQ, on his way in or out, so he knew his face from there and got mixed up.’
‘Yep,’ I say. ‘Or he didn’t just get mixed up: he was frantically trying to invent a fall guy, so he pictured someone he’d seen recently, to make the description sound realistic.’
‘Yeah.’ Steve hasn’t moved since he sat down, not even to resettle his arse on the damp bench. He’s concentrating hard. ‘We need to try for a voice ID, off the uniform who took the call.’
‘While you’re with Breslin this morning, see if you can get a voice sample. Just record a minute of the conversation on your phone. Then send it to me, if you can’t get away from him, and I’ll take it down to Stoneybatter.’
He nods. My phone beeps. ‘Here we go,’ I say, pulling it out. ‘Keep your fingers crossed.’
‘They are. Believe me.’
The e-mail says Here, and a list of dates and times. It has twenty-nine pics attached. I swipe through them: yellow Post-it, 8W inside a circle. Post-it, 1030 inside a circle. Post-it, 7 inside a circle, in the background a sliver of purple that looks like Aislinn’s sitting-room curtains. Post-it, 7Th inside a circle, chunk of a thumb in one corner.
I say, ‘Times and days.’
‘Looks like.’
‘Remember we were wondering how the secret boyfriend could’ve made appointments with Aislinn?’
Steve flicks the edge of my phone with one fingernail. ‘Low-tech. The safest way.’
‘And we didn’t find any of these in the search of her gaff.’ I keep swiping: 11, 6M, 745. ‘When Breslin knows he’s got some free time coming up, he sticks a note through Aislinn’s letterbox, letting her know what time she needs to be ready and waiting in her good lingerie. Then, when he gets there, he takes the note back and destroys it. Just like we said: he’s careful.’
Steve reaches over and enlarges the 745 on my screen. ‘You figure that matches Breslin’s writing?’
‘Hard to tell. There’s nothing that clashes, anyway. And I’ve seen him write times like that, without the full stop.’
‘Plenty of cops do that.’
‘Yeah, but not a lot of civilians. That might narrow it down.’