Daytime’s kicked in properly while we were up there. Rathmines is buzzing: students hunting hangover cures, couples making sure the world can see how in love they are, families who are going to enjoy their family time if it kills them all. One look at it drops us both into the morning-after vortex, when your body suddenly realises you’ve been up all night and shuts down the engine, turning you floppy with fatigue.
‘Coffee,’ Steve says. ‘Jesus, I need coffee.’
‘Wimp.’
‘Me? If you shut your eyes, you’ll fall over asleep. Do it. I dare you.’
‘Fuck off.’
‘Coffee. And food.’
I hate wasting my time eating on the job, I can’t wait for them to come up with some nutrition pill I can pop twice a day, but till then me and Steve both need food and plenty of it. ‘Your turn to buy,’ I say. ‘Find somewhere they serve coffee by the litre.’
Steve does it right: skips the shiny hip chai-and-cronut cafés, picks the smallest, scuzziest corner shop, and comes out with massive medical-grade coffees and breakfast rolls stuffed with enough sausages and egg and rashers to see us through most of the day. We take them to a little park off a side street; it’s too cold for that, with a nasty edge to the air like it’s just waiting for the right moment to dump sleet down the backs of our necks, but getting out of the car means at least no one can give us hassle over the radio, and we need to have a conversation that doesn’t belong in a coffee shop.
The park looks just adorable, all curly wrought-iron benches and neatly clipped hedges and flowerbeds waiting for spring, till you look again: used condom twisted in the hedge, blue plastic bag hanging off a railing with something sticking out that I don’t like the look of. The place has a nightlife. In sunshine it would be jammed, but the weather is keeping people wary. On one bench a guy in a Tesco uniform is having a smoke, whipping his head around after each puff like he’s checking no one’s seen him, and a kid is circling grimly on a scooter while his mother bobs a whining buggy and swipes at her phone. The kid is wearing a hat that looks like some kind of dinosaur eating his head.
We find a bench that doesn’t smell like anyone’s pissed on it recently. I turn up my coat collar and get half my coffee down me in one swig. ‘You were right. Talking to Lucy, that was worth doing.’
‘I think so, yeah. It could still be Rory Fallon—’
I give Steve the eyeball. ‘It is. Almost definitely, it is.’
Steve wavers his head noncommittally. He’s unfolding paper napkins to spread over the front of his overcoat – these are attack sandwiches, and Steve takes his work clothes very seriously. ‘Maybe. But the rest of that stuff’s worth knowing, either way.’
I’m feeling better already; the coffee zapped my eyelids open like something out of a cartoon. ‘At least we know why Aislinn’s gaff looked like Working Girl Barbie Playhouse. And why Aislinn looked like Dream Date Barbie. The woman hadn’t got a clue; she was putting together who she was meant to be out of magazines.’
Steve says, ‘Someone like that, she’s vulnerable. Really vulnerable.’
‘No shit. Rory could be a full-on psychopath with more red flags than the Chinese embassy, and as long as he wore the right labels and helped her put her coat on, she’d still have invited him over for dinner on Date Three. Because that’s what you’re supposed to do.’
‘Lucy’s not clueless,’ Steve points out. ‘If he was covered in red flags, she’d’ve spotted them.’
‘Speaking of,’ I say. The breakfast roll is good stuff, proper thick rashers, grease and egg yolk going everywhere; I can feel my energy creeping back up. ‘What’d you think of Lucy?’
‘Smart. Scared.’ Steve has finished arranging his bib. He props his coffee cup on the bench and starts peeling back his sandwich wrapper. ‘She’s keeping something back.’
‘She’s keeping back plenty. And that doesn’t make sense. Forget all that hair-splitting crap about old-mates-not-best-mates-no-not-that-kind-of-mates; she cared about Aislinn, a lot. So what the hell? Does she not want the guy caught?’
‘You think she knows more about Aislinn’s married fella than she’s letting on?’
‘I think we’ve only got Lucy’s word for it that this married fella even exists.’ We’re keeping our voices down; Tesco guy and buggy mammy look like they’ve barely noticed we’re here, but you never know. ‘She was dead careful not to give us anything we could disprove, you notice that? No name, no description, no dates, no place where they might’ve met, nothing.’
Steve has his roll opened up across his lap and is carefully decorating it with brown sauce. ‘You figure she made him up on the spot? Why, but?’
I say, ‘She cares way too much whether Rory’s our prime suspect. It’s not just that she wants to know who did this to her mate; she wants to know whether we’re looking at Rory, specifically.’
‘Yeah.’ Steve squirts the last of the brown sauce into his mouth and tosses the packet into a bin by the bench. ‘I couldn’t figure out whether she was hoping it was yes or no, though. She was straight in there giving us Rory’s name, telling us he was due at Aislinn’s last night; but after that . . .’
‘Right. Giving us his name and the appointment was no big deal: she had to know we had that already, or would any minute. And after that, it was all about what a good guy he was, how she never got any kind of threat vibe off him, how happy Aislinn was with him. Could be all true; she could be trying to steer us away from him because she genuinely doesn’t think it’s him, doesn’t want us wasting our time while the real guy gets away. But I’m wondering if her feelings for Rory were as nonexistent as she’s claiming.’
Steve’s eyebrows go up. ‘“I thought he was kind of boring, but Ash was obviously seeing something I missed . . .” ’
‘Yeah, we’ve only got Lucy’s word for that, too. For all we know, she was just as into Rory as Aislinn was. For all we know, she was actually seeing him behind Aislinn’s back.’
‘We just said: she cared about Aislinn. A lot.’
‘And for some reason, she’s not happy admitting that. Could be guilt.’ I get more coffee into me. ‘Like she said herself, that love-triangle shite can go way wrong.’
‘She’s got an alibi,’ Steve points out.
‘Yeah, plus the shock was genuine. Lucy’s not our woman. But her alibi means she can’t give Rory an alibi. So if she wants him off the hook, for whatever reason, the only thing she can do is come up with some mysterious other guy for us to chase.’