Steve is staring at me. He says, ‘What d’you mean?’
I say, and it takes everything I’ve got to hold my voice down, ‘All this shite is imaginary. Do you seriously not get that? Just about every single thing you’ve said since we got this case has been pulled straight out of your hole. Gangs and affairs and sweet Jesus Christ I don’t even know what—’
‘I’m coming up with theories,’ Steve says. He’s still staring. ‘That’s our job.’
‘Theories, yeah. Not fucking fairy tales.’
‘They’re not—’
‘They are, Moran. That’s all they are. Yeah, sure, all of it’s possible, but there’s not one iota of hard evidence for any of it. Here you are talking my ear off about Aislinn being a fantasist, coming up with stories to make herself feel better about her shite life: you’re doing the same fucking thing.’
Steve is biting down on his lip, shaking his head. I lean in closer, feeling the edge of the desk jam into my ribs, mashing the words into his face. ‘Rory Fallon killed Aislinn Murray because they had some stupid spat and he lost his temper. Breslin and McCann are fucking with me because they want me gone. Desmond Murray has nothing to do with any of it. There’s no thrilling hidden story here, Moran. There’s nothing that’s going to turn you into Sherlock Holmes tracking down the master criminal. You’re a scut-monkey working a shitty little lovers’ tiff, with your shitty squad giving you shite because they’re shiteholes. The end.’
Steve is white around the freckles and breathing hard through his nose. For a second I think he’s going to walk out, but then I realise it’s not humiliation; it’s anger. Steve is furious.
He starts to say something, but I point a finger right in his face. ‘Shut up. And I should’ve known that right from the start – I did know right from the start, only like a fucking fool I let myself get carried away by you and your pretty little story. If there’d been even a sniff of anything good off this case, we’d never have got within a mile of—’
Steve throws himself back in his chair. ‘Ah Jaysus, not this. “Everyone’s out to get me, the world is against me—” ’
‘Don’t you fucking—’
‘It’s like working with an emo teenager. Does nobody understand you, no? Are you going to slam your bedroom door and sulk?’
I can’t work out how he’s managed to live this long, whether he injects bleach into his ear every evening to burn the day out of his head and keep himself innocent. I say, ‘You fucking spoilt little brat.’ That widens Steve’s eyes. ‘All the imagination you’ve got going on, and you just can’t imagine that other people might not have it quite as easy as you.’
‘I know you don’t have it easy. I’m right here, remember? I see it every day. There are people who give you shite. That doesn’t mean that everything that ever happens is just an excuse to throw you to the wolves. You’re not that fucking important.’
We’re forcing our voices into something like calm. From a few yards away, where the floaters are, this would sound like just a routine work discussion. That only makes it more vicious.
‘I get that you want me to be talking bollix, Moran. I get that. It’d make your life a whole lot easier if—’
‘All I want is to stop walking on fucking eggshells. I want to stop turning cartwheels trying to put you in a decent mood, so you won’t bite the head off anyone who comes near us—’
Steve cracking crap jokes when I’m in a fouler, till I give in and throw him the laugh he’s angling for. I thought it was just him liking things to be nice, maybe even him liking me and wanting me to be happy. It hits me like a mouthful of sewer water: he was chivvying me into happy-clappy moods so I wouldn’t kill his chances of buddying up with the lads. And I fell for it, time after time, had a laugh with him and felt better about the world. Steve doing his little dance and his jazz hands; me clapping right along, slack-jawed and grinning.
I say, ‘Now we’re getting somewhere. You’d love to believe you’re trying to save me from myself, but when we get down to it, it’s all about you being in everyone’s good books.’
His head goes back in exasperation. ‘It’s about not making everything ten times harder than it needs to be. For me or for you. Is that so terrible, yeah? Does that make me an awful person?’
‘Don’t do me any favours. You’re aiming for a big group hug and happy ever after, and you might even get them, but we both know it’s not going to happen for me.’
‘No,’ Steve says flatly, ‘it’s not.’ The anger compresses his words into hard chips, slamming down on the desk between us. ‘Because you’re so set on going down in flames, you’d make it happen even if the entire force loved you to bits. You’ll light your own bloody self on fire if you have to. And then you can pat yourself on the back and tell yourself you knew it all along. Congratulations.’
He tries to shove his chair back to his end of the desk, where he can sulk in peace about what a demon bitch I am, but I’m not letting him away with that. I get hold of his wrist, under the edge of the desk. ‘You listen to me,’ I say, barely above a whisper, and I grip hard enough to hurt and have to stop myself gripping harder. Reilly has stopped banging his keyboard and the silence is stuffing my ears, my nose, making it hard to breathe. ‘You arse-licking little fuck. You listen.’
Steve doesn’t flinch or pull away. He stares back at me, eye to eye. Only the line of his mouth says I’m hurting him.
I say, ‘You have no idea how badly I wanted this to be a gang case. You can’t even imagine. Because if it was a gang thing, then that would explain everything that’s been going on. Breslin shoving Rory at us, the gaffer giving us hassle, McCann trying to swipe the old case file, Gary not wanting to be caught anywhere near me: they were trying to protect a bigger investigation, or a bent cop, or the whole lot of them were in the gang’s pocket, I don’t even care. But my mate in Undercover says there’s not a sniff of a gang connection. Nothing.’
Keeping my voice down is hurting my throat, like something swallowed wrong and swelling. ‘Do you get what that means? Breslin and McCann pulled all their crap specifically, deliberately to fuck me up. There’s no other reason. All that bullshit with the roll of fifties and the secret appointments, you really want to know what that was about? Breslin and McCann are no more bent than we are. They wanted me to go chasing after them till I was in too deep to pull back, and then they’d haul me up in front of the gaffer – Look, gaffer, she’s been pulling our financials, she’s been bugging our phones, she’s a lunatic, she’s a danger to the squad . . . Job done: I’d be gone.’ Saying it twists my stomach. I swallowed that shite whole, gobbled it down. ‘And if it’s got that far, if it’s people like Breslin and McCann who I’ve never done anything on, if they’re this serious about getting rid of me, then I’m done, Moran. I’m done. There isn’t a way back. There’s only one way this ends.’