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wide bend in the River Bandon. Apart from the roadway ahead of them, flatly illuminated by their headlamps, all they could see now was the black glittering water of the estuary, and a sprinkling of lights from the houses that were perched high on the hills all around them.
    In this landscape – although she had Detective Scanlan with her – Katie suddenly felt a pang of loneliness. When she had first told her father that she was thinking of joining An Garda Siochána, he had taken hold of her hands and said to her, ‘Think on this, Katie. From the moment you become a guard, no matter how many friends you have, no matter who loves you, people will always be wary of you. You’ll have made yourself an outsider, for the rest of your life.’
    They turned down the R604 and arrived at last at the entrance to Sceolan Boarding Kennels. Inspector O’Brien was already sitting in his black Mondeo by the side of the road, along with a uniformed sergeant. Katie flashed her lights and they climbed out to meet her.
    ‘What’s the story, Terry?’ said Katie. ‘I hope we haven’t kept you waiting too long.’
    ‘No bother at all, ma’am,’ said Inspector O’Brien. ‘Gave us a chance to have a much-needed hang sandwidge.’
    Inspector O’Brien was a stubby little bull of a man with very blue eyes and thinning, combed-over hair. Katie thought that if he put on a long striped apron he would look just like a butcher from the English Market.
    ‘This is Detective Scanlan,’ Katie told him. ‘I brought her along because she has a way of persuading women to confess to things that they wouldn’t even tell their best friend.’
    ‘Sounds exactly like my moth,’ said Inspector O’Brien. ‘She knows everybody’s business before they find it out themselves. This here is Sergeant Doherty. It was Sergeant Doherty who talked to Mrs Cassidy this morning, but like I told you, she was very unforthcoming, and pure distressed, so he considered it wiser to terminate the interview and question her later, when she’d had some time to calm down and reflect, like.’
    ‘Very sensible, sergeant,’ said Katie. ‘I gather she has some bruising on her face, too.’
    ‘She does, yes, desperate,’ said Sergeant Doherty. He was tall and stockily built, with a large bony head, and curled-up ears. In his yellow high-viz jacket he looked even more padded than he actually was, as if he wouldn’t be able to run more than a hundred metres before being puffed out. ‘I never got around to asking her how she came by them, all them bruises – whether she was the victim of domestic violence or whether she’d had some kind of an accident in inverted commas. You know – tripped and banged her face on the washing-machine like most of these battered wives do. She gave me the feeling that even if I did ask her, she wouldn’t tell me.’
    ‘Well, I think you did the right thing by cutting the interview short,’ said Katie. ‘She only would have retreated into her shell even more if you’d kept on pressing her. You didn’t warn the Cassidys that we were going to pay them a visit now, did you, inspector?’
    Inspector O’Brien shook his head. ‘No, but I’ve advised Eoin Cassidy that even if he doesn’t get formally charged for shooting your man, we’ll be requiring his co-operation for quite some time to come. We still need to ask him a rake of questions, and the technical experts haven’t yet finished taking prints and fibres from all of the kennels. There’s any amount of wire fencing where somebody’s sweater or jacket could have got snagged.’
    ‘What about identikit pictures?’
    ‘Those, too. I’ve told him that we’ll be using his description of the victim to prepare some 3-D facial approximations – you know, with the ZBrush software, like. I know they’re more generic than your hand-drawn re-creations, but that’s all we can stretch to, at the moment. Bill Phinner has a forensic artist on his team, doesn’t he? But he told me