The Trespasser

Lucy wants us to know Aislinn, or at least her version of Aislinn; wants it badly. Sometimes we get that: the friends and family want to shove a holy innocent in our faces, so we won’t think this was all the vic’s fault. Usually they do it when they think it was at least partly the vic’s fault. Aislinn shagging a married man might be enough to do t

Our solve rate is up there, whatever O’Kelly says, and more often than not we go for that pint to celebrate. Steve feels like a friend, or something on the edge of it. But we’re still getting the hang of each other; we still have no guarantees.

The other thing Ds are good at, as well as using their own instincts: wrecking other people’s. Suspects don’t make mistakes because they’re morons, or at least not all of them. They make mistakes because we know how to baffle them into it. Someone wants me to make a mistake. And I’m a couple of hundred miles out to sea with all my systems going hay

‘Talk to me, Conway. Are you trying to be super-careful, yeah? Make sure you’ve got all your bases covered? Is that what’s going on?’ It’s not a bad technique – make the other person explain herself, you’ve got her on the back foot right there – but this is what I mean about Breslin not being as smart as he thinks: I just saw him use it on Rory, pl

Lucy lights another smoke. I love nicotine. It puts witnesses back in their comfort zone when things get tricky, it keeps the vic’s friends and family from going to pieces, it means we can make suspects as antsy as we want and then throw them an instant chill pill when we want them calm again. Non-smokers are double the hassle; you have to find oth

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.

myself a sandwich because for obvious reasons I hadn’t had any dinner, and I sat in my flat looking out my window and feeling like the world’s biggest fool, and imagining more and more ridiculous ways that everything might still be all right, and wishing I were the kind of person who could deal with this by going out and getting drunk off my face a

Every investigation nets you plenty of nothing. You need that – it’s the only way you can narrow down your focus – and normally it feels good, slashing the dead ends off your whiteboard, leaving the live stuff to leap out at you big and bold. This time, though, there’s no slashing going on, just little bits of useless nothing splatting onto my desk

You don’t make the Murder squad without having a world-class gift for finding creative ways to get under someone’s skin and wriggle around in there till they’d rip themselves open to get rid of you; without being ready and happy to do it, even if the witness you’re working on is a devastated kid sobbing her heart out for her da. I’m not the excepti