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‘I’m really, really sorry to have upset you and your baby like this,’ she said to the young mother. ‘My name is Detective Superintendent Maguire and I’m in charge of this operation, so if you want to blame anybody you can blame me.’

‘But you’ve no right! You can’t just burst in on people like this and break down their doors!’

‘I’m afraid we can. We have a warrant for forcible entry. It’s that Nigerian woman we’re after.’

‘Why? What’s
she
done? She’s been staying in the top flat, not with me.’

‘She could be very dangerous,’ said Katie. ‘Haven’t you seen the TV news at all? She’s a suspect in four cases of homicide.’

‘My TV’s broke. My ex said he was going to fix me up with a new one, but he never keeps his word.’

‘Well, we believe that she’s already killed four people and she intends to kill more. She carries at least one gun that we know about and we know that she won’t hesitate to use it.’

The young mother had been patting and rocking the baby and it was beginning to calm down now. ‘She only moved in here a couple of weeks ago. She used to smile and say hello but I never saw much of her. I wouldn’t have minded having a chat, you know, because I’m stuck here all day with little Miley and I hardly ever get to speak to nobody. What am I going to do about my door? My landlord’s going to go mental.’

‘Don’t worry about your door, we’ll get it mended for you tomorrow. Or today, now. Did she ever have any visitors, this black woman?’

The young mother shook her head. ‘I never saw anybody go up there apart from her.’

Detectives O’Donovan and Horgan had been up into the attic and now they came to the door. ‘Looks like she’s done a runner, ma’am. Nothing left up there except for a few tins of food and some towels.’

‘Well, I won’t be sorry if she’s gone,’ said the young mother. ‘There was always such a smoky smell when she was cooking. African food, I suppose it was.’

Katie went up the steep, narrow stairs to the attic. It had two dormer windows, one overlooking the street and the other at the back, overlooking the loading dock and the river. At one end there was an unmade sofa-bed with a bunched-up duvet on it. In the middle stood two armchairs, one upholstered in mustard yellow and the other in grubby red, with a teak coffee table in between them. At the far end there was a kitchenette, with a counter made of chipboard, a small stainless-steel sink and an oven.

The walls and the sloping ceilings were papered with hunting scenes, with large brown damp patches in between them.

Detective Sergeant ó Nuallán came up, too, and looked around. ‘Looks like she’s definitely gone. Think she might have given up on Michael Gerrety?’

Katie was looking at the tins of food that had been left underneath the kitchen counter. Locust beans, cassava, crabmeat. There was also a large bottle of palm oil, three-quarters empty, and a brown paper bag of wood chips.

She opened the oven door. It smelled strongly of smoke and inside it she found a baking tray with a wire rack in it and a layer of wood chips on the bottom. Katie picked some up and sniffed them. They were damp and very pungent.

‘What do you think she’s been cooking with these?’ she asked Detective Sergeant ó Nuallán.

‘She’s been smoking spare ribs or something, probably. That’s how you do it if you don’t have a barbecue and you want to do it indoors. You soak the wood chips with water and then you just cook your meat very slowly.’

They looked carefully around the attic. There was a battered chest of drawers in one corner, but all of the drawers were empty except for two AA batteries and a reel of red cotton.

‘I don’t think she’s given up on Gerrety,’ said Katie. ‘If she was driven enough to do what she did to those other four men, she’s going to make sure that she gets him.’

‘But we have him under guard now. She won’t be able to get near him.’

‘More’s the pity.’

Detective Sergeant ó Nuallán looked at Katie narrowly. ‘You’ll get him one day. Just wait and see.’

She was back home by 5.55 a.m. John was still asleep and she was tempted to climb back into bed with him, but she was afraid that she would fall asleep herself and she had too much to do. As soon as she got into the station she would have to prepare a full report for Acting Chief Superintendent Molloy, and also brief the media.

The sun was shining so she took Barney out for an early walk along by the river. She felt light-headed with tiredness but she couldn’t stop thinking about Obioma and what she was going to do now. She wouldn’t be able to get into The Elysian Tower to attack Michael Gerrety at home, and he would almost certainly make sure that he had bodyguards with him whenever he went out.

It was possible, however, that Obioma was very patient. She was trained in guerrilla tactics and she could be prepared to wait for days or weeks or even months before she went for him. They couldn’t keep guards outside The Elysian indefinitely. The budget wouldn’t run to it, and apart from that the media would start asking awkward questions about what they were doing there. Why should they be protecting a man like Michael Gerrety when the ordinary citizens of Cork needed protection against housebreaking and mugging and drunken misbehaviour in the streets?

She returned home and put on the kettle to make herself a cup of coffee. John appeared from the bedroom, bare-chested, scratching and yawning. She put her arms around him and held him close.

‘I love you, you know,’ she told him. ‘I’m sorry I’ve been so tied up lately. It won’t always be like this, I promise.’

John stroked her hair. ‘You smell of fresh air,’ he said. ‘You smell of Ireland.’

She looked up at him. ‘Are you still wanting to go back to America?’

He shrugged. ‘Let’s see how the job goes. It wasn’t exactly an ideal first day, but I’m sure I’ll find my feet. You know what it’s like being a newbie. Everybody resents you, especially if you tell them that they’re stuck in the Stone Age.’

‘You didn’t say that, did you?’

‘Not in those words. But I implied it. Because they are.’

‘Oh, John,’ she said, and kissed his chest. She didn’t say, ‘Please make this work, for my sake.’ She knew that it had to work for him, and him alone.

Almost the whole of the next day was taken up with paperwork. Just before lunchtime, Katie had completed her file on last night’s forcible entry into the house on Lower Glanmire Road, and she took it in to Acting Chief Superintendent Molloy.

He flicked through it, and sniffed, and then he said, ‘I’d also appreciate up-to-date reports on all your ongoing cases.’

‘
All
of them? Serious? That’s going to take a few days.’

‘The thing of it is, Katie, I need to know that our manpower and our finances are being deployed in the most efficient way possible. I’ve already started to go through Dermot O’Driscoll’s files and I’m sorry to say that I’m less than impressed. Far too much wastage and inefficiency. I need to assess which current cases of yours are worth pursuing and which ones we could drop. There’s a few that I’ve earmarked already.’

‘For instance?’ asked Katie.

‘Take this Mayfield Lodge Care Home case. It’s not worth going after a care home for mistreating old folk if those old folk have all passed away and can’t testify against them. The owners have promised to make improvements, so there’s no real point in prosecuting them. Or this alleged bribery by Finbar Construction. It’s a waste of resources to chase a council planning officer for accepting a sweetener from a developer if the development has turned out to everybody’s satisfaction. Society has a way of curing its own ills, Katie. People are prepared to mend their ways if you point out to them what they’ve done wrong. It’s not up to us to be too punctilious.’

‘If society can cure its own ills, Bryan, that pretty much makes us redundant. We might as well pack it in and go home.’

Acting Chief Superintendent Molloy looked up at her with his eyes bulging. ‘Was that supposed to be humorous?’ he said. ‘It’s a truism, isn’t it, that women don’t know how to be funny?’

‘It wasn’t supposed to be humorous, no. But I can tell you a joke if you want me to.’

‘I don’t need any more jokes from you, Katie. The way you’ve been handling these Angel homicides is already a joke. I admit you saved us some media embarrassment by not shooting your suspect when she threatened to kill herself, but you should have shot her the second you saw that she was armed. You said, “Drop it,” didn’t you? When she didn’t, you should have instantly taken her out,
blam
, end of story. Then nobody could have complained.’

He picked up the file that she had just put down on his desk, and then dropped it again.

‘From what Sergeant Mulligan’s told me, you made a right bags of last night, too. Before you go smashing people’s doors down looking for suspects, it’s always worth checking that your suspect is actually inside.’

Katie kept her eyes on his forehead so that she wouldn’t have to look into his eyes. ‘There was every likelihood that she was there, and we had no other way of telling for sure. Besides, she’s armed and dangerous, and when a suspect is armed and dangerous you don’t go politely ringing the front doorbell and asking if they’re home.’

‘All right, let’s leave it like that for now,’ said Acting Chief Superintendent Molloy. ‘Let me have those case updates by Thursday.’

‘I’ll do my best, sir, so long as nothing more important comes up.’

Katie could see that she had irritated him by calling him ‘sir’, but he let it go. She was quite aware, however, that he wouldn’t forget it. He was notorious for bearing grudges, sometimes for years, and she had already annoyed him, on a daily basis, just by being a woman.

Detective Dooley came into the station in mid-afternoon, with his left ankle in plaster and on crutches. Katie gave him a hard time for not informing her immediately what had happened to him when he had fallen off the gate, but then she set him to work preparing reports on all of their current cases.

‘In that shape you can’t go running after bank robbers,’ she told him, dropping a stack of files in front of him. ‘So, here – you might as well make yourself useful.’

Detective Dooley looked at the files and his shoulders sagged.

Just before 5 p.m., John texted her and said, ‘Will u b l8 2nite?’

‘Don’t think so,’ she texted back. ‘All quiet so far.’

‘Gd,’ he replied. ‘We need 2 talk.’

She knew what he was going to say. She had expected it ever since she had let it slip that she had only managed to set up his interview with ErinChem because Aidan Tierney owed her a personal favour. Even if the job had gone well from day one and Alan McLennon had thought his proposal was the berries, John was too proud and too independent to have accepted that he hadn’t been offered the position on his own merits. He had left the family farm to go to America and started his dot.com pharmaceutical business because he had been too proud and too independent to work for his father, so what could she expect from him?

As she drove home, though, she had a feeling that was close to being grief.

It was still warm and sunny, so they sat in the back garden with a drink while Barney sat close to Katie’s chair with his tongue hanging out, panting.

John said, ‘I know I haven’t really given ErinChem much of a chance. The position is perfect for me, and all of ErinChem’s products are excellent. But I know that it’s not going to work out.’

‘You said that they’re backward when it comes to their marketing strategy,’ said Katie. ‘But surely you can modernize their thinking, can’t you, given time? Can’t you give it just a month or two? Then, if you’re still not happy, we can put our heads together and think of something else you can do. Tyco are going to be starting up again in Cork, maybe you could work for them. Or maybe you could set up on your own, like you did in San Francisco.’

John leaned forward so that his basketwork chair creaked and held her hand. She was still wearing the emerald-set ring that he had bought her to celebrate his decision to stay in Ireland. ‘Katie, I’m in love with you, darling, and I know you can’t leave your job. But the problem isn’t with ErinChem. It’s with me.’

‘You feel belittled because I called in a favour to get you the interview.’

‘It’s not that,’ he said. ‘It’s much more profound than that.’

‘It’s us? There’s something wrong with our relationship? I’m never at home, is that it? You know that I have to work unpredictable hours.’

‘It’s not that, either, although of course I’d like to see much more of you. It’s not you, darling. It’s Ireland.’

‘I don’t understand. What do you mean, it’s Ireland? You’re Irish. You were born here. This is your home.’

John shook his head. ‘Once you leave Ireland and make a life for yourself someplace else you always fondly think that you can come back. You remember your pals, and the craic, and the pubs. You can almost smell that damp peaty smell, even when you’re thousands of miles away.

‘But what I’ve found out is, Katie, that you can’t go back. Once you’ve left, you’ve left, and no matter how nostalgic you feel, it can never be the same again. I feel like I’ve come back to the house that I grew up in, but I’ve got my nose pressed against the window and I can see all of my family and my old friends inside, laughing and dancing and having a good time, but I can never go back in to join them.’

Katie blinked, because she didn’t want John to see that she was close to crying. ‘So what are you saying?’ she asked him. ‘You want to go back to America?’

‘I don’t even think that it’s a question of wanting to. I
have
to. That’s where my future is. I just can’t stay here, in my past.’

Katie said nothing for a long time, her head bowed, staring down at the orange brick paving with the groundsel growing up between the cracks and listening intently to the bees that swarmed around the buddleia, and Barney’s endless panting. High above her a plane was scratching its way across the sky. Perhaps by saying nothing and concentrating on the ordinary world around her she could make time come to a stop. But she had known from the beginning that it would come to this. She had never wanted to face it, but now the day had arrived.