“Mackey-” He was trying to shout, but his voice cracked and came out hoarse and hollow. “What’s in there?”

The bogmonster said snippily, “I’m in charge of this scene. Step back.”

The only thing I wanted in the world was for one of them, I didn’t care which one, to try and hit me. “You couldn’t take charge of your dick with both hands,” I told the uniform, inches from his big soft pudding of a face, and when his eyes fell away from mine I shoved him out of my way and went to meet Mr. Daly.

The second I got through that gate he grabbed my collar and reefed me in hard, chin to chin. I felt a red zip of something like joy. He had more balls than the uniform or he wouldn’t back down for a Mackey, and either one worked for me. “What’s in there? What did you find?”

An old one squealed ecstatically and there were monkey hoots from the hoodies. I said, loud enough that plenty of people could hear me warn him, “You want to get your hands off me, pal.”

“Don’t you, you little bastard, don’t you tell me to-Is that my Rosie in there? Is it?”

“My Rosie, pal. My girl. Mine. I’m telling you one more time: get your hands off me.”

“This is your fault, you dirty little knacker. If she’s in there, it’s because of you.” His forehead was grinding against mine and he was strong enough that my shirt was slicing the back of my neck. The hoodies had started chanting, “Fight! Fight! Fight!”

I got a good grip on his wrist and I was about to break it when I smelled him, his sweat, his breath: a hot, rank, animal smell that I knew by heart. The man was terrified, almost out of his mind. In that second I saw Holly.

All the red went out of my muscles. Something felt like it broke, deep down under my ribs. “Mr. Daly,” I said, as gently as I could manage, “as soon as they know anything, they’ll come and tell you. Until then, you need to go home.”

The uniforms were trying to pull him off me, with a lot of loud bogger noise. Neither of us cared. There were wild white rings around Mr. Daly’s eyes. “Is that my Rosie?”

I got my thumb on the nerve in his wrist and dug in. He gasped and his hands leaped off my collar, but in the second before the sidekick uniform dragged him away he jammed his jaw against mine and hissed in my ear, close as a lover, “Your fault.”

Mrs. Daly came out of somewhere, making shapeless whimpering noises, and launched herself onto him and the sidekick. Mr. Daly slumped and together they hauled him away, back into the gibbering crowd.

For some reason the bogmonster was attached to the back of my jacket. I elbowed him off, hard. Then I leaned back against the railings, readjusted my shirt and massaged my neck. My breath was coming fast.

“You haven’t heard the last of this, sonny,” the bogmonster informed me ominously. He was an unhealthy shade of purple. “I’m telling you now, I’ll be filing a report.”

I said, “Frank Mackey. That’s E-Y. Tell them to put it on the pile.”

The uniform gave an outraged old-maid snort and flounced off to take it out on the rubberneck posse, shouting at them to get back, with plenty of sweeping arm gestures. I caught a glimpse of Mandy with a little girl on her hip and one by the hand, three pairs of round stunned eyes. The Dalys stumbled up the steps of Number 3, holding on to each other, and disappeared inside. Nora leaned against the wall beside the door with a hand pressed over her mouth.

I went back to Number 11, which seemed like as good a place as any. Shay was lighting another cigarette. Kevin looked sick.

“They found something,” he said, “didn’t they?”

The pathologist and the morgue van would be rolling up any minute. “Yeah,” I said. “They did.”

“Is it…?” A long silence. “What is it?”

I found my cigarettes. Shay, in what might have been a gesture of sympathy, held out his lighter. After a while Kevin asked, “Are you OK?”

I said, “I’m just dandy.”

None of us said anything for a long time. Kevin took one of my smokes; the crowd settled down, gradually, and started swapping police-brutality stories and discussing whether Mr. Daly could sue. A few of the conversations were in undertones, and I caught the odd over-the-shoulder glance at me. I stared back without blinking, until there got to be too many of them to keep up with.

“Look out,” Shay said softly, up to the heavy sky. “Old Mackey’s back in town.”

6

Cooper the pathologist, a narky little bollix with a God complex, got there first. He pulled up in his big black Merc, stared severely over the heads of the crowd till the waters parted to let him through, and stalked into the house, fitting on his gloves and leaving the murmurs to boil up louder behind him. A couple of hoodies drifted up around his car, but the bogmonster shouted something unintelligible at them and they sloped away again, without changing expression. The Place felt too full and too focused, buzzing hard, like a riot was just waiting for its moment to kick off.

The morgue guys came next. They got out of their grimy white van and headed into the house with their blue canvas stretcher slung casually between them, and just like that, the crowd changed. The collective lightbulb had switched on: this wasn’t just better entertainment than whatever pseudo-reality show was playing on the telly, this was the real thing, and sooner or later someone was coming out on that stretcher. Their feet stopped shifting and a low hiss ran down the street like a thin breeze, ebbed away to silence. That was when the Murder boys, with their usual impeccable timing, showed up.

One of the many differences between Murder and Undercover is our attitudes to subtlety. Undercovers are even better at it than you think, and when we feel like a giggle we do love watching the Murder boys loving their entrances. These two swung around the corner in an unmarked silver BMW that didn’t need markings, braked hard, left the car at a dramatic angle, slammed their doors in sync-they had probably been practicing- and swaggered off towards Number 16 with the music from Hawaii Five-0 blasting through their heads in full surround sound.

One of them was a ferret-faced blond kid, still perfecting the walk and trying hard to keep up. The other one was my age, with a shiny leather briefcase swinging from one hand, and he wore his swagger like it was part of his El Snazzo suit. The cavalry had arrived, and it was Scorcher Kennedy.

Scorcher and I go back to cop college. He was the closest mate I made in training, by which I don’t necessarily mean that we liked each other. Most of the lads came from places I had never heard of and didn’t want to; their main goals, careerwise, were a uniform that didn’t include wellies and a chance to meet girls who weren’t their cousins. Scorcher and I were both Dubs and we both had long-term plans that involved no uniforms at all. We picked each other out on the first day, and spent the next three years trying to wipe the floor with each other at everything from fitness tests through snooker.

Scorcher’s real name is Mick. The nickname was my doing, and personally I think I let him off lightly. He liked winning, our Mick; I’m pretty fond of it myself, but I know how to be subtle. Kennedy had a nasty little habit, when he came top at anything, of pumping his fist in the air and murmuring “Goal!” almost but not quite under his breath. I put up with it for a few weeks and then started taking the piss: You got your bed made, Mikey, is that a goal? Is it a good one, yeah? Is it a real scorcher? Did you put the ball in the back of the net? Did you come in from behind in extra time? I got along with the bog-boys better than he did; pretty soon everyone was calling him Scorcher, not always in a nice way. He wasn’t pleased, but he hid it well. Like I said, I could have done a lot worse, and he knew it. I had been considering “Michelle.”