I shook my head. “Keep going.”

“Carmel and her husband took their children home around eight. The others stayed put for a while longer, watching television and talking. Everyone except your mother had a few cans over the course of the evening; general consensus is that the men were a little drunk but definitely not blotto, and Jacinta only had the two. Kevin, Seamus and Jacinta left your parents’ place together, just after eleven. Seamus went upstairs to his flat, and Kevin walked Jacinta down Smith’s Road as far as the corner of New Street, where her car was parked. She offered Kevin a lift, but he said he wanted to walk off the gargle. She assumed his plan was to head back the way they’d come, along Smith’s Road past the entrance to Faithful Place, then cut through the Liberties and along the canal to his flat in Portobello, but obviously she can’t verify that. He watched her into her car, they waved good-bye, and she drove off. The last she saw of him, he was turning back down Smith’s Road. That’s our last confirmed sighting of him alive.”

By seven he had given up and stopped ringing me. I had ignored him thoroughly enough that he hadn’t thought it was worthwhile giving me one more try, before he tried to deal with whatever it was all by his great gormless self. “Only he didn’t go home,” I said.

“Doesn’t look like it. The builders are next door today, so no one came in here till late this morning, when two kids called Jason and Logan Hearne headed in to have a look at the basement, glanced out the landing window and got more than they bargained for. They’re thirteen and twelve, and why they weren’t in school-”

“Personally,” I said, “I’m delighted they weren’t.” With Number 14 and Number 12 empty, nobody would have spotted Kevin from a back window. He could have stayed there for weeks. I’ve seen bodies after that long.

Scorch gave me a quick, apologetic sideways glance; he’d got carried away. “Yeah,” he said. “There is that. Anyway, they legged it out of there and called their mother, who called us and apparently half the neighborhood. Ms. Hearne also recognized the deceased as your brother, so she notified your mother, who made the definitive ID. I’m sorry she had to see that.”

I said, “My ma’s tough.” Behind me, somewhere downstairs, there was a thump, a grunt and a scraping sound as the morgue boys maneuvered their stretcher through the narrow corridors. I didn’t turn around.

“Cooper puts time of death somewhere in the region of midnight, plus or minus a couple of hours either way. Add in your family’s statements, and the fact that your brother was found in the same clothes that they describe him wearing yesterday evening, and I think we can take it that after walking Jacinta to her car, he headed directly back to Faithful Place.”

“And then what? How the fuck did he wind up with his neck broken?”

Scorch took a breath. “For whatever reason,” he said, “your brother came into this house and upstairs to this room. Then, one way or another, he went out the window. If it’s any comfort, Cooper says death was probably pretty near instantaneous.”

Stars were exploding in front of my eyes, like I’d been bashed over the head. I raked a hand through my hair. “No. That doesn’t make sense. Maybe he fell off the garden wall, one of the walls-” For a confused second I was seeing Kev sixteen and limber, vaulting his way across dark gardens in pursuit of Linda Dwyer’s blouse bunnies. “Out of here makes no sense.”

Scorcher shook his head. “The walls on both sides are, what, six feet high-seven, tops? According to Cooper, the injuries say he fell around twenty. And the trajectory was straight down. He went out this window.”

“No. Kevin didn’t like this place. On Saturday I practically had to drag him in by the scruff of his neck, he spent the whole time moaning about rats and heebie-jeebies and the ceilings falling in, and that was in broad daylight, with two of us there. What the hell would he be doing here on his own, in the middle of the night?”

“We’d like to know the same thing. I wondered if he needed a piss before he headed home and came in for a bit of privacy, but then why come all the way up here? He could’ve hung his mickey out the hall-floor window just as easily, if he was aiming to water the garden. I don’t know about you, but when I’m a bit the worse for wear, I don’t take on stairs without a reason.”

That was when I realized that the smudges on the window frame weren’t grime, they were print dust, and that was when it hit me why the sight of Scorcher had given me that nasty feeling. I said, “What are you doing here?”

Scorch’s eyelids flickered. He said, picking his words, “At first we were thinking in terms of an accident. Your brother comes up here, for whatever reason, and then something makes him stick his head out the window-maybe he hears a noise in the back garden, maybe the booze isn’t sitting well and he thinks he’s going to get sick. He leans out, overbalances, doesn’t catch himself in time…”

Something cold hit the back of my throat. I clamped my teeth on it.

“But I did a bit of experimenting, just to see for myself. Hamill, downstairs, the guy at the tape? He’s very near your brother’s height and build. I’ve spent most of the morning making him hang out that window. It doesn’t work, Frank.”

“What are you talking about?”

“On Hamill, that sash comes up to about here.” Scorch put the side of his hand to his ribs. “To get his head under it, he has to bend his knees, and that brings his backside down and keeps his center of gravity well inside the room. We tried it a dozen different ways: same result. It’d be almost impossible for someone Kevin’s size to fall out that window by accident.”

The inside of my mouth felt icy. I said, “Somebody pushed him.”

Scorch hiked up his jacket to shove his hands in his pockets. He said carefully, “We’ve got no signs of a struggle, Frank.”

“What are you saying?”

“If he’d been forced out that window, I’d expect to see scuffle marks on the floor, the window sash smashed away where he went through it, breakage to his fingernails from grabbing at the attacker or the window frame, maybe cuts and bruises where they fought. We haven’t found any of that.”

I said, “You’re trying to tell me Kevin killed himself.”

That made Scorcher look away. He said, “I’m trying to tell you it wasn’t an accident, and there’s nothing that says he was pushed. According to Cooper, every one of his injuries is consistent with the fall. He was a big guy, and from what I’ve gathered, he may have been drunk last night, but he wasn’t legless. He wouldn’t have gone down without a fight.”

I took a breath. “Right,” I said. “Fair enough. You’ve got a point. Come here for a second, though. There’s something I should probably show you.”

I guided him towards the window; he gave me a suspicious look. “What’ve you got?”

“Take a good look at the garden from this angle. Where it meets the base of the house, specifically. You’ll see what I mean.”

He leaned on the sill and craned his neck out under the window sash. “Where?”

I shoved him harder than I meant to. For a split second I thought I wasn’t going to be able to pull him back inside. Deep down, a sliver of me was fucking delighted.

“Jesus Christ!” Scorch leaped back from the window and stared at me, wide-eyed. “Have you lost your fucking mind?”

“No scuffle marks, Scorch. No broken window sash, no broken fingernails, no cuts and bruises. You’re a big guy, you’re stone-cold sober, and you’d have been gone without a squeak. Bye-bye, thank you for playing, Scorcher has left the building.”

“Bloody hell…” He tugged his jacket straight and slapped dust off it, hard. “Not funny, Frank. You scared the shit out of me.”

“Good. Kevin was not the suicidal type, Scorch. You’re going to have to trust me on this one. There’s no way he’d have taken himself out.”