Stephen shrugged. “Yeah. Well. I said I would.”

“Ah. Are we having issues?”

“This feels sleazy.”

“I promise I’ll respect you in the morning.”

He said, “Back in Templemore, they told us the force was our family now. I paid attention to that, you know? I took it seriously.”

“And so you should. It is your family. This is what families do to each other, sunshine. Hadn’t you noticed?”

“No. I hadn’t.”

“Well, lucky old you. A happy childhood is a beautiful thing. This is how the other half lives. What’ve you got for me?”

Stephen bit down on the inside of his cheek. I watched with interest and let him work through the conscience thing all by himself, and finally, of course, rather than grabbing his knapsack and legging it out of Cosmo’s, he leaned over and pulled out a slim green folder. “The post-mortem,” he said, and handed it over.

I flicked through the pages with a thumbnail. Diagrams of Kev’s injuries jumped out at me, organ weights, cerebral contusions, not your ideal coffee-shop reading. “Nicely done,” I said. “And much appreciated. Summarize it for me, thirty seconds or less.”

That startled him. He had probably done family notification before, but not in full technical detail. When I didn’t blink, he said, “Um… OK. He-I mean, the deceased; um, your brother… he fell from a window, head first. There were no defensive injuries or combat injuries, nothing that would point to another person being involved. The fall was approximately twenty feet, onto hard earth. He hit the ground just to one side of the top of his head, around here. The fall fractured his skull, which damaged his brain, and broke his neck, which would have paralyzed his breathing. One or the other killed him. Very quickly.”

Which was exactly what I had asked for, but all the same I almost fell in love with the overgroomed waitress for showing up right at that moment. I ordered coffee and some kind of sandwich. She wrote down the wrong thing twice to prove that she was too good for this job, rolled her eyes at my stupidity and nearly knocked Stephen’s mug into his lap whipping my menu away, but by the time she wiggled off, I had managed to unclench my jaw at least partway. I said, “No surprises there. Got the fingerprint reports?”

Stephen nodded and pulled out another file, thicker. Scorcher had put some serious pressure on the Bureau, to get results this fast. He wanted this case over and done with. I said, “Give me the good parts.”

“The outside of the suitcase was a mess: all that time up the chimney rubbed off most of whatever was there before, and then we’ve got the builders and the family who-your family.” He ducked his head, embarrassed. “There’s still a few prints that match Rose Daly, plus one matching her sister Nora, plus three unknowns-probably from the same hand and made at the same time, going by the position. On the inside, we’ve got more or less the same: lots of Rose on everything that’ll hold prints, lots of Nora all over the Walkman, a couple from Theresa Daly on the inside of the actual case-which makes sense, I mean, it used to be hers-and loads from all the Mackey family, mostly Josephine Mackey. Is that, um, your mother?”

“Yep,” I said. Ma would definitely have been the one to unpack that suitcase. I could hear her: Jim Mackey, you get your great dirty hands out of that yoke, that’s knickers in there, are you some kind of pervert? “Any unknowns?”

“Not inside. We’ve also got, um, a few of your prints on the envelope the tickets were in.”

Even after the last few days, I had just enough room for that to hurt: my prints from that gobsmackingly innocent evening in O’Neill’s, still fresh as yesterday after twenty years hidden in the dark, ready for the Bureau techs to play with. I said, “Yeah, you do. It didn’t occur to me to wear gloves when I bought them. Anything else?”

“That’s it for the suitcase. And it looks like the note was wiped clean. On the second page, the one that was found in 1985, we’ve got Matthew, Theresa and Nora Daly, the three lads who found it and brought it to them, and you. Not one print from Rose. On the first page, the one from Kevin’s pocket, we’ve got nothing. Like, no prints at all. Clean as a whistle.”

“And the window he went out of?”

“Opposite problem: too many prints. The Bureau’s pretty sure we’ve got Kevin’s on the top and bottom sashes, where you’d expect them if he opened the window, and his palm prints on the sill where he leaned out-but they won’t swear to it. There’s too many layers of other prints underneath; the details get lost.”

“Anything else I might want to know about?”

He shook his head. “Nothing that sticks out. Kevin’s prints showed up in a couple of other places-the hall door, the door of the room he fell from-but nowhere you wouldn’t expect. The whole house is covered in unknowns; the Bureau’s still running them. So far a few have popped up guys with minor records, but they’re all local fellas who could have been in there just messing about. Years ago, for all we know.”

“Nicely done,” I said. I squared off the edges of the files and stashed them in my case. “I won’t forget this. Now let’s hear you summarize Detective Kennedy’s theory of what happened.”

Stephen’s eyes followed my hands. “Tell me again how this is ethically OK.”

I said, “It’s ethically OK because it’s done and dusted, kid. Summarize.”

After a second his eyes came up to meet mine. He said, “I’m not sure how to talk to you about this case.”

The waitress smacked down my coffee and our sandwiches and flounced off to get ready for her close-up. We both ignored her. I said, “You mean because I’m connected to just about everyone and everything involved.”

“Yeah. That can’t be easy. I don’t want to go making it worse.”

And bedside manner, too. Give the kid five years and he’d be running the force. I said, “I appreciate your concern, Stephen. But what I need from you right now isn’t sensitivity, it’s objectivity. You need to pretend this case has nothing to do with me. I’m just an outsider who happened to wander in and needs briefing. Can you do that?”

He nodded. “Yeah. Fair enough.”

I settled back in my chair and pulled my plate towards me. “Wonderful. Hit me.”

Stephen took his time, which was good: drowned his sandwich in ketchup and mayo, rearranged his crisps, made sure he had his thoughts in order. Then he said, “OK. Detective Kennedy’s theory goes like this. Late on December fifteenth 1985, Francis Mackey and Rose Daly are planning to meet at the top of Faithful Place and elope together. Mackey’s brother Kevin gets wind of it-”

“How?” I didn’t see Imelda pouring her heart out to a fifteen-year-old kid.

“That’s not clear, but obviously someone did, and Kevin adds up better than most people. That’s one of the factors backing up Detective Kennedy’s theory. According to everyone we’ve talked to, Francis and Rose had kept the elopement totally under wraps, no one had a clue what they were planning. Kevin, though: he was in a privileged position. He shared a room with Francis. He could have seen something.”

My girl Mandy had kept her mouth shut. “Let’s say that’s out. There was nothing in that room to see.”

Stephen shrugged. He said, “I’m from the North Wall. I’d say the Liberties work the same way, or anyway they did back then: people live on top of each other, people talk, there’s no such thing as a secret. I’ve got to tell you, I’d be amazed if no one knew about that elopement. Amazed.”

I said, “Fair enough. We can leave that part vague. What happens next?”

Concentrating on giving his report was relaxing him a little; we were back in his comfort zone. “Kevin decides to intercept Rose before she meets Francis. Maybe he arranges to meet her or maybe he knows she’ll need to pick up her suitcase, but either way, they meet up, most likely somewhere in Number Sixteen Faithful Place. They get into an argument, he snaps, he grabs her by the throat and hits her head off the wall. From what Cooper says, that part would’ve taken no time; a few seconds, maybe. When Kevin gets his temper back, it’s too late.”