‘That day you first came to me, you signed a waiver which permits me to publish anything about your treatment, providing I don’t identify you.’

My mind rewound to that first appointment, those papers.

‘You can’t do that … I have rights.’

‘Oh I can, Donal,’ she said, getting to her feet, ‘and I will. Here.’

She snatched a file out of her bag, slung it on the table and stomped off.

‘Hang on, Lilian,’ I called, leaping to my feet and scaring the shit out of the Roundhouse regulars.

‘Lilian?’ I roared, as the final person who cared about me left the building.

I opened the file and found her cover note. In psychotically neat handwriting, Lilian explained how she’d failed to get hold of my medical records but, remembering that Mum is insomniac, applied and received hers from Tullamore General Hospital. She warned that the file contains a lot of information about my traumatic birth. Her conclusion: ‘I really think you should get a CT scan on your skull AT ONCE, to check for intracranial pressure which is a common cause of severe insomnia.’

She’d added pink Post-it notes in the relevant areas, helpfully explaining the content. This exercise must have taken her at least a couple of hours. I started to feel bad.

The headlines: I came out of my mother too quickly, too early. She’d suffered perineum and rectal tearing (no explanation given, nor sought) and life-threatening blood loss. She was found unconscious on the kitchen floor and required intensive care treatment. A surgeon had to re-open her cervix by hand to release the placenta.

Had I finally found the root of my dad’s contempt for me? I’d almost killed his wife, probably killed their love life and killed stone dead the chance of more children. In all likelihood, Martin had to explain himself to the local priest, who’d be wondering why there wasn’t a conveyor belt of Lynches.

Because of the speed of my exit, I suffered a suspected diastatic fracture to my lambdoid suture. Lilian’s microscopic, precise notes explained that the skull is made up of eight cranial bones, separated by fibrous joints called sutures that fully close at different stages of your life. The lambdoid suture is the one that runs horizontally around the back of your skull – about halfway – and should fully close by the time you reach forty. Lilian explained that a diastatic fracture may have caused a widening of the lambdoid suture, and that I should get this checked out.

Through the pub chatter wafted those words from my youth.

If you stand between the window and the body during this time, then God help you.

Had this spider-web fault line in my skull acted as some sort of spirit catcher for restless souls seeking peace? Was my brain a living purgatory for the pilgrim spirits of the recent dead?

Another Post-it explained that I’d suffered craniosynostosis, caused when other sutures close too quickly. This causes pressure in the skull, which can lead to extreme headaches and sleeping problems.

Another typed column showed that Mum was first prescribed benzodiazepine sleeping tablets four months after my birth. And since then she’d been prescribed a Latin phrasebook of pharmaceuticals – which she still took to this day. I’d read how over-prescription of these pills in the Seventies and Eighties led to thousands of middle-aged addicts suffering depression, painful withdrawal and, ironically, insomnia.

The horror sank in quickly. I had been the root cause of Mum’s insomnia and need for drugs, drugs that exacerbated her insomnia so that it was now killing her. No wonder Dad hated me.

Poor Mum had never told me any of this, or ever blamed me. I managed not to burst out crying until I got to the loo.

I paged Shep and told him to meet me at the Roundhouse, right now.

I leaned forward and felt the reassuring weight of the bar pushing back, my hands enjoying its cool smoothness. I was ready.

‘That was a masterstroke about the trainers, Lynch. How did you even think of that?’ said Shep, clambering upon a stool beside me.

For once, I didn’t feel myself redden.

‘I’ve been really impressed with your work, son. Stick with me and you could go far.’

My drained, streaked-white Guinness glass needed no cue. He ordered another and a double Glenfiddich for himself. Again, he eschewed anything that might give his drink a leisurely twist. Water, say, or a cube of ice. I doubted that Shep ever did anything simply for pleasure: every action had to somehow reinforce his image of himself. Shep was basically a socially-adjusted psychopath, like Fintan.

He raised his drink: ‘Here’s to a very important pair of collars,’ he said, and I clinked.

He took a sip. I took a long draw, relishing the burnt-barley taste, toasting my burnt ties.

As we sat there side-by-side, Shep intertwined his fingers and started twirling his thumbs. I imagined the cogs in his brain grinding hard, working out his next play.

‘We have a problem,’ Shep finally said, glancing over to me.

‘If this is about Fintan’s story,’ I started, but Shep put his hand on my arm, indicating that I should shut up.

He reached inside his suit jacket and pulled out a piece of paper. He laid it out on the bar in front of me.

‘What’s this?’ I asked.

‘Phone records,’ said Shep, ‘from the incident room. The records show you rang the Sunday News at 4.23 p.m. yesterday.’

My mind flashed back: getting the note to call Fintan, his insistence that he hadn’t left any such message.

‘How do you know it was me?’

‘Because the receptionist has confirmed that you were the only member of the team who stayed behind. She watched you making the call. She heard you say Fintan’s name.’

Round one to Shep.

I suppressed my swelling rage. I had to box clever here, play Shep at his own game. I picked up the records and scoured them. There it was, in black and white, the record of my call to Fintan’s direct line.

I stuck to the facts: ‘It says the call lasted less than a minute, hardly enough time for me to pass on a thoroughly detailed story. Not to mention copies of her statement and a wedding video.’

Shep had already thought of this, of course: ‘But enough time to arrange a meeting. Did you meet Fintan on Saturday evening?’

I said nothing, but realised he’d trapped me.

‘If you did, then it doesn’t look very good for you, does it, Lynch?’

Shep was now doing to me what he’d done to the Fosters. He was building a case piecemeal, skilfully creating a comprehensive picture out of fragments of truth and supposition. Jigsaw Justice.

He likes to own people. All of the guys in his team owe him in some way.

‘I got a message to call him, Guv. I didn’t speak to him about this case. I’ve never spoken to him about any case. And I didn’t leak him Karen’s statement or the wedding video. I’ve never had access to the exhibits cupboard.’

‘Everyone knows where the key to that cupboard is,’ spat Shep.

Shep scooped up the phone record sheet and presented it to me: ‘There is only one other copy, which I’ve put in a very safe place. Feel free to destroy this.’

‘Why would you do this for me, Guv?’

‘Let’s just say you owe me a favour,’ he said.

Shep picks up waifs and strays and turns them into his bitches.

I had two choices. I could take the phone record sheet, keep the peace and learn a vital lesson about how Shep operated. Or I could show him that I wasn’t prepared to be anybody’s bitch. I had plenty of dirt on him now. When I had pinned Fintan against his bachelor pad earlier today, he finally coughed about how the racket at the Feathers worked. How he and Shep worked.

Fintan admitted that Seamus – the pub manager – had been acting as a middle man between him and his police sources for about four months, passing messages and money. It soon transpired that Seamus was a double agent, also working for Shep, who knew about every single officer on Fintan’s payroll.