Every time he enters a crime scene he experiences the moment as an absolute transition, as if he is crossing into a different realm. The crime scene is the frozen world; circumstances have run to their conclusion here and time has taken itself elsewhere.

The detective’s attention is drawn to the wound on her left temple. He studies the angle and depth of it and gazes up at the spray of blood that fans out across that part of the wall near where she must have stood. So telling are these details that he is already pre-empting the pathologist’s report: She was struck from behind with a blunt instrument; at the last moment she turned round, turned her head into the blow. On the other side of the corpse, the pathologist ducks out under the tape. Without a word of greeting, the detective calls to him.

‘Do we have a time of death?’

The pathologist pulls the hood back from his lab suit and fixes his gaze in the middle distance. ‘I have to do a full examination but based on lividity and rigor mortis I would say the corpse is about twenty-four hours old, certainly not a lot more.’

The pathologist leaves the room and the detective steps aside to let the crime-scene photographer circle the corpse a final time. Now he turns his attention to the room itself. The large table in the middle of the floor is littered with open journals and copybooks, reference books and a small ashtray with a few butts in the bottom. Among the journals is a wallet. It contains a couple of credit cards, a library photo pass and a couple of twenties. Nothing else, no photos of loved ones, no receipts, no address. He looks up and sees his new assistant detective across the table from him. He hands the wallet to her.

‘Detective Kennedy.’

‘Kenny, sir.’

‘Kenny, yes. There’s a name, a few other bits and pieces here, see what you can find,’ he says and then turns out of the room into the daylight where time and circumstance pick up the run of themselves once more.

‘Here.’

The man hands his wife a mug of tea and sits apart from her at the other end of the sofa. It is a large sitting room dominated across its centre by the sofa, which faces the fireplace and the flat-screen TV. The room is lit from the rear by two up-lighters that cast down a soft glow. Over the fireplace there is a fine line drawing of a child in three-quarter pose, a sensitively realized piece that shows real talent on the part of the draughtsperson. The man stretches out on the sofa, his whole body and posture asserting his right to slob out in his own house at the end of a day’s work.

‘So what’s happened?’ he asks.

‘It’s just begun,’ his wife says. ‘The detective has been called to a crime scene. A young woman is found in a rented house lying face down with her head bashed in. There is blood on the walls but no sign of a struggle.’

She is sitting with her bare feet tucked up under her and in spite of the late hour there is an energy and alertness about her that gives the impression she still has work to do. Her dark hair is pulled back in a girlish headband, which gives full exposure to a face that is clearly in its late thirties but has yet to show any signs of droop or sag. And if she is too plain to be anyone’s idea of beauty, it is easy to see that most men will eventually confess to being attracted to her without being able to say why.

‘And these are the crime-scene photos?’

‘Yes.’

The detective spreads a series of photos across his desk. From various angles they show the young woman lying face down on the timber floor, her head haloed in a pool of blood. The picture sequence glances over the deep wound on her left temple, the blood on the wall over where she stood, and ends finally in a couple of wide-angle scenes of the room itself. She is lying between the table and the wall, her head near the skirting board. Using her body to establish scale, it is easy to calculate the size of the room as something like fifteen feet by twelve. A large table in the middle of the room is scattered with books and open writing pads; a couch stands against one wall and the others are decorated with cheap prints of old masters in generic frames. The last photo shows a single window opening onto a large beach over which a high summer sun shines.

The detective has a theory about corpses, specifically murder victims. His theory has it that all murder victims are ashamed; all are acutely aware of themselves as a blemish on creation, a despoiling of the natural order. They feel this deeply and they protest that they are not merely this brutal set of circumstances, this shambles lying here on the floor. At the moment of death they make one last flailing attempt to establish their death within the widest laws of the universe. This is their last despairing act of faith in the world because the dead, no more than the living, cannot abide chaos and will not lie in eternity without making peace with the world …

No, he has never voiced this theory to anyone and he is unsure what part of himself is responsible for it. All he knows is that he can never look at photographs like these without thinking of it. He shuffles through the photos and stops on a close-up of her skull. He studies the angle of the wound and by shifting the photographs he lines it up with the spray pattern on the wall above her. Now it is clear that she had to have been struck by someone who was left-handed. That narrows it down. Is this what he is looking for?

With nothing more to be gleaned from them, the detective squares the photos into a file. A mortuary technician leans into his office.

‘We have a time of death – close to the original guesstimate, she died sometime in the middle of Sunday afternoon.’

‘Any other wounds?’

‘None, no impact marks, no ligatures, no sign of sexual assault.’

‘Just the single blow.’

The detective turns his gaze back to the file on the desk. The camera pans back from him and in this uncertain mood the scene freezes and fades to a title screen; cue the first ad break.

The woman on the sofa takes up the remote and turns the sound down. She turns to her husband.

‘So,’ she says abruptly, ‘what’s your alibi, mister?’

‘What?’

‘Your alibi, you’re dragged in for questioning on this.’

The man does not have to think – he sees instantly what’s afoot. They are both fans of these late-night cop shows and sometimes they have this game of second-guessing the plots with the sound turned off. It’s a game they have played several times for their own enjoyment. There are no winners or losers, just the shared satisfaction of building a coherent story that covers the facts and the circumstances; a convincing account they can both agree on with as few holes and contradictions as possible.

But tonight the man is not in the mood. He groans deeply; he’s had a long day and he’s bone-tired. But one look at his wife’s vivid expression and he sees immediately that she will not be thwarted. He will have to ease himself into it; he decides to begin by playing for time.

‘Why am I dragged in for questioning?’

‘You’ve been seen with her. This is a small town, people have seen you buying drinks and flirting with her.’

‘I’m a suspect?’

‘You’re the only one.’

‘What would I want with her? I’m a married man with two kids.’

The woman shakes her head with a pitying expression; apparently this protest is so naïve it barely warrants further comment.

‘Look at her,’ she urges, ‘her looks, the sexy summer dress, the rented house – this is exactly the sort of woman a married man might have a fling with. A couple of months screwing her over the summer and when September comes she will have gone back to where she came from. You’d better have a pretty secure alibi because right now you’re the only suspect.’

Early as it is in the game, he sees that there is something especially forceful about her tonight, something pointedly relentless and aggressive.

She is looking at him without blinking. This is a more forceful and sudden challenge than he is used to. The sequence of photographs flashes through his mind.

‘OK,’ he relents, ‘as it happens I do have an alibi, a secure one with witnesses.’

‘Good, let’s hear it.’

‘Time of death was established as twenty-four hours before the corpse was found, right?’

‘Yes.’

‘Let’s say twenty-four hours ago was the afternoon of Sunday 27th.’

‘OK.’

‘Well, in the middle of Sunday afternoon, almost exactly at the TOD, I was thirty miles away, lining out at wing forward for our club in the first game of the championship. In the twentieth minute I got yellow-carded and my name was entered into the ref’s notebook; in the fifty-eighth minute I scored an equalizing point and that, too, was recorded by the ref and witnessed by the whole team and no less than a hundred spectators. Furthermore, later that week, the local paper carried a photo of me jumping for a ball in that same game. So, all these things, eyewitness reports, referee’s game report and photos place me at least thirty miles away at the time of her death. I couldn’t have done it.’

The man sits back. He has surprised himself with this sudden inspiration; he has seldom been this sharp. Now he considers; if there is a flaw in his reasoning it is not immediately obvious. The woman nods appreciatively.

‘That’s good,’ she concedes.

‘It’s better than good, it’s waterproof. You have to let me go.’

‘Maybe. It remains to be seen how your alibi holds up when we begin to examine it.’

‘What do you mean, “when we begin to examine it”? There is no flaw in it as far as I can see. You keep holding onto me and I will bring a case of unlawful detention.’

‘We’ll see.’

She picks up the remote once more and points it at the TV.

Detective Kenny enters his office. She is new and eager and she has that bright appearance of someone who is used to bringing good news. Now she pauses inside the door with what may be a dramatic sense of her new role, or may be something more diffident. Either way he lets her stand there, framed from behind in the blue light; whatever the moment he has no wish to spoil it for her.

‘We have an ID,’ she eventually blurts.

‘Yes.’

‘The cards in her wallet tell us that her name is Alice Rynne. She was twenty-five and she worked as a counsellor for the Irish Adoption Authority. For the last three months she had been on sabbatical while she completed a course of study – she was doing a postgrad diploma through the Open University. She rented the house from a family friend and was staying there while she wrote up her thesis. Her topic was on attachment disorders in Romanian adoptees. The theme has special resonance for her – she herself was adopted from an orphanage in Arad in western Romania when she was two years old. She had been living in that house for the last two months.’

‘Did she have any callers, friends or boyfriends?’

‘We’re checking that at the moment.’

‘This is a small town, a single woman with her looks would have drawn attention. Let me know when you have something else.’

She leaves the office and the detective watches her go.

The woman turns to her husband and looks at him expectantly. In moments like this he has the uneasy feeling that he is not wholly himself but more exactly the willed object of her imagination, something she has drawn up out of thin air. It has often crossed his mind that he is nothing more than her imaginary friend, something she constructed long ago in the bored afternoon of a gifted childhood. He also feels himself to be attention dependent – without her gaze he might flicker and fade away entirely. But right now he feels totally invoked and compelled to participate in her game. Whatever her childhood pastimes, her games are more complex now, the rules and objectives knotted in ways he can barely guess at. Having no choice, he decides to enter the game immediately.

‘So I’m having an affair with this woman.’

‘Yes.’

‘I’m a married man with two kids.’

‘I didn’t say you weren’t.’

‘But …’

‘That’s why they’re called affairs.’

‘Let me guess – my wife and kids have driven me into the arms of this woman.’

‘Yes.’

‘Why?’

‘You have disappointments, grievances.’

‘Do I?’

‘Yes.’

‘You might as well spell them out.’

‘OK, these are the facts. You are a small-town man so you have small-town grievances – the wife and kids you lumbered yourself with in your early twenties and the football career which suffered as a result; all the travel you never got around to; screwing the same woman your whole life; the aging mother left on your hands by a brother and sister who took off when they saw the writing on the wall; all these things.’

‘That’s some list.’

‘Yes, it is. There is no single item on it capable of driving you into the arms of another woman but all of them together and targeted at that raw spot … well, this is the kind of bitterness you succumb to in a small place like this.’

‘There’s a big gap between being pissed off and being a killer.’

‘Yes, admittedly motive is a bit blurred at the moment.’

‘And with no motive you have no case?’

‘The investigation is ongoing.’

She turns her attention back to the television. On screen the assistant detective has entered a local pub. The place is quiet – four or five men along the counter supping their pints. The barman stands with his back to the shelves, his arms folded across his chest. Detective Kenny takes her drink to a table by the back wall and listens to the hum of conversation. Talk goes up and down the bar.

‘… riding her …’

‘… so I believe …’

‘… no …’

‘… yes …’

‘… lot of talk …’

‘… dúirt bean liom …’

‘… always be talk …’

‘… lads putting legs under it …’

‘… I’m only saying …’

‘… put it past him, though …’

‘… always fond of it, the same boyo …’

‘… the wren’s nest …’

‘… yes …’

‘… in fairness …’

‘… aren’t we all, if we could get it …’

‘… unless he’s changed …’

‘… and changed in a big way …’

‘… I don’t know …’

‘… lads doing more talking than riding …’

‘… talking …’

‘… sympathy for him …’

The assistant detective stands in the doorway and coughs. It is clear that she is still finding her way in this new environment. As yet she is not wholly sure of her cues and entrances. She waits for the detective to raise his head.

‘She was having an affair,’ she says simply.

‘Who was having an affair?’

‘Alice Rynne.’

‘You’ve asked around?’

‘Yes. As you’ve said, this is a small town; she was seen flirting with a man and there is definite word that she was having a thing with this person.’

‘He’s local?’

‘Yes, forty years old, married with two kids.’

For the first time he notices that she has a gap between her two front teeth, a gap that seems to take its cue from the severe centre parting that runs through her hair. He remembers reading somewhere that in some cultures this signifies a certain type of sensual promise; he makes a note to himself that he must stop watching the Discovery Channel. Her CV mentioned that she has training in ballistics but beyond that he does not know much about her. She has shown real eagerness and efficiency in this investigation so far, but there has also been a degree of impatience with the slow progress. He has yet to decide if this is a newcomer’s proper anxiety to impress or whether it is indicative of something more headstrong. Time will tell.

‘Will we bring him in for questioning?’ she asks.

He shakes his head. ‘Not just yet, it’s too soon and we don’t have enough on him. Believe me, if we go hauling in every married man in the village who bought her a drink we would have the place full in no time. No, go to his house, show your face and ask him a few questions; let him know how much you know and see how he reacts.’

She nods, turns on her heel and is gone.

‘So what would you say to her?’ the woman asks. ‘Suppose the doorbell was to go at this moment and she was there on your doorstep, flashing her badge, wanting to question you. How would you react?’

‘How do you think I’d react? I’d just give her my alibi and that would be it, game over.’

‘So you’re wagering all on this alibi of yours?’

‘Why not?’

‘I don’t buy it,’ she says softly. ‘It’s too anxious.’

She sweeps the remote through the air and kills the sound on the TV. Now he senses that she is about to pounce – all her energies and pulses seem barely contained within her.

‘What’s too anxious?’

‘Your alibi.’

‘I was playing football, what’s anxious about that?’

‘That’s not what you said.’

‘I said I was playing football.’

The woman shakes her head and looks into the distance. ‘No, you didn’t. The exact phrase you used was “lining out at wing forward”. I took note of it.’

‘So? That’s what footballers do, they line out. You’re clutching at straws.’ He stifles an urge to throw up his hands in exasperation. ‘This is going nowhere.’

‘Think about it, it’s ridiculous. You’re forty years of age, three stone over your fighting weight, what makes you think you can still get a game at wing forward?’

‘I was a good footballer, skill doesn’t leave you.’

‘Skill no, but speed yes. You can’t tell me that at your age you’re still getting a game on the wing. You may have the skill but you do not have the legs for it. In fact, the foul you got carded for was for pulling and dragging – that’s exactly the type of foul that someone whose speed has deserted them would be pulled for. Your alibi is at least questionable on one point.’

‘That’s a small point.’

‘I reckon the only way you are going to get a game in the championship at your age is on a scrappy junior B team: stick you in at full forward where you won’t have to do any running.’

It takes him a moment to acknowledge that he will have to concede this further point. ‘OK, I was playing junior B, another minor detail.’

‘Not so minor at all.’

‘It does not disprove what the ref and the spectators saw.’

‘Yes, the spectators – about a hundred, you said.’

‘About that, give or take.’

‘Only a hundred spectators at a championship game on a summer Sunday?’

‘The first game of the championship, it was a slow start.’

‘My guess is that it wasn’t a Sunday. Summer Sundays are not clogged up with scrappy junior B games. Junior B matches are played on weekday evenings or on Saturdays. Either of those makes it possible that you were at the crime scene around the time of her death. That alibi of yours is full of holes.’

She is exaggerating but there is no denying she has bent his story out of shape. He is not fully exposed but he does need to rethink his position. She moves off the sofa towards the door and calls back over her shoulder.

‘If I was you I’d start getting a lawyer, mister.’

She walks up the gravel drive to the house and stands on the doorstep, pressing the bell. Waiting for the door to open, she steps back on the concrete walk and surveys the front of the house. It’s an ordinary hip-roof house on the outskirts of the village, one of several such along both sides of the main road. But little details distinguish it; there is a degree of taste and wealth evident in the pea gravel and lawn lamps that set the house apart from its neighbours. The battered tradesman’s van in the drive gives an improbable hint as to where this wealth might have come from. Now the door opens and a man stands there in his shirtsleeves and socks.

‘John Crayn?’

‘Yes.’

‘I’m Detective Kenny. I was wondering if I could ask you a few questions.’

‘Questions about what?’

‘About the death of Alice Rynne.’

She sees him check something within him, some pulse running ahead of itself. She’s not sure what to make of it. She has radar but does not always know how to interpret the signals it receives. It could mean anything, innocent surprise or an anxious man putting his guard up.

‘I don’t know anything about her death.’

‘We have reason to believe you knew her.’

‘I’m not answering any more questions.’ As he makes to close the door, she raises her voice.

‘It would be better if we did this now, Mr Crayn. The alternative is that I bring you into the station and hold you overnight. I suggest you answer a few questions and get it over with.’

Crayn looks her up and down and scans the road behind her. Then he stands back and motions her inside. She steps past him into the hallway and then turns into the sitting room; he leaves the door open to follow her.

‘I thought you people came in pairs,’ he says. ‘I didn’t think they sent anyone on their own.’

‘We’re only having a conversation; why would I need to be chaperoned?’

‘It’s just that on the telly … suit yourself.’

‘Are you alone, Mr Crayn?’

‘Yes, my wife is at work.’

‘Where does she work?’

‘She works in Allergan, a pharmaceutical company; she’s a HR manager.’

‘And your kids, you have a boy and a girl?’

‘They’re in their teens, they don’t tell me where they go.’

He looks bigger amid the comfortable furniture of the sitting room; his chest has now broadened out to its full width and his shoulders swell through his heavy work shirt. He smells of cement and his face has the pinched creases of a man who has suffered long exposure to its heat and dry burn. And although he is only forty there is no trace whatsoever of the young man he recently was. The face, all that compacted muscle – had she not known she would have said he was ten years older. It is clear he wants her gone so he pushes straight to the point.

‘Yes, I heard about her death but I know nothing about it.’

‘We have witnesses who say that you were very friendly with her.’

‘I’m friendly with a lot of people.’

‘I was thinking more than friendly.’

He shakes his head. ‘I bought her a drink, I flirted with her. There was nothing more to it than that.’ He draws himself up to his full height.

‘Did you ever leave her home after closing time?’

‘No, never.’

‘I find that hard to believe. You spend the evening talking and flirting and buying her drink and you never offered to drive her home?’

‘I might have offered but she did not take it up.’

‘You’re saying you were never in her house?’

‘I’m saying I’m a married man with two kids. I take all that seriously, Detective. Now is there anything else?’

‘One last thing; where were you on the afternoon of the 27th?’

‘The 27th was what, Sunday, Monday?’

‘Sunday.’

‘If it was Sunday I was playing football.’

‘You have witnesses?’

‘Yes, how many do you need?’

His rigid stance is his way of telling her that her work in this room is finished.

He raises his hand before she can speak. It’s not his way to cut across his wife like this but he has an anxious need that he does not rightly understand; a need to establish something.

‘OK,’ he says with as narrow an emphasis as he can manage. ‘It’s easy to see where this is going. Let’s turn to the question of what’s happening between the two people who have an involvement with this woman. Let’s turn to their marriage. The detective has just learned that this man’s wife is a corporate career woman; she heads up a HR division. We can see the conclusions she will draw from that. She will wager that the relative social positions within their marriage have created an imbalance of some sort, a kind of shamed tension in the man which comes to a head and spills over into violence, ending up with this young woman lying face down in a pool of her own blood. Is that an accurate summary?’

‘Yes, that would be my read on it, pretty accurate.’

He makes no effort to hide his disgust. ‘Well, it may be accurate, but it’s also tiresome, hackneyed. It’s the old story, some tired drama of a midlife crisis which ends in bloodshed. Some idiot who can’t manage his grievances, or keep them to himself; life has disappointed him so now someone has to pay. Boohoohoo, fuck him.’

He is surprised by the rising register of his voice, it seems to have snagged on some rage within himself, drawing it up from a hollow place.

She is looking at him carefully. ‘I think that’s one telling of it, but as to how that version ends in this dead woman – I’m not so sure about that. How about this version: the story of a man usurped from within himself. Once upon a time a young man set aside certain dreams and freedoms for a wife and family. He set aside the drink and the screwing and the travel and even the football career he might have had for a life with a wife and kids. He turns his back on Jack-the-lad and settles for being a good husband and a good father. The years go by, a family is raised and one day he looks up and sees that his youth is way behind him, fading fast in his rear-view mirror …’

‘And that comes as news to him?’

‘No, not at all, that doesn’t come as news to him, but his own reaction to it does. He feels cheated, aggrieved, overwhelmed by a feeling of something lost. He tries to tell himself that it’s OK, he’s raised two happy, healthy kids, he has a nice house and he’s comfortable – he’s not wealthy by any means but neither he nor his family want for anything. And he realizes that this is what he has gambled on as a young man and he sees now that he has won – all these things are his – wife, kids, house and money, the whole lot. He has it solved. And yet … and yet there’s this voice inside him, a voice he has never heard before, a little shrill voice screaming at him, saying, “No, fuck it, none of this is enough, this is a shit deal, I’ve been swindled; fuck the house and the kids, fuck the wife and the money – what’s in it for me, what do I get?” ’

The man snorts derisively. ‘You can’t expect sympathy for that fucker, he needs to stop pissing and moaning and get some balls.’

‘And that’s the point. Life wasn’t happy taking his youth, it had to take his balls, too. As the detective pointed out, the woman he married thrived; she has gone on to a high-flying career heading up a human resources division – that’s a lot more than he’s done. While she’s attending seminars in behavioural psychology, he is out with his hawk and trowel, covered in cement. It’s not hard to guess which side of the house the prestige is on.’

‘And he can’t find it in himself to be happy or proud of her?’

‘He would like to, he’s not a bad man, but there’s that little voice inside him protesting, giving him no peace. On and on it goes … he’s not proud of how he feels but that voice won’t give him any rest.’

‘So why come up with that alibi?’

She groans in dismay. ‘Are we back to that again?’

‘Yes.’

‘There’s no serious flaw in it but there is just enough anxious vanity with which to twist it out of shape. And this same vanity might accommodate the type of violence we have here.’

‘Bollocks!’

‘No, just think – this man feels he owes it to himself, one last fling before it is too late, before he gets too fat and too old. Remember the photos; remember how she looked – that hair, those legs. Remember that she flirted with him, the conversations she had with him and the drinks he bought her – a couple of months’ remorseless fucking and he might be able to call it quits, shut the voice up in your head once and for all. Square it with your conscience. You might feel you owe yourself that. Remember, you haven’t just come to fuck her, you’ve come to collect.’

‘I?’

‘I, you, whoever.’

He has the sudden sense of himself falling, something in him coming unhinged and spilling over an edge. The sensation is all the more frightening in that he is fully aware of himself sitting on the sofa. But this is what she loves. For all the forensic truth-seeking in traces and wavelengths, she knows that the real truths are found in the raw ground of the human heart, that fevered realm. Now she has the scent of blood in her nostrils and he can sense her savage relish. This focused aggression is heedless to the damage it might cause, the things said that cannot be taken back, the wounds old and new, caused and reopened … She is ready to push on and risk everything and he realizes that for as long as he can remember he has been afraid of this woman, not merely for what she is capable of doing but for who she is, this woman, his wife …

The stillness of her pose tells him that she is fully aware of him looking at her. She raises her chin as if sitting for her portrait.

On screen, Detective Kenny has visited the local pub again. Once more she takes her drink to the back wall and listens.

‘… a couple of times, out the back smoking …’

‘… blonde hair and …’

‘… fine-looking …’

‘… early twenties …’

‘… I’d have said older …’

‘… I won’t argue, you’re a good judge …’

‘… wife of his …’

‘… where they met …’

‘… the back smoking …’

‘… talk away and have the craic with you …’

‘… lovely …’

‘… student, I think …’

‘… Silk Cut Blue …’

‘… her a light …’

‘… where you’re sitting now …’

‘… one thing talking but …’

‘… a short with that …?’

‘So what do we know about our suspect?’

Detective Kenny checks her notes and begins to rhyme off the facts. ‘John Crayn, DOB 1967, born and raised locally. Married his childhood sweetheart Olwyn Lavelle with whom he has two teenage children, Matthew and Emily. Self-employed as a tradesman, a plasterer; in the middle of the nineties began taking on contracts of his own and now has six other plasterers working for him. Made some money in the last few years when he successfully tendered for a couple of publicly funded projects – community centres, school extensions and a council housing development. But other than that, there is nothing to set him apart from any other man with a family in the area. He’s well known and well liked, nothing else much to say about him.’

‘And he was seen in the company of Alice Rynne.’

‘Yes, we believe they met in his local. She was in the habit of going for a drink late at night before closing time. They were seen together laughing and flirting and we have word that he would sometimes drive her home at the end of the night. Because of that, people speculated that it developed into a relationship, which he denies.’

‘So she spends all day working on this thesis of hers and come night-time she lays down her pen and goes for a drink.’

‘Something like that, it’s only a seven-minute walk from the house to the village.’

‘Where she met this Crayn and struck up some sort of a relationship with him …’

‘Which he denies.’

‘Was he in the pub on the night of Saturday 26th?’

‘No and neither was she.’

The detective shakes his head. ‘He may have been having an affair with her but that does not immediately give him a motive for killing her. What do we know about his wife, do we know anything about her?’

‘We know they were childhood sweethearts, that they went to school together, and that they got married in their early twenties when she became pregnant. She works in a pharmaceutical firm; she went in as a production-line operative and gradually, by dint of hard work and study, rose to be head of HR. She has frequently been absent to the parent company in America for ongoing training.’

‘That’s quite a rise, from production-line op. to head of the human resources division. How much focus and hard work do you need to achieve that?’

‘Quite a lot, I’d imagine.’

‘I’d imagine your husband would be eating alone at home a lot of nights.’

The detective considered. She has noticed that when he does this he lays the tip of his thumb against the front of his teeth. She watches him do it now and lets the silence develop fully until he finally looks up. ‘So, she’s a corporate high-flier and he’s a plasterer. I wonder is there anything there, has that made the marriage lopsided in some way or other. Some more background research into her might not go astray.’

Detective Kenny nods and turns out through the door.

‘He has a point,’ the man on the sofa says as he drains his mug before setting it on the ground.

‘Does he?’

‘Yes, your suspicion of my affair with this woman pushes the motive onto you. I may or may not be having an affair with this woman but the motive for killing her is yours, not mine. So now we have to ask where were you on the afternoon of Sunday 27th?’

‘That’s easy to answer. I did what I always do on Sunday afternoons. I went for a long walk with Emily Ruane, my childhood friend; we walked for two hours along the secondary roads, up through the bog and along the beach. We spoke to a couple of people on the way, waved to a couple of passing cars and it was after half past four when I got home. Emily will testify to that, we have been doing it for years. We hardly ever miss a summer Sunday.’ She looks at him keenly. ‘Of course, you know all that or did you think this ass keeps itself firm and trim all on its own?’

The lapse into cheap sarcasm does not suit her but it still needles him. He needs a moment to ride the swell of temper that blooms through his chest. There is something dangerous in the air between them, now. Everything from here on is a risk. He moves to close out the game.

‘So where do we go from here, a woman we both know is dead but both of us have alibis which put us in the clear.’

‘You mean mine puts me in the clear. As we have already established, yours is seriously open to question.’

The man shakes his head. ‘It’s bent at the edges, not discredited. It can’t be discarded on the basis of your suspicions; this investigation is at a dead end.’

‘That’s sloppy,’ she scorns, ‘we have to be able to do better than that.’

‘Not me, I’m knackered.’ He throws his head onto the back of the sofa and opens his mouth to a huge yawn. He knows well that conceding the game will aggravate her. Seeing things through to the end, finishing what you start – these are some of the values by which she has succeeded in her world; she will not be able to let this go so easily. The man rouses himself and points at the screen.

‘Matter a damn anyway, they’re bringing the boyo in for interrogation now, we’ll see what he has to say for himself.’

He is the only suspect in the investigation and he sits in the interview room across the table from the detective. It is not often a straightforward case of murder proves so difficult, yielding so little in the way of leads or other avenues of investigation. All alibis have checked out and a full search of the house has thrown up nothing in the way of fibres or prints or weapons. So a lot depends on the statement given by this man sitting opposite him. Preliminary questioning has confirmed what the investigation already knows – he is forty years old, married with two kids in their late teens and, barring a couple of speeding tickets, he has no convictions.

The man is sitting with his hands clamped together on the table, his bullish strength giving the impression that he is all shoulders. He looks wholly misplaced in the interview room. His woollen cap lies on the table – he has been pulled off a worksite in the middle of a job – and there are clear traces of cement on his jacket and trousers. His wish to be anywhere else but in this dim, windowless room is obvious. He has already denied having an affair with the dead woman, having stated reasonably that it is neither unusual nor a crime to have flirted with her or bought her drinks. He has amused the senior detective by appealing to a shared blokeishness – she was young and pretty, what’s a man to do? Nor is he able to add anything to what they already know about Alice Rynne. His account of her squares with what is common knowledge, with what anyone might pick up over a few shared drinks. And as the interview proceeds he has come to realize how little they know, how clueless the investigation is. The whole thing is grounded in nothing more than a few local rumours, precisely the sort of tittle-tattle that makes up the social static of any small community. Beneath his anxiety there grows a solid sense that he can refute everything they throw at him, that they have nothing to hold him on.

‘I have nothing more to say,’ he says. ‘And by the looks of it, you have nothing, either.’

The only revealing moment comes when the subject of his relationship with his wife is brought up. Is he happy in his marriage? He becomes defensive, laughing as if the question is utterly meaningless. The detective spots a chink and, by way of prising it open, he finds himself volunteering something about his own life.

‘I’m happily married myself,’ he says blandly. ‘The best decision I ever made. Twelve years now and I cannot wait to clock off every evening. Come five o’clock I’m out of here before the fifth bell has sounded. And that myth about the obsessive cop who takes his work home with him …’ The detective shakes his head and laughs, ‘Not me. My work stays here at my desk, dead woman or no dead woman. I go home, switch off the phone and play with my kids.’

As he speaks, the detective finds himself becoming fond of his story, falling for it in a way he would not have wished. What exactly his motives were in revealing all this he cannot rightly say; what sort of empathic mood he hoped might develop between them he is not sure. Either way, the man opposite is having none of it. He shrugs his shoulders as if this has nothing to do with him and the detective knows that the interview is lost. It was a mistake bringing him in with so little to press him on. The interview stumbles on another half-hour through summary and repetition, summary and repetition, the drag of fatigue entering the room. In the middle of the afternoon the detective leaves and, shortly after, the duty officer comes in and tells the man that he is free to go. The man’s surprise is genuine. He rises cautiously from the chair, glancing around him as if he expects someone in the room to administer a blow or a barked warning to sit back down – an interrogator’s trick to scramble his defences and catch him off guard. But there is no one else in the room. To anyone watching, his anxious caution as he pulls the door behind him might confirm his innocence.

Later that evening the detective takes his turn in the pub, sitting at the end of the bar. He listens to the conversation among the other customers.

‘… shortly after the bit of grub in the afternoon …’

‘… up on scaffolding putting a scratch coat on the gable …’

‘… two of them, suits and all …’

‘… a woman …’

‘ … pair of shoes on her …’

‘… washed his hawk and trowel …’

‘… no …’

‘… so I believe …’

‘… left on the mixer …’

‘… wouldn’t be long …’

‘… quietened the cunt …’

‘… the same Johnny …’

‘… in fairness, though …’

‘… trousers covered in cement …’

‘… the shoes ruined …’

‘… last thing you’d be worried about …’

‘… thing on your mind …’

‘… lads up on the roof …’

‘… down from Christ what was happening …’

‘… looking at the whole thing …’

‘… the mixer still running …’

It has been a disappointing episode, slow and irresolute and with none of the plot dynamics that have made the best episodes of the series such compulsive viewing. No reversals or recognitions, no antiphonal subplots. The episode has spent itself in a single storyline and made up the plot deficit by emphasizing the change to a village locale and the introduction of a new character. It is difficult to say at this early stage whether Detective Kenny will be a permanent feature. But she looks promising. She has been given a lot of screen time and there has been more than enough substance in the weighted exchanges between herself and her senior partner to suggest that she is here to stay. However, it appears that her first investigation is going to end in failure. The closing scene finds her standing in the afternoon sun, watching the suspect walk away across the car park. Her disappointment is obvious. The detective comes up behind her and steps up to his role as mentor and philosopher.

‘So, what do you think?’ she asks.

‘I think he is as guilty as sin.’

‘And he walks away like this?’

‘That’s what the evidence allows.’

‘I thought we had him.’

‘Don’t colour an investigation with faith or hope, Detective.’

She grapples with this for a moment and then stores it away for further examination.

The suspect walks straight towards the camera, the sun full in his face. His features are set in a blank expression that does not falter as he settles the woollen cap on his head and continues walking until he blacks out the screen with the full of his chest. Cue the credits.

‘For Christ’s sake,’ the woman groans. ‘This programme gets worse and worse.’ She subsides heavily against the back of the sofa in exasperation.

‘You heard the man – he’s as guilty as sin.’

‘He gets to walk away, that’s not good enough.’

‘We are given to believe that in some other world he will be brought to account in some other reckoning.’

‘Are we? I didn’t see that. All I saw was him walking away scot-free.’

He is not surprised to see her so frustrated but he is surprised that her disappointment is never tempered by the recurrence of such things. She has been critical of this series in the recent past, despairing of how it has fallen away from the character-driven plots of the early episodes. She has prophesied that it will not run for another season and yet still she is disappointed with it. And her sulk is genuine, a sullen mire with nothing girlish or alluring to it; a relentless hum of anger comes off her. He shifts himself into a sitting position.

‘So,’ he says, ‘the O.J. scenario: if I did it, how and why?’

If she is grateful for the offer she does not show it. She takes it slow, giving deliberate vent to her rage. ‘It was like everything else in your life, a panicked reaction, an act of cowardice. Exactly the sort of bluster you could expect from someone who has never given life any serious thought.’

There is everything of the pale accuser about her, now. He half-expects her to raise a finger to him and start ranting, driven by some terrible knowledge. But she seems to feel she has said enough, that nothing more is needed by way of explanation. He holds the silence and the long moment stretches between them. Eventually, he concedes with a sigh. He may as well, or they will be here to all hours.

‘It’s only a game,’ he says, ‘let’s call it a night.’

The look on her face has deepened beyond frustration to the expression of deep disgust. ‘I hate games,’ she whispers fervently. ‘Such a waste.’

She will not be easily soothed from her frustration but he has no wish that she should go to bed in this mood.

He sits back and closes his eyes. ‘OK, how did I do it?’

She shifts her weight to the edge of the sofa. ‘The detective is right, you struck her from behind with your left hand, one single blow – there was no sign of a struggle. Angles and blood spatter show that it had to be left-handed. There is no room for a right-handed person to swing against the wall.’ She swings her left hand in a wide arc to demonstrate. He shakes his head.

‘Correction.’ He draws his right hand across his body to strike the same arc, backhanded. She shakes her head.

‘Same angle of impact, yes, but you would never get enough force into it to do the job like that.’

‘OK, so that’s how I did it, but why?’

‘It looks like a crime of passion but that’s not what it was. It got out of hand as these things usually do. For you it was a couple of months’ thoughtless fucking but for her it snagged her heart. All of a sudden she begins to have feelings for you. Look at her, her looks, look at her work – attachment disorders in Romanian adoptees – she is a passionate woman, the type of woman who will always be prey to her heart, always susceptible to its moods and qualms. And now she has these feelings and she cannot let you go. Also, there’s this developed sense of melodrama – she has the panicked feeling that this might be her only chance at happiness. She cannot let this slip. So she starts making demands; she wants you to go away with her, leave your wife and kids, start anew. At first you fend her off with the usual excuses but by the end of three months she is frustrated. And then she threatens that she will go to your wife and tell all; that is the moment when things come to a head. You can’t have that but you don’t have the wit to argue your way out of it.’

‘So he whacks her?’

‘You whack her. It looks like a crime of passion, the beautiful woman on the floor done in with a single blow to the head, but it is not like that. In fact, it is more an act of cowardice than anything else, the panicked response of someone who has never made a proper commitment to anything in his life.’

You could be struck blind at this time of night, the man thinks. Not by what you see but by what you know others see; a kind of referred blindness. Because now he knows what she sees, looking at him down the years, down the length of this sofa. Her vantage point is that of a woman who has picked up a career and two languages while dropping a dress size and raising a family; from that standpoint anyone might see clearly. But she is not anyone, she is this woman, his wife, and he cannot think of a time when he did not fear her slightly. And now he knows why. You would not need to stand long in her shoes to see what she sees, to know the things she knows. The wonder is that he has not been blinded long ago.

She rises from the sofa and stands over him. She opens her mouth to say something but stops. And it’s as if this moment has been waiting for them, waiting to be fulfilled as one instance of clear understanding between them. And so it is, and anything either of them might say now would be redundant, entirely beside the point. The moment wanes and she exits the room, pulling the door quietly behind her.

He remains on the sofa with his gaze fixed in the depths of the television screen.

He wakes early the following morning and sits up fully clothed on the sofa. After a moment, he stands up with a grimace and braces his hand in the small of his back before walking stiffly to the kitchen. There is milk in the fridge and he drinks it straight from the carton, wiping his mouth with the back of his hand. He pulls on his work boots and jacket before stepping outside.

The watch on his wrist tells him that it’s not yet half-seven and at this early hour the sky looks contused, frayed. It has rained during the night and the grass and hedges look especially vivid, pressing towards him out of the grey light. He pats himself down, jacket and trouser, checking for fags, phone, keys – all the things he will need for the day ahead. As he stands there frisking himself, the discussion of the night before comes back to him and it is as vivid as if he had just walked away from it, as if a whole night’s sleep had never intervened. Once again he is in the grip of that cold anxiety. He should have known better than to go head to head with her in something like that; he was never a match for her. But he was shocked at the lengths to which she was prepared to go, the damage she risked; he had never seen her so reckless and wilful before.

At this early hour, the light falls at a low angle across the fields, running ahead of itself, drawing shadows in its wake. This is the time of day when search teams fan out across open ground looking for those shallow troughs in which shadows pool, those elongated depressions that turn out to be shallow graves into which the earth has slumped over abdominal and thoracic collapse, over what remains of the heart … And standing there, he wonders how he knows such stuff. Did he read it or see it, who could have told him? It seems a strange topic to dwell on at this hour of the day – or any hour, for that matter. And there is something shameful about knowing such a thing. He suspects that it takes a peculiar hollowness to know it, to be bothered by it at all; an inner, ringing emptiness in which such knowledge might come to rest.

Of course the real question is not how he knows such stuff but whether it is worth knowing at all and at what price does knowing it come. Was something crucial displaced within him when he learned this, something meaningful and essential, something to do with the real, congested stuff of a lived life? It seems obvious that there should be more pressing worries than this to occupy his mind … He stands there a while, lost in these thoughts. Then, after a second frisk he finds his keys and moves around the gable of the house towards his van.

A man can only know so much, he thinks. Or more accurately, there is only so much a man needs to know.