“Francis,” Kevin said. “There’s probably nothing there.”

“Maybe not.”

“Seriously. I probably imagined it. Is it too late to-”

Shay asked, “Imagined what?”

“Nothing,” I said.

“Kev.”

“Nothing. That’s what I’m saying. I probably imagined-”

“What are they looking for?”

“My bollix,” I told him.

“Hope they brought a microscope.”

“Fucking hell,” Kev said unhappily, rubbing one eyebrow and staring at the uniforms. “I don’t like this game any more, lads. I wish I’d just…”

“Sketch,” Shay said suddenly. “Ma.”

The three of us slid down on the steps, fast and in perfect sync, getting our heads well below the crowd horizon. I caught a glimpse of Ma, between bodies: standing on our front steps with her arms folded tight under her bosom, raking the street with a gimlet eye, like she knew well that this mess was all my fault and she was going to make me pay. Da was behind her, pulling on a smoke and watching the action with no expression at all.

Noises inside the house. One of the techs came out, jerking a thumb over his shoulder and saying something smart-arsed to make the uniforms snicker. He unlocked the van, messed around inside and ran back up the steps holding a crowbar.

Shay said, “He uses that in there, the whole gaff’ll come down around his ears.”

Kevin was still shifting, like the step made his arse ache. “What happens if they find nothing?”

“Then our Francis goes in the bad books,” Shay said. “For wasting everyone’s time. Wouldn’t that be a pity?”

I said, “Thanks for caring. I’ll be grand.”

“Yeah, you will. You always are. What are they looking for?”

“Why don’t you ask them?”

A hairy student in a Limp Bizkit T-shirt wandered out of Number 11, rubbing his head and looking impressively hungover. “What’s the story?”

I said, “Go inside.”

“It’s our steps.”

I showed him my ID. “Ah, man,” he said, and dragged himself back inside, weighed down by the massive unfairness of it all.

“That’s right,” Shay said, “use the badge to intimidate him,” but it was just reflex. His eyes, narrowed against the fading light, were on Number 16.

A great deep boom like cannon fire echoed through the street and off the houses, out over the Liberties. That concrete slab, dropping. Nora flinched and made a small, wild noise; Sallie Hearne pulled the neck of her cardigan tighter and crossed herself.

That was when I felt the shiver in the air, the electric charge starting deep down in the guts of Number 16 and rippling outwards: the techs’ voices rising and then falling away, the uniforms turning to stare, the people swaying forwards, the clouds tightening over the rooftops.

Behind me Kevin said something with my name in it. I realized we were standing up and he had a hand on my arm. I said, “Get off.”

“Frank…”

Inside the house someone called out an order, a sharp fast bark. I had stopped caring who knew I was a cop. “Stay there,” I said.

The uniform in charge of defending the railings was pudgy, with a prissy face like someone’s auntie. “Move along, sonny,” he told me. His accent was six foot deep in bog. “Nothing to see.”

I showed him my ID, which he read with his lips moving. Feet on stairs inside the house, a flash of a face past the landing window. Somewhere Mr. Daly shouted something, but his voice sounded faraway and slowed-down, like it was traveling through a long metal pipe.

“That there,” the uniform told me, handing back the ID, “is Undercover. I wasn’t informed of any undercover presence on the scene.”

“You’re being informed now.”

“You’ll have to speak to the investigating officer. That might be my sergeant or it might be one of the lads from the Murder Squad, depending on what-”

I said, “Get out of my way.”

His mouth puckered up. “There’s no need to take that tone with me. You can wait over there, where you were, until you’re cleared to enter by the-”

I said, “Get out of my way or I’ll punch your teeth in.”

His eyes bugged, but I meant it and he moved. He was still telling me what he was going to report me for when I took the stairs three at a time and shouldered past his startled buddy, in the door.

Have a good laugh at this: deep down, I never for a second thought they would find anything. Me, Mr. Street-Smart Cynic giving newbies my savvy little spiel about how the world is always two steps more vicious than you plan for, I never believed it would do this; not when I opened that suitcase, not when I felt the concrete slab rocking in that dim basement, not when I felt that charge magnetizing the evening air. Right deep down, deeper than everything I’d learned before or since, I still believed Rosie. I believed her all the way down the crumbling stairs to the basement and I believed her when I saw the circle of masked faces turning upwards to me in the white glare of their lights, the concrete slab uprooted and skewed at a wild angle on the floor between cables and crowbars, when I smelled the rich underground reek of something horribly wrong. I believed her right up until I pushed between the techs and saw what they were crouched around: the jagged hole, the dark mat of tangled hair, the shreds that could have been denim and the slick brown bones scored with tiny toothmarks. I saw the delicate curl of a skeleton hand and I knew that when they found the fingernails, somewhere in the layers of muck and dead insects and rotten sludge, the right index one would be bitten down to the quick.

My jaw was clenched so tight I was sure my teeth were going to break. I didn’t care; I wanted to feel that snap. The thing in the hole was curled up like a kid asleep, face tucked down in its arms. Maybe that saved my mind. I heard Rosie’s voice say Francis, clear and amazed by my ear, our first time.

Someone said something snippy about contamination and a hand shoved a mask in my face. I backed away and ran my wrist over my mouth, hard. The cracks in the ceiling were skidding, jumping like a telly screen gone bad. I think I heard myself say, very softly, “Ah, shit.”

One of the techs asked, “Are you OK?”

He was on his feet, way too close to me, and he sounded like he had asked it a couple of times. I said, “Yeah.”

“Gets to you at first, yeah?” one of his team said smugly. “We’ve seen way worse.”

“Are you the one who called it in?” the tech asked me.

“Yeah. Detective Frank Mackey.”

“Are you Murder?”

It took me a second to work out what he was talking about. My mind had slowed down to a standstill. “No,” I said.

The tech gave me a weird look. He was a geeky little object about half my age and half my size, probably the useless prick from earlier. “We called Murder,” he said. “And the pathologist.”

“Safe enough bet,” said his sidekick cheerfully. “She didn’t get in here all by herself.”

He was holding an evidence bag. If one of them touched her in front of me I knew I would batter the living shit out of him. “Good for you,” I said. “I’m sure they’ll be along any minute. I’ll go give the uniforms a hand.”

On my way up the stairs I heard the geek say something about the natives getting restless, and a spatter of snickers from his team. They sounded like a bunch of teenagers, and for one last shard of a second I would have sworn that it was Shay and his mates down in that basement smoking spliff and laughing at dark-edged jokes, that the hall door opened onto the life I had been born in, that none of this was happening.

Outside, the circle of people had thickened and closed in tighter, necks stretching, only a few feet away from my friend the guard dog. His mate had come down from the door to stand next to him at the railings. The clouds had moved in lower over the rooftops and the light had changed, turned a bruised, dangerous purplish-white.

Something moved, at the back of the crowd. Mr. Daly was coming through, straight-arming people out of the way like he barely saw them, eyes fixed on me.