The old ones gasped and blessed themselves, licking up every second. The morgue boys passed by me and Scorcher with their heads down against the building rain, one of them already bitching over his shoulder about traffic. They came close enough that I could have reached out and touched the body bag. It was just a shapeless crumple on their stretcher, so near flat that it could have been empty, so light that they carried it like it was nothing at all.

Scorch watched them sliding it into the back of the van. “I’ll only be a few minutes,” he said. “Stick around.”

We went to the Blackbird, a few corners away, far enough and exclusively male enough that the news hadn’t made it in yet. The Blackbird was the first pub I ever got served in, when I was fifteen and coming from my first day’s casual work hauling bricks on a building site. As far as Joe the barman was concerned, if you did a grown man’s job, you had earned a grown man’s pint afterwards. Joe had been replaced by some guy with an equivalent toupee, and the fog of cigarette smoke had been improved into an aura of stale booze and BO so thick you could see it heaving, but apart from that nothing much had changed: same cracked black-and-white photos of unidentified sports teams on the walls, same fly-spotted mirrors behind the bar, same fake-leather seats with their guts spilling out, a handful of old fellas on personal bar stools and a clump of guys in work boots, half of them Polish and several of them definitely underage.

I planted Scorcher, who wears his job on his sleeve, at a discreet corner table, and went up to the bar myself. When I brought back our pints, Scorcher had his notebook out and was jotting away with a sleek designer pen-apparently the Murder boys were above cheapo ballpoints. “So,” he said, snapping the notebook shut one-handed and accepting his glass with the other, “this is your home turf. Who knew?”

I gave him a grin with just a touch of warning thrown in. “You figured I grew up in a mansion in Foxrock, yeah?”

Scorch laughed. “Hardly. You always made it clear you were, well, salt of the earth. You were so secretive about details, though, I figured you had to come from some shit hole tower block. I never pictured somewhere this-what’ll we call it?-colorful.”

“That’s one word for it.”

“According to Matthew and Theresa Daly, you haven’t been seen in the area since the night you and Rose flew the coop.”

I shrugged. “There’s only so much local color one man can take.”

Scorch drew a neat smiley face in the head of his pint. “So. Nice to be back home, yeah? Even if this isn’t the way you pictured it?”

“If there’s a silver lining here,” I said, “which I doubt, that’s not it.”

He gave me a pained look, like I’d farted in church. “What you need to do,” he explained to me, “is see this as a positive.”

I stared at him.

“I’m serious. Take the negative, turn it around into a positive.” He held up a beer mat and flipped it over, to demonstrate the concept of turning something around.

Normally I would have communicated to him exactly what I thought of this bat-shit crazy advice, but I wanted something from him, so I kept a lid on it. “Enlighten me,” I said.

Scorcher demolished the smiley face in one long gulp and wagged a finger at me. “Perception,” he said, when he came up for air, “is everything. If you believe that this can work to your advantage, then it will. Do you follow me?”

“Not really, no,” I said. Scorcher gets meaningful on adrenaline, the way some guys get maudlin on gin. I wished I had ordered a short on the side.

“It’s all about belief. This country’s entire success is built on belief. Is Dublin property really worth a grand per square foot? Is it fuck. But that’s what it goes for, because people believe it is. You and me, Frank, we were ahead of the curve there. Back in the eighties, this whole country was in the shit, it hadn’t a hope in hell, but we believed in ourselves, you and me. That’s how we got where we are today.”

I said, “I got where I am today by being good at my job. And I’m hoping to Christ you did too, mate, because I’d like to see this one solved.”

Scorcher gave me a stare that was halfway to an arm wrestle. “I am very fucking good at my job,” he told me. “Very, very fucking good. Do you know the overall solve rate for the Murder Squad? Seventy-two percent. And do you know my personal solve rate?”

He left a gap for me to shake my head. “Eighty-six percent, sonny. Eighty-read-it-and-weep-six. You got lucky when you got me today.”

I gave him a reluctantly impressed grin and a nod, letting him win. “I probably did, yeah.”

“Damn right you did.” Point made, Scorch relaxed back on his bench, winced and shot an irritable glare at a busted spring.

“Maybe,” I said, holding my pint up to the light and squinting thoughtfully at it, “maybe this was both of our lucky day.”

“How’s that?” Scorcher demanded, suspiciously. Scorch knows me well enough to be suspicious on principle.

I said, “Think about this. When you start work on a case, what’s the one thing you want most?”

“A full confession backed by eyewitnesses and forensics.”

“No, no, no. Stay with me here, Scorcher. You’re thinking specific. I need you to think universal. In one word, what’s your biggest asset, as a detective? What’s your favorite thing in all the whole wide world?”

“Stupidity. Give me five minutes with a thicko-”

“Information. Any type, any quality, any quantity, it’s all good. Info is ammo, Scorch. Info is fuel. Without stupid, we can always find a way; without info, we’re nowhere.”

Scorcher considered this. “So?” he asked cautiously.

I spread out my arms and grinned at him. “The answer to your prayers, man.”

“Kylie in a thong?”

“Your professional prayers. All the info you could ever want, all the info that you’ll never get on your own because no one from around here is ever going to tell you, all neatly wrapped up in your very favorite trained observer. Me.”

Scorcher said, “Do me a favor and come down to my level for a second, Frank. Get specific. What do you want?”

I shook my head. “This isn’t about me. It’s about a win-win situation. The best way for us to turn this into a positive is together.”

“You want to be on the case.”

“Forget what I want. Think about what’s good for you and me both-not to mention for the case. We both want a solve here, am I right? Isn’t that everyone’s top priority?”

Scorcher pretended to think that over for a minute. Then he shook his head, slowly and regretfully. “No can do. Sorry, mate.”

Who the hell says No can do? I gave him a grin like a dare. “Are you worried? You’ll still be the lead detective, Scorch. It’ll still be your name on the result. We don’t do solve rates, over in Undercover.”

“Well, good for you,” Scorch said smoothly, not taking the bait. He’d got better at managing his ego, over the years. “You know I’d love to have you onboard, Frank, but my super would never go for it.”

The Murder Squad super is in fact not my biggest fan, but I doubted Scorcher knew that. I raised an eyebrow and did amused. “Your super doesn’t trust you to pick your own team?”

“Not unless I can back up my choices. Give me something solid to show him, Frank. Share some of this famous info. Did Rose Daly have any e nemies?”

We both knew I wasn’t in a position to point out that I had already shared plenty. “None that I know of. That’s one reason why it never occurred to me that she could be dead.”

He looked disbelieving. “What, was she an idiot?”

I said, on a pleasant note that let him figure out whether I was joking, “She was a lot smarter than you’ll ever be.”

“Boring?”

“A long way from.”

“A dog?”

“The neighborhood babe. What the hell kind of taste do you think I have?”