A guy’s voice in the background: a firm, easy drawl, hard to ignore; familiar, but I couldn’t place it. “Hang on,” Sam said.

I clamped the phone between my ear and my shoulder and started fitting my gun back together. If it wasn’t someone we knew, then it had to be a bad one, to make Sam sound like that; very bad. Irish homicides are still, mostly, simple things: drug fights, burglaries gone wrong, SOS killings (Spouse On Spouse or, depending who you ask, Same Old Shite), this elaborate family feud in Limerick that’s been screwing up the figures for decades. We’ve never had the orgies of nightmare that other countries get: the serial killers, the ornate tortures, the basements lined with bodies thick as autumn leaves. But it’s only a matter of time, now. For ten years Dublin ’s been changing faster than our minds can handle. The economic boom has given us too many people with helicopters and too many crushed into cockroachy flats from hell, way too many loathing their lives in fluorescent cubicles, enduring for the weekend and then starting all over again, and we’re fracturing under the weight of it. By the end of my stint in Murder I could feel it coming: felt the high sing of madness in the air, the city hunching and twitching like a rabid dog building towards the rampage. Sooner or later, someone had to pull the first horror case.

We don’t have official profilers, but the Murder guys, who mostly didn’t go to college and who were more impressed by my psychology semi-degree than they should have been, used to use me. I was OK at it; I read textbooks and statistics a lot, in my spare time, trying to catch up. Sam’s cop instincts would have overridden his protective ones and he would have called me in, if he needed to; if he’d got to a scene and found something bad enough.

“Hang on,” the redhead said. He had switched out of display mode and was sitting up straight on his bench. “You used to be in Murder?” This right here was exactly why I hadn’t wanted to get chummy. I had heard that avid note way too many times, over the past few months.

“Once upon a time,” I said, giving him my sweetest smile and my you-do-not-want-to-go-there look.

Redser’s curiosity and his libido had a quick duel; apparently he figured out that his libido’s chances were slim to none anyway, because the curiosity won. “You’re the one who worked that case, right?” he said, sliding a few lockers closer. “The dead kid. What’s the real story?”

“All the rumors are true,” I told him. On the other end of the phone Sam was having a muffled argument, short frustrated questions cut off by that easy drawl, and I knew that if the redhead would just shut up for a second I could work out who it was.

“I heard your partner went mental and shagged a suspect,” Redser informed me, helpfully.

“I wouldn’t know,” I said, trying to disentangle myself from my bulletproof vest without losing the phone. My first instinct was-still-to tell him to do something creative to himself, but neither my ex-partner’s mental status nor his love life was my problem, not any more.

Sam came back on the phone sounding even more tense and rattled. “Can you wear sunglasses, and a hood or a hat or something?”

I stopped with my vest half over my head. “What the hell?”

"Please, Cassie,” Sam said, and he sounded strained to breaking point. "Please.”

I drive an ancient, bockety Vespa, which is like totally uncool in a town where you are what you spend, but which has its uses. In city traffic it moves about four times as fast as your average SUV, I can actually park it, and it provides a handy social shortcut, in that anyone who gives it a snotty look is probably not going to be my new best friend. Once I got out of the city, it was perfect bike weather. It had rained during the night, furious sleety rain slapping at my window, but that had blown itself out by dawn and the day was sharp and blue, the first of almost-spring. Other years, on mornings like this one, I used to drive out into the countryside and sing at the top of my lungs into the wind at the edge of the speed limit.

Glenskehy is outside Dublin, tucked away in the Wicklow mountains near nothing very much. I’d lived half my life in Wicklow without getting any closer to it than the odd signpost. It turned out to be that kind of place: a scatter of houses getting old around a once-a-month church and a pub and a sell-everything shop, small and isolated enough to have been overlooked even by the desperate generation trawling the countryside for homes they can afford. Eight o’clock on a Thursday morning, and the main street-to use both words loosely-was postcard-perfect and empty, just one old woman pulling a shopping cart past a worn granite monument to something or other, little sugared-almond houses lined up crookedly behind her, and the hills rising green and brown and indifferent over it all. I could imagine someone getting killed there, but a farmer in a generations-old fight over a boundary fence, a woman whose man had turned savage with drink and cabin fever, a man sharing a house with his brother forty years too long: deep-rooted, familiar crimes old as Ireland, nothing to make a detective as experienced as Sam sound like that.

And that other voice on the phone was nagging at me. Sam is the only detective I know who doesn’t have a partner. He likes flying solo, working every case with a new team-local uniforms who want a hand from an expert, pairs from the Murder squad who need a third man on a big case. Sam can get along with anyone, he’s the perfect backup man, and I wished I knew which of the people I used to work with he was backing up this time.

Outside the village the road narrowed, twisting upwards among bright gorse bushes, and the fields got smaller and rockier. There were two men standing on the crest of the hill. Sam, fair and sturdy and tense, feet planted apart and hands in his jacket pockets; and a few feet from him, someone else, head up, leaning back against the stiff wind. The sun was still low in the sky and their long shadows turned them giant and portentous, silhouetted almost too bright to look at against skimming clouds, like two messengers walking out of the sun and down the shimmering road. Behind them, crime-scene tape fluttered and whipped.

Sam raised his hand when I waved. The other guy cocked his head sideways, one fast tilt like a wink, and I knew who it was.

“Fuck me briefly,” I said, before I was even off the Vespa. “It’s Frankie. Where did you come from?”

Frank grabbed me off the ground in a one-armed hug. Four years hadn’t managed to change him one bit; I was pretty sure he was even wearing the same banged-up leather jacket. “Cassie Maddox,” he said. “World’s best fake student. How’ve you been? What’s all this about DV?”

“I’m saving the world. They gave me a lightsaber and all.” I caught Sam’s confused frown out of the corner of my eye-I don’t talk much about undercover, I’m not sure he’d ever heard me mention Frank’s name-but it was only when I turned to him that I realized he looked awful, white around the mouth and his eyes too wide. Something inside me clenched: a bad one.

“How’re you doing?” I asked him, pulling off my helmet.

“Grand,” Sam said. He tried to smile at me, but it came out lopsided.

“Oo,” Frank said, mock-camp, holding me at arm’s length and eyeballing me. “Check you out. Is this what the well-dressed detective is wearing these days?” The last time he had seen me, I’d been in combats and a top that said “Miss Kitty’s House of Fun Wants YOU.”

“Bite me, Frank,” I told him. “At least I’ve changed my gear once or twice in the last few years.”

“No, no, no, I’m impressed. Very executive.” He tried to spin me round; I batted his hand away. Just for the record, I was not dressed like Hillary Clinton here. I was wearing my work clothes-black trouser suit, white shirt-and I wasn’t that crazy about them myself, but when I switched to Domestic Violence my new superintendent kept going on at me about the importance of projecting an appropriate corporate image and building public confidence, which apparently cannot be done in jeans and a T-shirt, and I didn’t have the energy to resist. “Bring sunglasses and a hoodie or something?” Frank asked. “They’ll go great with this getup.”