"I don't give a tinker's damn what you told me." Andrews's voice was rising. "You've told me more than enough already. You told me it would all be back on track by now, do you remember that? Instead there's fucking…injunctions everywhere-"

"I told you to calm the hell down and let me sort it, and I'm telling you the same again. I've everything under control."

"You do in your hole. Don't you dare talk to me like I'm your emp-your emp-your employee. You're my fucking employee. I paid you. Fucking…thousands and thousands and…'Oh, we'll need another five grand for this, Terry, a few grand for the new councilor, Terry…' I might as well have flushed it down the bog. If you were my employee you'd be fired. Out on your arse. Like that."

"I got you everything you paid for. This is just a minor delay. It'll be sorted. Nothing's going to change. Do you understand what I'm saying?"

"Sorted, my arse. You double-dealing little cunt, you. You took my money and ran. Now I've nothing but a pile of worthless land and the police crawling all over me. How do they…how the fuck do they even know that's my land? I trusted you."

There was a slight pause. Sam let his breath out in a small burst, held it again. Then the deep voice said sharply, "What phone are you calling from?"

"That's none of your bloody business," Andrews said sulkily.

"What were the police asking you about?"

"Some…just some kid." Andrews stifled a belch. "That kid who got killed out there. Her father's the fucker with the fucking injunction… The thick bastards think I had something to do with it."

"Get off the phone," the deep voice said coldly. "Don't talk to the cops without your lawyer. Don't worry about the injunction. And don't ever fucking ring me again." There was a click as he hung up.

"Well," I said, after a moment. "That certainly wasn't sushi pizza and lonely hearts. Congratulations." It wouldn't be admissible in court, but it would be enough to put considerable pressure on Andrews. I was trying to be gracious, but a self-pitying part of me felt this was typical: while my investigation degenerated into an unparalleled collection of dead ends and disasters, Sam's skipped gaily onwards and upwards, success after tidy little success. If I had been the one chasing Andrews, he would probably have made it through the two weeks without calling anyone more sinister than his aging mother. "That should get O'Kelly off your back."

Sam didn't answer. I turned to look at him. He was so white he was almost green.

"What?" I said, alarmed. "Are you all right?"

"I'm grand," he said. "Yeah." He leaned forward and switched off the tape recorder. His hand shook a little, and I saw a damp, unhealthy sheen on his face.

"Jesus," I said. "No you're not." It struck me suddenly that the excitement of victory could have given him a heart attack or a stroke or something, he could have some weird undiagnosed weakness; there are stories like that in squad lore, detectives pursuing a suspect through epic obstacles only to drop dead as soon as the handcuffs click home. "Do you need a doctor or something?"

"No," he said sharply. "No."

"Then what the hell?"

Almost as I said it, the penny dropped. I'm amazed, actually, that I hadn't already caught on. The timbre of the voice, the accent, the little quirks of inflection: I had heard them all before, every day, every evening; a little softened, lacking that abrasive edge, but the resemblance was there and unmistakable.

"Was that," I said, "was that by any chance your uncle?"

Sam's eyes snapped to me and then to the door, but there was no one there. "Yeah," he said, after a moment. "It was." His breathing was fast and shallow.

"Are you sure?"

"I know his voice. I'm sure."

Regrettable though this may be, my main reaction was an intense desire to laugh. He had been so bloody earnest (Straight as a die, lads), so solemn, like a GI making a speech about the flag in some terrible American war movie. At the time I had found it endearing-that kind of absolute faith is one of those things that, like virginity, can only be lost once, and I had never met anyone who had retained it into his thirties before-but now it seemed to me that Sam had spent much of his life trundling happily along on sheer dumb luck, and I had a hard time working up much sympathy for the fact that he had finally stepped on a banana skin and gone flying.

"What are you going to do?" I asked.

His head moved blindly from side to side, under the fluorescent lights. He must have thought of it, surely: we were the only two there, one favor and one push of the Record button and the phone call could have been about that Sunday round of golf, anything.

"Can you give me the weekend?" he said. "I'll take this to O'Kelly on Monday. I just…not right now. I can't think straight. I need the weekend."

"Sure," I said. "Are you going to talk to your uncle?"

Sam glanced up at me. "If I do, he'll start covering his tracks, won't he? Getting rid of the evidence before the investigation starts."

"I assume he would, yes."

"If I don't tell him-if he finds out that I could have given him the heads-up, and I didn't…"

"I'm sorry," I said. I wondered, fleetingly, where the hell Cassie was.

"Do you know the mad thing?" Sam said, after a while. "If you'd asked me this morning who I'd go to, if something like this happened and I didn't know what to do, I'd have said Red."

I could think of nothing to say to this. I looked at his blunt, pleasant features and suddenly felt oddly disengaged from him, from the entire scene; it was a vertiginous sensation, as if I were watching these events unfold in a lighted box hundreds of feet below me. We sat there for a long time, until O'Gorman banged in and started shouting about something to do with rugby, and Sam quietly put the tape in his pocket and gathered up his things and left.

That afternoon, when I went for a smoke break, Cassie followed me outside.

"Have you got a light?" she asked.

She had lost weight, her cheekbones had sharpened, and I wondered whether this had happened unnoticed over the whole course of Operation Vestal or-the thought gave me a prickle of unease-just over the past few days. I fished out my lighter and handed it to her.

It was a cold, cloudy afternoon, dead leaves starting to build up against the walls; Cassie turned her back to the wind to light her cigarette. She was wearing makeup-mascara, a smudge of something pink on each cheek-but her face, bent over her cupped hand, still looked too pale, almost gray. "What's going on, Rob?" she asked, as she straightened up.

My stomach plummeted. We've all had this excruciating conversation, but I don't know of a single man who thinks it serves any useful purpose, nor of a single occasion when it has had a positive result, and I had been hoping against hope that Cassie would turn out to be one of the rare women who can leave it alone. "Nothing's going on," I said.

"Why are you being weird at me?"

I shrugged. "I'm wrecked, the case is a mess, these last few weeks have done my head in. It's not personal."

"Come on, Rob. It is too. You've been acting like I have leprosy ever since…" I felt my whole body tighten. Cassie's voice trailed off.

"No, I haven't," I said. "I just need some space right now. OK?"

"I don't even know what that means. All I know is you're freaking out on me, and I can't do anything about it when I don't understand why."

Out of the corner of my eye I saw the determined set to her chin, and I knew I wasn't going to be able to dodge this one. "I'm not freaking out," I said, hideously uncomfortable. "I just don't want to make things any more complicated than they already are. I am very definitely not capable of starting a relationship right now, and I don't want to give the impression-"