The little girl pulled a cartoon face of appeasement at her father, which he greeted with an impatient flick of his hand. Turning to me, she drew the corners of her mouth down in mock panic, said, "Ulp!" and went back into what I guessed was the kitchen. There was room for two people in the hall, but I was still outside. Sara's father smiled at me thinly.

"Mr. Loy, Joe Leonard. Perhaps we should head over first and inspect the, ah, scene of the crime," he said.

"I've just done that."

"I've been having my battles with the council, and I can tell you, you may as well be talking to-"

"Joe."

A petite woman with short black hair and fine, almost elfin features had appeared in the hall.

"Annalise, this is Mr. Loy, the, ah-"

"Private detective. Why is he standing on the doorstep, Joe?"

Joe Leonard turned from his wife and stared past me grimly, his protruding lips pursed, as if I were a tradesman, a roofer perhaps, and he had been hoping to conclude our business without my having to cross the threshold.

"Come in, of course, Mr. Loy," he said, and retreated into the kitchen. I closed the front door behind me and looked at his wife, who raised her eyebrows at me and pulled a cartoon "Ulp!" face not unlike her daughter's, but with a leaven of irony, of malice, almost, as if her husband's moods were trivial and amusing, or as if everything was.

The kitchen was long and narrow and bright, with Velux roof windows and a pine table and chairs by the door and a pale wood floor; glass doors led to a small living room, where Sara and a small boy were grazing on bananas and watching cartoons on TV. A green tree with white lights and cards on the bookshelves above the television reminded us that Christmas was on its way.

We sat around the kitchen table and Annalise Leonard brought me a cup of black coffee; her husband went into the living room and turned the TV off; howls of protest followed him out of the door, which he closed behind him; his children pushed their wailing faces up against the glass, and his wife looked at him almost in pity, as if his stupidity was an affliction.

"They've been watching television all morning," Leonard said.

"Well, if you had got up-"

"I had a night out; you got a lie-in when you had your night out."

"And I didn't complain about the way you looked after the kids then."

"I didn't plonk them in front of the television all morning."

"You don't have them all day every day."

"And I didn't stay in bed until four in the afternoon."

"I didn't ask you to get up."

"You just said I should have."

There was a pause, and then they both turned toward me, embarrassed but strangely expectant, as if I might give them some cut-price marriage counseling. I put what I hoped was a genial expression on my face, intended to suggest that due to temporary deafness I hadn't heard any of their conversation, or that it had been conducted in a language I didn't speak, and made a show of looking at my watch. Annalise gave her husband a forced smile, went into the living room and turned the TV back on, settled the kids on the couch and came back out, pausing at the fridge. When she joined us at the table, she had a glass of white wine in her hand. Leonard flinched at the sight of this, and looked like he was going to finish what he'd started, and I decided I'd better start talking before the bell for round two sounded.

"You were saying you've tried to get the local council to sort the problem out," I said.

"They do clear it up fairly regularly," Annalise said in a tone that suggested her husband was making a fuss about not very much.

"They clean the estate every week. They clear the space between us and the estate every three months," Leonard said. "And they only take the big items away, there's always a rake of small stuff left there. And phoning the council, you may as well be talking to the wall. No one ever calls you back, they don't reply to letters. The whole system is bloody ridiculous."

"I spoke to a councillor for the Green Party. Monica Burke. She has a son in Sara's class. She was going to raise it at a council meeting," Annalise said.

"Monica with the pink jeans and the scary eyebrows? And the mustache? She's going to get a lot done."

"She doesn't have a mustache," said Annalise, trying not to giggle and failing.

"She christened her son Carson. Carson Burke. For fuck's sake. Six-year-old kid sounds like a firm of solicitors."

Annalise laughed, then made a face at her husband, and he made one back, somewhere between a grin and a grimace, and something crackled in the air between them. Their marriage seemed to thrive on tension, the spiky energy of conflict, but it seemed uneasy and sour to me. Sometimes I envied married couples. Not this morning.

"So what exactly do you want me to do?" I said. "I mean, if it's people from the estate dumping a bag of bottles after a session, or an old bike, there may not be a great deal anyone can do, even if they're caught. I can't see the Guards getting too excited. And what are the council going to do, slap a few fines on them? Kind of people who dump their rubbish in the street are the kind who don't get too fussed about being fined, they won't pay them anyway."

Annalise treated her husband to a told-you-so look and drained her glass. Joe Leonard wasn't going to be put off though.

"You know, at this stage, I don't really care, I just…I mean, one of the consequences of our great property boom is to fling people like us into close proximity with…people like that-"

"Fucking knackers, you usually call them," Annalise Leonard offered from the fridge, where she was refilling her glass. "Skangers, scobies, scumbags."

I didn't want any wine-my head was aching from the sherry Vincent Tyrrell had given me-but it would have been nice if she'd asked. Maybe she'd gotten so used to drinking alone that it didn't occur to her.

"I don't pretend to any great fellow feeling," Leonard said. "Especially not after they broke into our car and took the spare tire, stole Sara's bike and trashed it and dumped it in our garden, ripped washing off the line and dragged it through dog shit across the way, and burned a car right out in front of our house. But that's not the point. There are five or six thousand people living in the estate. Walk through there and you'll see, for every house that has garbage dumped in the front garden, there's one with fresh paint and flowers planted. How are those people to thrive if they're being dragged down by the others?"

"The deserving poor," I said, earning myself an overemphatic "exactly" smile from Annalise. Leonard shrugged, unabashed.

"Oh, I know, that's supposed to shut down the argument. But I don't have a problem with that. I mean, if you can't clean up after yourself…if someone shits in the street, there's something wrong with them, we all agree. But people from Michael Davitt Gardens dump their trash in plain sight and we have to put up with it. It isn't fair."

"So what do you do? Evict them? They're council tenants. Where will they go? Into emergency accommodation, where they can do it again? Onto the street?"

"You have to have some kind of sanction. We have a social one, you know, other people will think we're pigs if we do it. We'll think that ourselves. They don't seem to. But we've all got to get along. I wish we didn't. I wished we lived in a middle-class enclave, like the ones we grew up in. But we don't."

For once, Joe Leonard's wife looked in total agreement with her husband, her wine-flushed face wiped clean of mockery and amusement. Most local authority estates had been built far from where the middle classes lived, back in the days when a teacher or a nurse could buy a semidetached house on a private development, days when their teenage kids viewed the prospect of "ending up" in a semi-d as a fate worse than death. But those days were gone, and young couples on good salaries were now living cheek by jowl with people they used to cross the city to avoid, and they were getting a crash course in the social policies that had left many of those people disaffected and alienated, confined to bleak estates decimated by drug abuse and criminality.