"He got into a car, you know," Sam said, sounding faintly worried. "I didn't know whether to let him drive, after all that drink, but…I might need to talk to him again, sure; I need to keep him on side. I wonder should I ring and see did he get home OK?"
The next day was Friday, two and a half weeks into the investigation, and early that evening O'Kelly called us into his office. Outside the day was crisp and biting, but sun was streaming through the big windows and the incident room was warm, so that from inside you could almost believe it was still summer. Sam was in his corner, scribbling between hushed phone calls; Cassie was running someone through the computer; I and a couple of floaters had just done a coffee run and were passing out mugs. The room had the intent, busy murmur of a classroom. O'Kelly put his head around the door, stuck a finger-and-thumb circle into his mouth and whistled shrilly; when the murmur died away, he said, "Ryan, Maddox, O'Neill," jerked his thumb over his shoulder and slammed the door behind him.
Out of the corner of my eye I could see the floaters exchanging covert eyebrow-raises. We had been expecting this for a couple of days now, or at least I had. I had been rehearsing the scene in my head on the drives to work and in the shower and even in my sleep, waking myself up arguing. "Tie," I said to Sam, motioning; his knot always edged its way towards one ear when he was concentrating.
Cassie took a quick swig of her coffee and blew out a breath. "OK," she said. "Let's go." The floaters went back to whatever they had been doing, but I could feel their eyes following us, all the way out of the room and down the corridor.
"So," O'Kelly said, as soon as we got into his office. He was already sitting behind his desk, fiddling with some awful chrome executive toy left over from the eighties. "How's Operation What-d'you-call-it going?"
None of us sat down. We gave him an elaborate exegesis of what we had done to find Katy Devlin's killer, and why it hadn't worked. We were talking too fast and too long, repeating ourselves, going into details he already knew: we could all feel what was coming, and none of us wanted to hear it.
"Sounds like you've all the bases covered, all right," O'Kelly said, when we finally ran down. He was still playing with his horrible little toy, click click click… "Got a prime suspect?"
"We're leaning towards the parents," I said. "One or the other of them."
"Which means you've nothing solid on either one."
"We're still investigating, sir," Cassie said.
"And I've four main men for the threatening phone calls," Sam said.
O'Kelly glanced up. "I've read your reports. Watch where you step."
"Yes, sir."
"Grand," O'Kelly said. He put down the chrome thing. "Keep at it. You don't need thirty-five floaters for that."
Even though I had been expecting it, it still hit me with a thud. The floaters had never really stopped making me edgy, but all the same: giving them up felt so horribly significant, such an irrevocable first step of retreat. Another few weeks, this meant, and O'Kelly would be putting us back into the rota, giving us new cases, Operation Vestal would become something we worked in scraps of free time; a few months more and Katy would be relegated to the basement and the dust and the cardboard boxes, dragged out every year or two if we got a good new lead. Someone would do a cheesy documentary on her, with a breathy voiceover and creepy credit music to make it clear that the case remained unsolved. I wondered whether Kiernan and McCabe had listened to these same words in this room, probably from someone playing with the same pointless toy.
O'Kelly felt the mutiny in our silence. "What," he said.
We gave it our best shot, our most earnest, most eloquent prepared speeches, but even as I was speaking I knew it was no good. I prefer not to remember most of what I said; I'm sure by the end I was babbling. "Sir, we always knew this wasn't going to be a slam-dunk case," I finished. "But we're getting there, bit by bit. I really think it would be a mistake to drop it now."
"Drop it?" O'Kelly demanded, outraged. "When did you hear me say anything about dropping it? We're dropping nothing. We're scaling back, is all."
Nobody answered. He leaned forward and steepled his fingers on the desk. "Lads," he said, more softly, "this is simple cost-benefit analysis. You've got the good out of the floaters. How many people have ye left to interview?"
Silence.
"And how many calls did the tip line get today?"
"Five," Cassie said, after a moment. "So far."
"Any of them any good?"
"Probably not."
"There you go." O'Kelly spread his hands. "Ryan, you said yourself this isn't a slam-dunk case. That's just what I'm telling you: there are quick cases and slow cases, and this one'll take time. Meanwhile, though, we've had three new murders since, there's some class of a drug war going on up the north side, and I've people ringing me left and right wanting to know what I'm doing with every floater in Dublin town. Do you see what I'm saying?"
I did, all too well. Whatever else I may say about O'Kelly, I have to give him this: an awful lot of supers would have taken this one away from Cassie and me, right at the beginning. Ireland is still, basically, a small town; usually we have a fair idea whodunit almost from the start, and most of the time and effort goes not into identifying him but into building a case that will stick. Over the first few days, as it became clear that Operation Vestal was going to be an exception and a high-profile one at that, O'Kelly must have been tempted to send us back to our taxi-rank brats and hand it over to Costello or one of the other thirty-year guys. I don't generally think of myself as naïve, but when he hadn't, I had put it down to some stubborn, grudging loyalty-not to us personally, but to us as members of his squad. I had liked the thought. Now I wondered if there might have been more to it than that: if some battle-scarred sixth sense of his had known, all along, that this one was doomed.
"Keep one or two of them," O'Kelly said, magnanimously. "For the tip line and legwork and that. Who do you want?"
"Sweeney and O'Gorman," I said. I had a fairly good handle on the names by this time, but at that moment those were the only two I could remember.
"Go home," O'Kelly said. "Take the weekend off. Go for a few pints, get some sleep-Ryan, your eyes are like piss-holes in the snow. Spend some time with your girlfriends or whatever you've got. Come back on Monday and start fresh."
Out in the corridor, we didn't look at one another. Nobody made any move to go back to the incident room. Cassie leaned against the wall and scuffed up the carpet pile with the toe of her shoe.
"He's right, in a way," Sam said finally. "We'll be grand on our own, so we will."
"Don't, Sam," I said. "Just don't."
"What?" Sam asked, puzzled. "Don't what?" I looked away.
"It's the idea of it," Cassie said. "We shouldn't be snookered on this case. We've the body, the weapon, the…We should have someone by now."
"Well," I said, "I know what I'm going to do. I am going to find the nearest non-horrible pub and get absolutely legless. Anyone joining me?"
We went to Doyle's, in the end: overamplified eighties music and too few tables, suits and students shouldering at the bar. None of us had any desire to go to a police pub where, inevitably, everyone we met would want to know how Operation Vestal was going. On about the third round, as I was coming back from the men's room, I bumped elbows with a girl and her drink splashed over, splattering us both. It was her fault-she had reared back laughing at something one of her friends had said, and knocked straight into me-but she was extremely pretty, the tiny ethereal type I always go for, and she gave me a soft appreciative look while we were both apologizing and comparing damage, so I bought her another drink and struck up a conversation.