“There’s somebody under the water,” said Minogue. “For an undue period of time, if you take my meaning. Has a Guard taken your names yet?”

“Jases, no! Sure I’m only walking by on me way to get a taxi. What would you, you know?”

Minogue had his notebook out.

“To be sure,” he said. “But we have procedures, now. Naturally ye’d want to help.”

The questions came automatically. Minogue knew the pub the men cited. He squinted at the three in turn while they spoke. The alarmed righteousness in their voices grated on him less because of its boozy earnestness than because it sounded exactly banal enough to be the truth. Instead of listening closely to the men, the Inspector found himself following the canal back inland in his mind’s eye. Fed from the River Shannon, it entered the city of Dublin channelled along by terraced houses and blocks of flats, past derelict warehouses and sheds. He thought of the grassy banks out by Crumlin, the skinny kids swimming by the locks years ago. Portobello, the pillars.

One of the men was getting agitated. He had remembered talking to the barman at exactly ten o’clock. Ten, wasn’t it, Lar, he kept saying to one of the others. Ten, right? Ruygh, Lar, waznit? Kilmartin would goad Malone plenty if he heard a Dublin accent like that. Minogue told him to calm down. He didn’t bother to ask him why he appeared so frantic to reassure a Guard.

Here in the south city centre, the canal water idled in the shade of trees. The architectural glacier which had begun to grind through Dublin in the early sixties had left the city pitted with office buildings so ugly that they absorbed light and space from the streets they had been driven into. Many of the most ferociously insipid of those buildings had been deposited by the canal. Pockets of older houses still remained by its banks, however, and several times over the years, the Inspector had noted the glossy red doors and the restored brickwork, the Saabs and the freshly painted railings. Sunday supplement style or not, he commended people for wanting to live here by the canal. Along with the daily ebb and flow of office workers and cars, they had soaring rates of burglary and car theft to contend with for their troubles.