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the people who commissioned him to do the BMW X3 were off-limits, and that was fair enough. ‘And I won’t give evidence against anyone,’ which was as much as could be expected.
    Garda Templeton-Smith gave him a pass on the BMW and Walter began dropping titbits. Disappointing stuff so far, but he might have coughed up some more useful information in the long run. Should have lasted more than seven weeks, but those were the breaks.
    Who?
    Someone in the station, probably. Over the seven weeks, Templeton-Smith met Walter just once, in a pub. He’d rung the tout once a week. Should have been safe enough, but there was no telling. Someone saw or heard something, yapped about it. It happened.
    Walter tapped the envelope. ‘You can afford more than that. Please.’
    ‘I have to go.’ As Garda Templeton-Smith stood up he put a tenner on the counter. ‘You stay, have a drink on me.’
    Walter shook his head. He picked up the money. ‘I wouldn’t be caught dead drinking in a place like this.’
    ‘Fair enough, you’ve got standards.’
    Walter gave it one last try. ‘Look, Jesus, there’s got to be more you can do – if not more money, somewhere to go—’
    ‘I’m a policeman, Walter, not your guardian angel.’
    ‘You don’t care, do you? You don’t care what happens to me.’
    Garda Templeton-Smith thought for a moment, then he nodded. ‘Don’t give a fuck.’

Day Two
     
Chapter 5
     
    The kettle plugged in, switched on, Danny Callaghan took down his mug and reached for a spoon, his hand knocking against something. When the jar of instant coffee hit the floor, Callaghan barked an obscenity.
    Great start to the day
.
    After he’d cleaned up the coffee and the broken glass, he did the washing-up – the glass from which he’d drunk his orange juice, the bowl from which he’d eaten his microwaved porridge. He put them in the cupboard with the coffee mug he hadn’t used. One bowl, one glass, one mug – and, in the cabinet, one plate – all bought at Tesco the day he moved in. He washed the two spoons he’d used. Part habit from prison, part the urge to keep things simple. Clean as you go, that way a little place like this stays liveable.
    Callaghan set out for the local shopping centre. He passed a petrol station and shop that used to serve as a neighbourhood convenience store. It had already closed down, bought by a developer, when Callaghan moved into his flat. The intention was to build another apartment block, with retail units on the ground floor, but the developer killed the project when the property market collapsed. Now there was no local shop and there wouldn’t be one while the developer awaited a new property boom. Meanwhile, the garage had become an eyesore, the pumps vandalised, the abandoned car wash a haven for teenage lovers in search of ten minutes of frantic privacy.
    It took Callaghan twenty minutes to reach the shopping centre. He bought two newspapers, then he went to the coffee shop andtook a black coffee to a seat by the window. This time of morning the shopping centre had yet to come fully to life. Mostly old people and young women with buggies.
    One bowl, one glass, one mug in his kitchen. In the seven months he’d been out his life had remained small, bare, cramped, not much in it beyond the things that met his immediate needs. Living within a prison routine for eight years, it never occurred to him that life outside might contract into a routine just as narrow.
    He’d had a general intention, when freedom came, to return to some variant of the business he’d set up before he went inside – interior fittings for kitchens, apartments and shops. Throughout his sentence, the country had been full of chatter about opportunity. Once he got out, he recognised that he simply didn’t have the interest in the constant planning and assessing involved in running a business.
    ‘Take control,’ Novak told him. ‘If you’re not in control of your life, someone else will be.’ Which