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Mickalou with the Toddler, but there was no other choice short of giving up all three of them. Also Mickalou had an easy way of getting on withpeople, even the likes of the Toddler, whom, after all, he had once worked for. And finally Mickalou was a party to none of what had happened there on the corner and knew nothing about it. Why would the Toddler want to harm him?
    Thanking June with her eyes, Biddy made straight for the kitchen door, which she opened quietly. She stepped out, waved once, and fled through the back garden.
    The alley was empty and led to a quiet street and another alley and so forth—all places that Biddy had begged, door to door, in years past. It was her one advantage: knowing how to move through the city in a way that no car could follow.
    Yet she had the feeling that she was being followed. All the more so when, at Harold’s Cross a long mile distant from John Dillon Street, she chanced to step out of the shadows and wait for a bus that would take her to Tallaght, where she did not know what she would find.
    The Toddler or her parents or, worse, both.

CHAPTER 4
Caw
    Dublin
November
    WINTER CAME EARLY that year with cold winds and lashing rain that began in September and scarcely let up for whole weeks on end.
    By November Dublin was blear and chill, as though a permanent pall had fallen over the city. Conversation was muted, voices were hushed, and even lifelong Dubs seemed beset and without hope that the short days would ever brighten.
    On one such morning a telephone call came through to the Murder Squad that was fielded by various staffers and finally routed to Detective Sergeant Bernie McKeon, the squad’s chief of staff, who dealt with most difficult callers.
    A rotund but powerfully built man of middle age, McKeon listened for a while, asked a few questions, then turned his head to glance into the cubicle where Chief Superintendent McGarr was presently staring down at a cup of coffee, as though attempting to divine some secret from its rising vapors.
    McGarr had slipped his hands into the pockets of his dark suit, and his hat—a bowler now in winter—was still on his head, even though he had arrived a full half hour earlier.
    Seated to his immediate left with an arm on the desk and a newspaper opened in his lap was a much larger and older man who was nattily attired in a pearl gray vested suit and black brogues. Superintendent Liam O’Shaughnessy—McGarr’ s second-in-command—was also wearing a hat, a magnificent homburg that matched the suit.
    True, it was chilly in the old building that had once served as a barracks for the British Army, but the early-morning scene—the coffee, the staring, the newspaper, the hats—was a ritual that McKeon knew better than to disturb without good cause. Or at least until McGarr produced the bottle of malt from the lower right-hand drawer and topped up his coffee. “The Chief,” as he was known to the staff, had been up all night investigating another suspected murder in Lahinch in distant Clare, and he could be…irascible was not quite a strong enough term, when tired.
    Omertà, they called it jokingly: the “code of silence.” Once it was broken, their day of work would begin with a formal meeting in the cubicle and questions from the two that would keep everybody hopping often long into the night.
    “I’m sorry, the chief is tied up. Where are you now? Oh. I realize it’s a long way, but could I ask you to call into our office here in Dublin Castle?” McKeon listened some more, then said, “Yes, he will see you. Personally. It’s just that he’s presently in a, er, planning conference. It’s quite important, but I can assure you he’s most interested in what you have to say. In person would be best, if it’s not too much to ask. Another possibility is for us to send out a detective to interview you. In private, of course.”
    It was the technique McKeon employed to separate crank and scurrilous tipsters from those who truly