Dublin Castle

Dublin Castle serves as the workplace of Rob Ryan and Cassie Maddox, its historic exterior enclosing offices adapted to the uniform routines of modern administration. The contrast is practical as well as atmospheric: above ground, they work in a contemporary police setting; below it, an old cellar stores records that reach back into unresolved cases.

Setting and Architecture

The police work from the grounds of Dublin Castle. The interiors have been refurbished into conventional corporate offices, with cubicles, fluorescent lighting, staticky carpet and institution-colored walls. The buildings’ exteriors, by contrast, are protected and remain intact, with old red brick, marble, battlements, turrets and carvings of saints. The contrast places everyday investigative work inside a site whose older architectural character has not been erased by modernization.

For Ryan, the historic grounds are one of the advantages of the job. In winter, the cobblestones and surrounding buildings can lend the walk across the grounds a storybook atmosphere; Cassie Maddox imagines the setting in relation to Inspector Abberline and the Ripper murders. On one clear December night under a full moon, she crossed the main courtyard doing cartwheels. The courtyard is thus not only a route through the workplace but also a space where the partners’ shared imagination and informal companionship briefly surface.

Workplace and Shared Habits

The building’s older spaces persist alongside its offices. The basement, used for old case files, had once been a wine cellar. Unlike the refurbished rooms above, it retains flagstones, columns and low-arched bays. Ryan and Cassie have a pact to return there with candles and look for secret passageways, despite the electric lighting and safety regulations. Their plan turns the neglected cellar into a private imaginative counterpoint to the orderly working environment above.

The castle also provides a setting for their after-hours investigative routine. One evening, past seven, O'Kelly was still in his office while the rest of the building was dark. Cassie went up to the squad room to check Mark and the Devlins on the computer; Ryan went down to the basement files. Cassie left the lights off so O'Kelly would not notice them. The quiet division of tasks makes the building’s vertical arrangement part of the scene: computer inquiries upstairs, archival searching below.

Records and Investigative Significance

In the basement, Ryan finds the cardboard box labeled for Rowan and Savage, which he believes has not been touched since he last saw it more than two years earlier. He checks the statement taken by Missing Persons from Jamie Rowan’s mother. It describes Jamie’s appearance and clothing, including the Strawberry hair clip. The record supplies a concrete identifying detail at a moment when the link to the Devlin case has become definite.

Ryan takes the file upstairs under his jacket, although he recognizes there is no proper reason he should not have it. His sense of guilt makes the ordinary archive feel like a forbidden place, and the case file like a taboo object. Dublin Castle therefore joins the present investigation to an older missing-person inquiry not through a dramatic revelation in the main offices, but through a document retrieved from the cellar. Its layered spaces mirror the work of the case: a modern institution above, unresolved history preserved below.