‘How did he sound, your father?’ the detective asked, lifting his eyebrows and scanning various objects on his desk, pretending to be short-sighted. She had the impression he was trying not to laugh.

‘Do you mean, was he drunk?’ she asked. ‘No, he wasn’t – at least, not drunk drunk. He doesn’t do that, any more, since he married.’

‘A reformed man, then.’

She smiled. Hackett’s raillery was never more than mild.

‘He’s quite convinced, you know,’ Phoebe said, ‘that the woman he met at the hospital was April Latimer. He’s sure of it.’

Hackett nodded, still looking down, still with his eyebrows lifted.

‘What name is she going under?’

‘Angela Lawless. I think it was the coincidence of the initials that struck him first.’

‘The initials?’

‘A. L. – Angela Lawless, April Latimer.’

‘Ah. I see.’ Hackett was nodding. ‘That would be a coincidence, all right.’ He rolled the tip of his cigarette on the edge of a tin ashtray, and cleared his throat. ‘There must be a lot of people in the world with the same initials. Alvar Liddell. Annie Laurie.’

She knew he was teasing her. Behind him, on the window ledge outside, a seagull alighted and folded its wings, bobbing its head in that peculiar way gulls did, as if it had something stuck in its gullet.

‘Doctor Quirke must have known your friend already, then,’ Hackett said, with a tone of dreamy mildness, contemplating again the objects on the desk before him.

‘Yes, he saw her, with me,’ she said, and she too looked down. ‘We were leaving the Shelbourne one evening, April and I. It was getting dark. My – my father was coming in. We didn’t speak. He was—’

Hackett waited, stroking his lower lip with a thumb and forefinger.

‘A bit under the weather?’ he gently suggested.

‘Yes.’ She clicked open the clasp of her handbag and clicked it shut again. ‘I believe he’s right, you know,’ she said. ‘I believe it was April he met.’

‘I see,’ Hackett said. He straightened an untidy pile of papers on the desk, then extracted another cigarette from the packet, but noticed the half-smoked one he had set down on the edge of the tin ashtray. He sighed.

‘You’ve put me in a pickle, Miss Griffin,’ he said. ‘What you’re telling me is “mere conjecture”, as the barristers like to say.’

‘I know,’ Phoebe said, ‘I know.’ She unclasped her handbag again and this time took out her cigarette case. Hackett advanced the box of matches, pushing it along the desk with the tip of a finger. ‘You know, I never really believed she was dead, and when my father said he had seen her, it was like a light going on inside my head. Of course, I thought, of course it’s her, it has to be.’