Phoebe saw him glancing at her left hand, looking for a ring, no doubt, on the third finger. Women often did that, men rarely. Since she was Quirke’s daughter, no doubt he was puzzled by her surname. She wondered if she would get to the stage, always a delicate one, when it would be appropriate to explain to him why she was called Griffin and not Quirke. She rather hoped so. She liked the look of this oddly emaciated, diffident man, with his slight stoop and lean face and pale-grey eyes. An image came to her mind of the two of them together in the Shelbourne Hotel, sitting over drinks at a table by the windows in the lounge, her speaking and him listening, while the sunlight inched across the floor, and the trees on the far side of the street leaned down as if to catch what she was saying.

She blinked, and drew herself upright on the chair, and straightened her shoulders. She didn’t often indulge in daydreams. She thought of Paul, and what she saw was his neat little lightweight suitcase.

There was no chair for Strafford, so he leaned against the wall beside the empty fireplace, with an elbow on the mantelpiece and the fingers of both hands laced together and his ankles crossed. She noticed his shoes, and looked more closely at his suit. These items hadn’t been bought on a detective inspector’s salary. Old money, then, though not a lot of it – the suit was close to threadbare.

Hackett was still rocking himself back and forth on his chair, almost hugging himself, delighted with everything, it would seem, with Phoebe and her sudden alertness, with the singular creature leaning at the fireplace, with himself, even. His granny had been the village matchmaker.

‘Miss Griffin is going down to Spain,’ he said, ‘and is in need of an escort.’

*

Afterwards, she was surprised at herself that she had fallen in so readily with Hackett’s devious plan. He had been so brisk and practical-sounding that it had seemed the most natural thing in the world that she and this detective should travel together to Spain. There were questions that might have occurred to her, for instance as to what Paul Viertel would have to say about it, but they didn’t. Or if they did, she ignored them. She hadn’t realised how fiercely she had been longing for something to happen in her life, for something to change.

She left the Garda station in a state of not unpleasant confusion. She was about to embark on a probably foolhardy and potentially disastrous adventure. All the same, an adventure it would be. When was the last time she had felt such a buzz of excited anticipation?