He was fond of her, and missed her quite a bit, at night especially, though not for the obvious reason. It was just that the nights were very long, and he was a bad sleeper, and craved company. He supposed she would come back, sooner or later. Meanwhile, he must get on as best he could with the doilies and the coasters – though he did remove the pink cover from the lavatory lid. Things could have been worse. He had been spared a set of flying china ducks on the wall above the fireplace. That would have exceeded the limits of even his tolerance.

He fetched a glass from the kitchen and poured himself a whiskey from one of the dusty bottles on the sideboard. The room and its furniture seemed to draw back in shock. Drinking, him, at half past four on a Thursday afternoon? He almost never drank alcohol, and certainly not in the daytime. But today he was in something of a dither. What was Hackett thinking of, to send him off to Spain on a hare-brained search for a young woman who was supposed to be dead but who seemingly wasn’t? And all on the word of State Pathologist Quirke, a notorious drunkard.

Still, he had never been to Spain, and he had to admit he was quite looking forward to seeing it, or at least the small part of it that he would see. He wondered what the weather would be like in San Sebastián. He was not a man given to excitements, but just the name, San Sebastián, stirred something in him that he had not experienced since childhood. He pictured coral-blue waters and a tawny shore, and a barquentine sailing straight out of the pages of Robert Louis Stevenson. He laughed at himself. It was Spain that was in question, not the Spanish Main. Not that he knew where or what the Spanish Main might be, or even if it was a real place.

What had come over him, to be entertaining such frivolous fancies? It must be the whiskey, he decided.

He drank the last of it and, to his surprise, found himself pouring another, albeit a very small one. He lifted the glass in an ironic salute to the window and the view in it of the little garden outside, damp and sparkling in the still vigorous light of the latening April afternoon. How did one say cheers in Spanish? Whatever the word, he supposed it would have an upside-down exclamation mark in front of it. He racked his brain, but all he could come up with was ¡Viva España! When he spoke the words, he was taken aback by the loudness of his voice, booming in the silence of the empty house.