Early evening was their favourite time, with twilight coming on and the pace of everything slowing down in anticipation of the rowdy nocturnal excitements that would soon start up. They would step out of the hotel and stroll arm in arm along the front, Quirke in slacks and a light jacket and brown suede shoes – not his usual choice of footwear, though secretly he thought them quite racy – and Evelyn in a flowered cotton frock with a cardigan draped over her shoulders. Darkness, when it fell, fell rapidly in these latitudes, and when it had settled they would stop and lean on the rail above the beach and gaze out over the bay, as black and shining as a vast bowl of oil and scattered with the reflections of lights from houses on the hill on the right, or from the little island of Santa Klara at the mouth of the bay.

At such moments, his wife’s happiness was almost palpable to him, a sort of faint, slow vibration running all through her. She was Austrian, and Jewish, and many members of her family had been murdered in the camps. Having ended up by chance in Ireland, she had married, first, a sometime colleague of Quirke’s, and been happy for a while, until her husband died. She had lost a child, too, a boy called Hanno, to an illness the doctors had been too late in diagnosing.

She would speak of none of these things.

‘That was in the old time, when I should have died with the others,’ she would say, with a strange, shy little smile. ‘But I didn’t. And now here we are, you and I.’

*

And so the days went on, and Quirke gradually stopped complaining about being on holiday and having to sleep in a bed that wasn’t his own and to shave in a mirror that showed him his big fleshy face in a harsher light than it should ever be seen. Evelyn made no comment on this, surely, to her, wel come relief, and for his part he made no comment on her not commenting. His wife was not a woman to let a blessing go uncounted, but she was considerate enough to count in silence.

*

There was a café on a square in the Old Town that became their favourite haunt of an evening. They took to sitting outside there, under an old stone arcade, as the nights grew increasingly warm. In the space of a few days, late spring had turned to early summer.

One entire side of the square was taken up by a big ugly building with a clock on the top of it, watched over by a pair of stylised cement lions and flanked on either side by rusted, miniature cannons that didn’t look as if they would have done much defending even in the days when they were still in a condition to be fired.