What she had taken to be the window was in fact a floor-length sheet of heavy glass in a heavy wooden frame. She opened it and stepped out on to the shallow balcony and set her hands on the wrought-iron rail. The night air was chilly, but pleasantly so. She drew the smell of the sea deep into her lungs.

If April wasn’t dead, then she was alive somewhere, now, at this instant, doing something, living her life, being herself.

Suddenly, to her dismay, she began to weep.

*

Downstairs, Quirke had summoned the creaky waiter and ordered another whiskey. Strafford’s heart sank. He was tired, at the close of this long and trying day. He thought of the room awaiting him upstairs, anonymous, undemanding, a space that knew nothing of him. He thought of the high broad bed and the smooth sheets and the pillow cool against his cheek.

‘I’m not sure I know why you’re here,’ Quirke said to him, lighting yet another cigarette. ‘Are you?’

‘Chief Superintendent Hackett asked me to come.’

Quirke made a cold little smirk.

‘Asked? He’s your boss, isn’t he?’

He was flushed and sweaty, in his rumpled linen jacket and suede shoes, slumped in the chair with his glass of booze in one hand and cigarette in the other and his paunch straining at the buttons of his shirt. Strafford had once been trapped in a corner of a hay field by an angry bull. He had felt no fear then, either.

‘You met Miss Latimer before, didn’t you?’ he said, for the sake of saying something.

Quirke studied the ashy tip of his cigarette.

‘Once, in Dublin, years ago. She was with Phoebe. It was night, it was raining.’ He shrugged. ‘Maybe I’m wrong,  maybe it’s not her at all, and your journey is wasted. But at least’ – a sour laugh – ‘you’ll get a suntan.’

Strafford smiled politely.

‘Did you tell her you remembered her, that you knew who she was?’

Quirke shook his head.

‘Hardly the kind of thing to come out with over dinner in a fancy restaurant. “By the way, I know it’s you and I can see you’re not dead.”’

He took a swig of whiskey. Strafford smelled the alcohol, a waft of it came across the table, sharp and at the same time sickly sweet.

‘Do you know why she ran away and came here?’

‘Maybe she was bored.’

Strafford brushed a lock of hair out of his eyes, then brought his hands together palm to palm and pressed them between his knees. Quirke watched him narrowly.

‘You know about the Latimers, don’t you?’ he asked.

Of course he knew about the Latimers. The story of that scandal was routinely whispered up and down the corridors of every newspaper office, law court and Garda station in the land.