Strafford appeared not to be listening. He was drinking his coffee and looking out distractedly at the seafront and the people passing by. It was a fresh, clear morning, the night’s fall of dew drying off the ground in big shapeless patches. The air had a rinsed look, and the houses on Santa Klara off at the mouth of the bay seemed much nearer than in fact they were, their details showing in sharp relief.

He too was conscious of the absurd predicament into which he had landed, through no fault of his own. Quirke, he saw, was either suffering from a hangover or was working himself into a fresh bout of rage – or both. How did that wife of his put up with him? She was so calm, so pleasant, so amusedly ironic. He had caught her eye as they were entering the dining room and he was convinced she had given him the ghost of a wink.

He supposed he would have to meet the young woman Quirke believed was April Latimer. What would he say to her? How was he supposed to behave? Good behaviour, of which his father had been the very model, was important to Strafford. To carry oneself well was one of the marks of a gentleman, and he was nothing if not that, by design as well as by nature. He knew the world took him for a prig. Well, let it.

His coffee had gone cold. He looked out again at the morning – it might be a watercolour scene by Raoul Dufy. Who but the likes of Quirke would allow himself to be glum in this paradisal place of beige and white and pellucid blue?

He was sharply conscious of Phoebe where she sat next to him. He breathed deep and caught the scent of her well-scrubbed skin. All high-strung girls smelled the same, in his experience, which, as he would have been the first to admit, wasn’t wide. It was clear that she, for her part, didn’t think much of him.

Now she put down her napkin and stood up.

‘I’m going to telephone the hospital,’ she announced.

Quirke lifted his head and stared at her. She stared back. What was she here for if not to meet the woman he believed was April Latimer?

‘Ah, but what about our shopping expedition?’ Evelyn exclaimed.

Phoebe had a small but seemingly insoluble problem, which was that she didn’t know how to address her father’s wife. She had worked for Evelyn as her receptionist – this was how Quirke had encountered Evelyn in the first place – and then she had been, simply, ‘Doctor Blake’. But Doctor Blake was now her stepmother. Somehow, she couldn’t bring herself to call this self-contained, slightly intimidating, complacently middle-aged woman by her first name, even if she was married to her father. It was a conundrum.