Strafford lifted his arm and the taxi pulled violently out of the line of traffic, veered across the road and drew to a smoking halt. Strafford hesitated – he felt as if his coat had caught in the cogs of a relentless and fast-moving machine. He climbed into the passenger seat. The window was down. Quirke laid a hand on the door frame.

‘Listen,’ he said in a low voice, ‘I’m counting on you.’

Strafford nodded, though he didn’t quite know what it was he was being depended on for.

Quirke stood back. The taxi driver spun the steering wheel.

The girl in the beach dress walked on, followed by the young man carrying the towel and the straw basket. They were going in the direction of the Old Town.

*

Quirke went back into the hotel. Evelyn, at the table, knitted on, uninterruptable. She smiled at Quirke. He sat down, and sighed. The wine that remained in his glass was tepid. His wife was watching him.

‘I’ll have another if I feel like it,’ he said.

She raised an eyebrow.

‘Did I say anything?’

‘You don’t need to.’

‘Have whatever you want, my dear. I shall not try to stop you. Do I ever?’

He sat back in the chair and laid his wounded hand in his lap. The bandage gave him vaguely the look of a boxer at the end of an exhausting bout.

‘You are worried,’ Evelyn said. ‘Are you afraid this young woman is not the one you think she is?’

‘Of course it is,’ he snapped. Then he looked away, and sighed again. ‘I don’t know. I was sure at first, but now—’

Evelyn freed a length of wool from the ball on the floor at her feet.

‘It’s good to have Phoebe here,’ she said, concentrating on the wool.

‘You think I made the whole thing up just to get her down here, don’t you,’ he said. ‘Maybe I did. As you like to tell me, I don’t know anything about myself or what I do.’

Evelyn clicked her tongue.

‘No no,’ she said, shaking her head, ‘I do not tell you such things. I do not like to tell anyone anything, since I know so little myself.’

Quirke looked out at the bay. How innocent the sea seemed, out there, a sort of huge toy, to be paddled in and swum through and sailed on. He supposed there must be storms, in wintertime. Hard to believe, on a day like this. The people passing by outside were cut off at the waist by the window ledge. They reminded him of that Seurat painting of a Sunday crowd gravely disporting themselves on a grassy island in the Seine. There was something blandly uncanny in that scene, as there was here, too, with those doll-like half-figures gliding past the window. He felt unease stir in him, like a bubble in his gut.