‘Why would she come here and hide herself away, this April Latimer?’ Evelyn asked.

Quirke still had his eye on the window and the people passing by. They might be mounted on hobby horses, he thought.

‘They’re dangerous people, her family,’ he said.

‘That poor young man, her brother, who killed himself. I would be glad to think he did not kill her, too.’ A ship, white with a blue stripe, had appeared on the horizon, beyond  Santa Klara. ‘The mind has a mind of its own, you know. It does things of which we are not aware. It makes connections, invents fantasies. This is the secret world we move in when we dream.’

‘I’m not dreaming,’ Quirke said stubbornly.

He was looking around for the barman, his old pal.

‘You are worried,’ Evelyn said again.

That trick of hers, to be able to read his thoughts. She had paused to count a row of stitches, speaking the numbers under her breath. She always counted in German. ‘… siebzehn, achtzehn …’ Then she plied her needles again.

‘There was an old Christian Brother, in the place where I was,’ Quirke said – he never spoke the name of Carricklea if he could avoid it. ‘His dentures were loose.’

‘Oh, yes?’

‘They used to make a sound just like that, just like you knitting.’ The needles went still. She looked at him. He turned his eyes away from hers. ‘I think I shouldn’t have made that phone call,’ he said. ‘I shouldn’t have brought Phoebe here. I shouldn’t have involved her.’

‘Why? Why do you think this?’

He was looking again to the window and the sea-bright day shining in it. A brass band was playing somewhere far off; the faint music came in billows, wavering.

‘I don’t know.’

He spotted the waiter, gestured to him.

‘The detective,’ Evelyn said, ‘what is his name, again? I’ve forgotten.’

‘Strafford.’

‘Strafford. He will protect Phoebe. I trust him.’ The waiter arrived, smiling and murmuring. It was Evelyn who spoke to him. ‘My husband will have a very large glass of white wine. And I shall take a tisane.’

Quirke watched the old man shuffle away. He wore a red waistcoat, a white shirt, decidedly grubby at the collar, and dark trousers that sagged in the seat.

‘I’m not much impressed by Inspector Strafford,’ he said.

Evelyn counted another row.

‘He has a gun,’ she said, and severed a length of wool with her teeth.

‘A gun?’

‘Yes, a pistol. I saw it, under his jacket.’

‘What a sharp eye you have, my dear.’

He thought of the young man and his little doll-like girl climbing the steps from the beach. Beware orphanage boys.

‘No,’ he said, with a troubled frown, ‘I shouldn’t have made that call.’

Evelyn was counting stitches again – ‘… zwei, drei …’ Now she interrupted herself and said:

‘But you did, my dear.’

Chapter 42