Slamming shut the door of the taxi, Phoebe turned, and paused to gaze up at the hospital’s white-pillared façade. The place looked altogether too cheery and bright to be a house for the sick. It reminded her of a toy she had when she was a child, consisting of a set of painted wooden blocks that could be assembled and reassembled flat in its box into a seem ingly infinite number of variants of a miniature palace. It was, she recalled, a Christmas present from Quirke, in the days when he was still masquerading as her favourite uncle. For this and other deceptions she had long ago forgiven him. One had to make do with life’s building blocks, the unasked-for gift that couldn’t be brought back to the shop and exchanged for something better.

She went up the steps and pushed through the tall swing doors.

The nun behind the reception desk wore a pale-grey habit with celluloid cuffs and a stiff collar, and a comical little white hat topped with a pair of starched white butterfly wings.

‘I am here to see Doctor Angela Lawless.’

The nun, as if reacting to a challenge, shook her head vigorously and poured out a stream of Spanish. Phoebe, taken aback, made to speak again. Before she could do so, the telephone on the desk rang, and the nun answered it. Somewhere in the further reaches of the hospital an electric bell began to blare – Phoebe recognised it as the same one she had heard earlier in the background on the telephone. The nun ignored it, only raised her voice until she was yelling into the phone. Meanwhile, Phoebe took out her diary and scribbled DOCTOR ANGELA LAWLESS on a blank page at the back and held it up for the nun to see. The bell was still ringing. The nun put a hand over the receiver.

‘Ahí está ella,’ she said impatiently, pointing past Phoebe’s shoulder.

Phoebe turned. On the far side of the reception area, at the entrance to a long, light-filled corridor, a youngish woman in a white coat, a doctor, obviously, stood talking to a younger nurse, her back turned to Phoebe. Slender, with narrow shoulders and dark hair cut short. Her ankles looked too frail to support even so slight a frame.

The nurse saw Phoebe staring, and said something to the woman facing her. The bell stopped ringing, leaving behind it a faint, tinny reverberation fading on the air. The nun had put down the phone and was addressing Phoebe again, again in Spanish. Phoebe paid her no heed.

Beyond the glass of the swing doors she saw a taxi pulling up outside and Strafford alighting from it. She had a dizzying sense of things rushing together into a vast, silent collision, like an event in stellar space.