He replaced the phone and sat motionless, listening to his wife’s soft, slow snores. Slipping on his shoes, he saw her sleeping face reflected in the mirror on the back of the open bathroom door. He turned and leaned down to her, half hoping she would wake just enough for him to kiss her. The dress she wore was his favourite, pale cream crêpe de Chine splashed over with big scarlet blossoms of peony roses. He studied the fat little bead of flesh in the centre of her upper lip, the smooth plane of her forehead, the parchment-pale eyelids filigreed with tiny violet veins. The last thing he saw, when he had stepped into the hall and was easing the door shut behind him, was the gauze curtain languidly billowing up like the sail of a blazoned galleon as it turned aslant of the wind and set forth.

The door closed behind him with a click.

Never to be lost, the memory of that moment already receding from him, with the big-bellied curtain and the sun in the window and, beyond, the indigo-blue sea stretching off to a blurred horizon.

*

They were seated in a huddle, the three of them, at a table in a far corner of the bar. Passing by the model three-master in its glass case, he ran his finger along the top edge of the wooden frame, as if for luck. It too probably imagined its voyage was just about to begin.

Phoebe looked at him blankly as he approached, seeming not to know him. Strafford too, glancing up, took a moment to adjust to his presence. What was the matter with them? They looked as if they had witnessed a car crash.

Music was playing somewhere, softly, blandly.

‘Well, Doctor Lawless,’ Quirke said, attempting a jaunty tone, ‘we meet again, in altered circumstances.’

April Latimer sat as he had seen her sit that first time, in the bar under the arches, with her thin shoulders drawn in around her and her knees pressed together and her fists lifted in front of her, the knuckles touching. But she was not the same person. It was as if an animal, half-wild and long lost, had come creeping back in search of sustenance and shelter, furious at itself and the world for being thus demeaned.

She muttered something that he didn’t catch, and looked away. Her face was drawn and her skin was ashen. He noticed the faint, rapid tremor in her hands. He saw the sleeves of her blouse buttoned tightly at the wrists. He looked at her eyes, the pupils like tiny dark stars. He understood.

‘Someone attacked her, at the hospital,’ Phoebe said in a rush. ‘She threw acid in his face.’

Quirke sat down slowly. A voice in his head, that seemed not his own, demanded of him sharply, What have you done? But why?

‘Who was it?’