He had addressed the question to April Latimer, but it was Phoebe who answered.

‘That fellow we saw earlier out there’ – she gestured towards the window – ‘coming up from the beach.’ Orphanage boy. ‘He was going to kill her – wasn’t he, April?’

April turned to her dully, seeming to peer at her as through a veil of clotted cobwebs. The drug, whatever it was, was wearing off, Quirke could see. Her thin shoulders drooped.

‘Someone must have sent him,’ she said. ‘Someone must have told him to—’

At that moment, two things happened simultaneously. Strafford stood up suddenly, looking across the lobby towards the entrance and reaching a hand inside his jacket. A voice spoke behind them.

‘Oh, look,’ Evelyn said gaily, ‘it’s happy families!’

She was coming towards them from the lift, in her peony frock.

‘Down!’ Strafford shouted, and everyone stared at him.

His right arm was outstretched, and he had something in his hand. There was a sense of being on stage, of an unseen audience holding its breath.

The sound of the shot was impossibly loud.

Halfway across the lobby a slight, doll-like young man in a striped shirt and fawn trousers that were too short for him had stopped suddenly and now was lowering himself slowly to his knees. He too had a gun in his hand.

For a moment, Phoebe thought it was indeed all a performance, some silly, lifelike show the hotel had put on to entertain the guests.

‘Stop!’ Quirke said loudly, not knowing who it was he was shouting at. He was still seated, his injured hand lifted like a club and the other clutching the arm of his chair, the knuckles white.

The manikin kneeling on the floor was trying to speak. His expression was one of amazement and fury. His left jaw and the left side of his throat bore a livid rash. His cheek on the other side had been torn open, revealing a bloodied mess of shattered teeth and splintered bone. The bullet had entered there and travelled upwards, tearing through the soft palate and lodging at the base of the brain. His right eye was bulging in its socket, and now it slowly slithered out, attached to a string of shiny, purplish flesh.

Evelyn took a step towards him.

‘Poor child,’ she said, in a strangely soft, subdued voice, ‘my poor child!’

She put out her hand to him. His one eye regarded her with what seemed like bemusement. It was as if he knew her, or someone like her. He lifted the gun and fired, then toppled forward on his face.

Evelyn turned back to Quirke enquiringly, as if he had called out to her, which he hadn’t. Then she looked down at the bloodstain spreading on the front of her dress, a flower-head unfurling among the other scarlet blossoms printed in the silk. Her eyelids fluttered and, lifting her arms out from her sides in a graceful, drooping gesture, she collapsed.