Bill Latimer turned from the window and crossed the room. He took a cigarette from the box on the desk, and lit it with a slim Colibri lighter. He hadn’t greeted Ned Gallagher, hadn’t even looked at him. Bad omen. He grasped the back of the chair that stood beside the one where Gallagher was seated, and moved it a good three feet away to the left and sat down on it. Cordon sanitaire, Gallagher thought.

Dick Fitz resumed his place behind the desk and riffled through a sheaf of what appeared to be telegrams.

‘I thought it best to see the two of you together,’ he said, keeping his eyes on the olive-green slips of paper before him.

He was a lithe, trim fellow in his early forties. Looked as if butter wouldn’t melt in his mouth, until you found yourself fixed in the pencil beam of his pale-blue stare. He wore a three-piece tweed suit, a white shirt with a thin blue stripe, and a blue-and-white polka-dotted bow tie. The tie wasn’t a ready-made one, but the real thing, that he knotted himself. It was his trademark. His nickname was Dicky Bow. He had been educated by the Jesuits at Clongowes, and then by the Prods at Trinity College. An all-round man.

He looked up now and smiled, first at Ned Gallagher, then at the Minister. It wasn’t really a smile, only the shape of one. Both men gazed back at him with a mixture of foreboding, calculation and contempt. Dick FitzMaurice was that rarest of things, an honest politician.

‘We’ve been contacted by the embassy in Madrid,’ he said. The telegrams crackled in his hands. ‘These were coming in throughout the night.’

‘Don’t tell me,’ Bill Latimer said. ‘Franco has been assumed bodily into Heaven.’

Dick FitzMaurice greeted this with a wintry smile. He had bad teeth, crooked and discoloured, and broken, some of them. It was said he had a terror of the dentist.

‘There has been an – an incident, in the north, in San Sebastián. Nice place, I’ve been there – went on my honeymoon, actually. The seafood is very good.’ He frowned. ‘It’s all a bit confused, still. But it’s certainly bad, very bad. A woman was killed there yesterday, shot dead in the lobby of a hotel, the’ – he peered at one of the telegrams – ‘the Hotel Londres. Doctor Evelyn Quirke.’ He looked at Ned Gallagher. ‘You know who she is?’

‘Quirke’s wife, the State Pathologist?’

There was a pause.

‘That’s right,’ Dick Fitz said. ‘You knew they were down there, did you?’

How mildly the question was put, how innocent it sounded. Gallagher shifted in his chair.

‘No,’ he said, ‘I just – I knew Quirke was married to a doctor.’

‘A psychiatrist, yes.’