Dick Fitz, once again seated, looked at him stonily. No booze, then. Gallagher coughed into his fist and looked off to the window, where the rain still streamed. Must be an east wind, he thought. He felt strange. It was as if he weren’t  really there, or was there but entirely detached. Didn’t they say that sometimes a patient undergoing surgery will feel himself drifting up to the ceiling and staying afloat up there, surveying the proceedings on the operating table? That was how he felt. He was suspended on high, the surgeon was working away on him, but the operation was going badly wrong.

Dick Fitz leaned back in his chair and joined his fingers at their tips.

‘The Ambassador tells me he spoke at length with the detective, Stafford – or Strafford, is it? He, in turn, had spoken to the young woman – your niece, Minister, though she’s going under another name, I forget for the moment what it is. She has been working down there, as a doctor, for some years. She has a strange, not to say a shocking, tale to tell.’

‘Aye, she’s a great teller of tales,’ Bill Latimer said, and leaned forward and took another cigarette from the box on the desk and brought out his lighter again. Dick Fitz was eyeing him coldly.

There was a light tap at the door, and the secretary appeared bearing a tray with tea things on it. Dick Fitz gestured at her where to set down the tray. She spoke not a word, and soon was gone.

‘You don’t seem surprised to hear that your niece is alive,’ Dick Fitz said, addressing Latimer.

Latimer gave him back stare for stare, and blew a stream of smoke contemptuously across the desk in his direction. Ned Gallagher could feel the pent-up anger of the man; even though he was sitting a yard away from him, the heat of it reached him like a blast of scorched air.

‘Nothing that girl does could surprise me,’ he said.

Dick Fitz was rummaging among the telegrams again. He was playing for time, Ned Gallagher saw. Or no, he was playing with them, like a cat with a couple of mice.

‘The story she tells,’ Dick Fitz said, still pretending to be engrossed in his papers, ‘is of a family in turmoil, and of the past crimes of – of certain of her relatives.’

Bill Latimer made a sound, a sort of grunt that might have been a laugh.

‘Crimes, is it?’ he said harshly. ‘One man’s crime is another man’s duty.’

Dick Fitz braced his hands against the edge of his desk.

‘There’s duty, and there’s sedition, Minister,’ he said. ‘Your niece told Strafford how you ran arms and ammunition into the country, and supplied them to the IRA in Belfast—’