‘There was another nun, in that place, I remember,’ he said. ‘Much less frosty – warm, in fact. Sister Rose. My first love. She used to give us our weekly bath, on Saturday night, two of us at a time, one at either end of the tub, facing each other. I can see her now, her rolled-up sleeves and pink arms, her wimple tied back with something, a piece of ribbon, I suppose. She would kneel down by the side of the bath and soap us all over, first one of us, then the other, and scrub and scrub. The moment I always waited for, in dread and hot excitement, was when she would reach down between my legs, under the water, and joggle around there vigorously, all the while keeping her eyes carefully averted, of course.’ He paused. ‘Pleasure is most intense when you don’t understand the source of it.’

Evelyn sipped again at the fragrant concoction in her cup.

‘You are very – what is the word for quietly thinking?’

‘Contemplative?’ he offered.

‘Yes. You are very contemplative, this evening. Quite the philosopher.’

She lifted her eyes again, and they gazed at each other briefly, in a silence the significance of which neither of them could have explained. Then Quirke laughed, and shrugged, and held the whiskey glass aloft, like a chalice.

‘Don’t mind me,’ he said. ‘It’s the drink that’s thinking.’

A tiny jewel of amber light glinted in the last drop of the liquor in the bottom of the glass.

Chapter 7

He woke in the night, instantly alert, and prey to a nameless fear. Was there someone in the room? He lifted his head from the pillow and peered into the shadows, but saw nothing there, no narrow-faced fellow with moustaches and a dagger, and no slim-hipped, sloe-eyed dusky girl in a bar apron, either. The only movement he could detect was the slight stirring of the gauze curtain in the breeze at the open window.

With a sigh, he let his head drop back on to the pillow, and made himself listen to the hushed sound of that long wave outside falling, then gathering itself and falling again. Presently, the sense of alarm dissipated and his nerves quietened. He still didn’t know what it was that had wakened him. Probably some fragment of a dream, already forgotten.

He thought again of the young woman at the café with the Irish accent. The table at which she and her gentleman companion had sat was quite far back under the stone arcade, and in the latening evening light Quirke had got no clear impression of her, except that she was thin and dark-haired, and seemed agitated in some way. He had guessed her to be in her middle twenties, perhaps a little older. It seemed to him that he had seen her before, a long time ago. But if so, where?