It was uncanny, how she could read his mind.

‘Then why did you ask?’ he asked.

‘To make sure.’

‘Isn’t that what men are always thinking about?’ he said, with a laugh.

He peered into the glazed grey eye of a fierce-looking fish the name of which, unlikely as it seemed, was rape, according to a sign pinned to its flank.

‘Yes, almost always,’ Evelyn replied equably. ‘Someone in America has made a calculation of it. A very high percentage, I can’t remember what it is. Though how you could find out such a thing is mysterious, no? Men always lie, especially about sex.’ He started to protest but she put a hand on his wrist and squeezed it, saying, ‘As women do also, of course.’

The young woman tending the stall was pretty. She wore her hair in a thick coil that hung down at her left shoulder. She had enormous eyes, the irises so deeply brown they were almost black. She smiled at Quirke and pointed to his hat.

‘Is very good,’ she said. ‘I know – I am from Ecuador.’

He took off the hat and looked at the label inside the crown. She was right – Hecho a mano en Ecuador. Even he could translate that.

‘Let’s buy some oysters,’ Evelyn said. ‘Look at them, they are enormous.’

*

They went for lunch to a restaurant on the quayside just above the Zurriola bridge, across from the city’s second, smaller beach, after which the bridge was named, or perhaps it was the other way around, he didn’t know. They ate a dish that looked like very pale mashed potato but turned out to be salt cod whipped to a smooth paste. For their main course they had sole fried in a great deal of sizzling butter, and sautéed potatoes and French beans sprinkled with almonds.

Evelyn had asked for a green salad on the side. Quirke rarely ate things that were green, and never in their raw state. There were limits.

But the fish was excellent.

He had ordered a bottle of txakoli. Although this one, he noticed, was called txakolina, with an added n and an a. He wondered what the difference was, but couldn’t summon up the nerve to ask.

Their waiter looked like a superannuated toreador. He was short and dark and slightly sweaty, with oiled black hair and a rigid, convex spine.

‘Gypsy blood,’ Evelyn said, when he had taken their plates away.

Quirke said he supposed she was right. ‘Why do they all look so angry all the time?’ he mused.

‘You mean the Spanish?’

‘Well, the ones like him. The way they scowl.’

He watched the little man hurrying about at his tasks. He was top-heavy, with a cask-shaped chest, narrow hips and a ballerina’s dainty, bowed legs.