‘How would they not be angry?’ Evelyn observed. ‘The civil war was terrible. I saw two men being – what is the word? Lynched? Yes, lynched. From a lamp post.’

He gazed at her across the table, holding his knife and fork motionless in mid-air.

‘Where?’ he asked. ‘When?’

She shook her head. ‘Oh, here,’ she said. ‘Back then.’ She was looking down at her plate, with that mild, blank expression she put on when she had said more than she meant to and wished the subject to be dropped. What things she must have seen, Quirke thought, in those wartime weeks when she and her uncle were making their perilous way along this coast.

Given all that had happened in her life, it was a wonder that she slept so peacefully at night. Or so deeply, at least. For how could he know what was going on in her dreams? She would never tell him, that he knew. But a mind doctor’s dreams, now – surely they would be worth hearing of. Or perhaps not. Perhaps she dreamed the same nonsensical stuff that everyone else did, except that to her and her revered Doctor Freud it all meant something other than it seemed. Wasn’t it Freud who said no dream is innocent?

When they left, they forgot the bag of oysters, and the swarthy little waiter had to come running after them with it. Evelyn thanked him, bestowing on him her sweetest smile, but he turned away stony-faced. Quirke regretted what seemed now the much too generous tip he had tucked under the rim of his plate. So angry, all of them.

In the hotel they realised the mistake they had made in not buying a tool to open the oysters with. They could have got one at the stall, but Evelyn didn’t know the Spanish name for it, and Quirke wouldn’t let her point to it – they would be shown up as tourists.

‘But we are tourists,’ Evelyn had said, laughing. ‘You think they don’t see our grey skin and know we are from the north?’

Now she came out of the bathroom.

‘Here is a nail scissors,’ she said. ‘That will do to open them with.’

And that was how Quirke ended up in hospital, and came face to face with the young woman whom he had heard at the café saying something about a theatre.

Chapter 12