Her name, she told them, was Lawless. Doctor Angela Lawless. She seemed to Quirke almost too convincing, like an actor playing the part of a doctor. She wore a white coat and flat-soled white shoes, and a stethoscope was draped around her neck in just the required fashion. She was older than he had taken her to be when he glimpsed her in the shadowy twilight at the bar Las Arcadas. He would put her now in her late twenties. She was small and quick, and watchful as a bird – he had the impression that at the slightest sudden movement she would fly off with a shrill cry and a clatter of feathers. She would have been pretty, perhaps more than pretty, if her features had been less angular and her manner less intense. Her hair was very black, and her skin was very white, despite the Spanish sun.

She addressed Quirke in what even he knew to be fluent Spanish. When he responded in English, she frowned, and turned to Evelyn.

‘Are you Irish?’ she asked, almost accusingly.

‘I am Austrian,’ Evelyn answered. ‘But my husband, he is Irish, yes.’

The woman blinked rapidly and glanced from one of them to the other with a look that seemed suddenly full of suspicion.

‘You’re Irish too,’ Quirke said. ‘I spotted you at the bar under the arcades. I recognised your accent.’

She said nothing. She had not so much as glanced at his injured hand, as if she believed it to be a deliberate and clumsy pretext for something or other and she was not going to be taken in by it.

‘We’re very busy today,’ she said. She seemed to be making urgent calculations in her head.

An orderly came with a large wad of cotton wool and Quirke took it and pressed it into his palm – the handkerchief that Evelyn had wrapped around his hand at the hotel was by now thoroughly blood-soaked. Quirke felt dizzy. The day was hot, which seemed to be making the pain in his hand worse. The point of the nail scissors had skidded on the hinge of the oyster and struck deep into the soft flesh at the base of his thumb. He had cursed himself for his maladroitness, and ordered a double whiskey from room service.

Evelyn had insisted he must go to the hospital.

‘This is Spain,’ she said. ‘Remember what you told me about Hemingway, that he brushed his teeth only with brandy because there were so many germs in the water?’

‘Ach, that’s just another of Papa’s myths,’ Quirke responded irritably. ‘Besides, this is seawater.’

‘But it was inside an oyster shell! Don’t you know how dangerous that is?’