She was, he saw, uncharacteristically cross.

‘Did that nun give a reason for the first one to walk off like that?’

‘No.’

He brooded.

‘There’s something familiar about her,’ he said.

‘About that nun?’

‘No – the woman, the doctor. What did she say her name was?’

‘Lawless.’

A crimson droplet fell on to the floor between his feet. The point of the scissors must have hit a blood vessel, he thought. But were there blood vessels in that part of the hand? He couldn’t remember – he, who should know about these things. How many bodies had he dissected? He swore under his breath.

‘Why won’t the damned thing stop?’ he muttered.

‘You are the doctor,’ Evelyn observed mildly.

‘I’m a pathologist,’ he snapped. ‘The dead don’t bleed.’

‘Do they not?’

‘They seep a little, sometimes.’

She looked at him in silence for a moment.

‘And sometimes I wish you had taken up some other profession.’

‘What would you prefer me to be?’ he asked, in a savage whisper. ‘A witch doctor, like you?’

He was in pain, his hand was throbbing, and he was growing increasingly indignant. It was she who had handed him the nail scissors. It wasn’t fair – none of it was fair. He had been persuaded to come to Spain against his will, or as good as, and was being required to be ‘on holiday’, and now he had a gashed hand and was at the mercy of hospital doctors – a breed he distrusted and despised, having known a great many of them – one of whom hadn’t even taken the time to examine his hand, but had walked off and abandoned him.

‘I don’t trust foreign medicine,’ he said.

The hospital smell was making him nauseous.

‘We are the foreigners, here,’ Evelyn said.

Quirke grunted. The last thing he needed was to be reasoned with.

Evelyn leaned her weight softly against his hostile shoulder.

‘My poor Q,’ she murmured.

He thought yet again, as so often, how odd it was that this woman should have appeared in his life, a creature in need of shelter from the storms of the world, just as he was, and odder still that she was still with him. Would she leave him someday? If she did, at least she wouldn’t do it out of disillusionment, since he knew she had no illusions about anything, including him.

One tawny autumn evening after rain, when they were sitting together in Evelyn’s little mews house in Dublin, she had looked up from a thick treatise on psychiatry by some famous German doctor whose name Quirke thought he probably should know but didn’t. She was smiling, in the vague, happily bewildered way of someone who has just made a momentous discovery.