‘This wise Herr Professor,’ she said, tapping a finger on the page of the book lying open on her lap, ‘informs me that what persons such as I suffer from is a lack of affect. Isn’t that interesting?’ Quirke didn’t find it so, but said nothing. He wasn’t absolutely sure what an affect was. ‘A lack of affect – think of that! But I love you,’ she added, ‘and therefore it doesn’t matter.’

To this last Quirke had made no reply. The logic of her words was beyond him, as was so much of her – far, far beyond him.

Chapter 13

Presently, a second doctor appeared. His name, Jeronimo Cruz, was handwritten in block capitals on a laminated badge pinned to the lapel of his white coat. Jeronimo Cruz. It sounded to Quirke like the name of a Mexican bandit in one of those fifteen-minute serials that used to be shown after the main feature in cinemas on Saturday afternoons when he was young.

Doctor Cruz had spoken to the nun behind the reception desk, who in turn had pointed them out to him, and he had come over to where they were seated, the large man with the bleeding hand and the soft-faced woman at his side, who looked vexed.

‘I shall not offer to shake hands,’ the doctor said, in his almost accentless English, and his lips twitched at one corner. Quirke thought to point out, but didn’t, that it was his left hand that was injured.

Cruz was tall and lean – were there no fat people in Spain? – with pale-blue eyes and thin pale lips and a neatly trimmed, sharply pointed, charcoal-flecked silver beard. He must be from the south, Quirke decided, for the skin on his face and the backs of his hands was so deeply tanned it appeared almost black in the creases at the corners of his eyes and mouth.

Quirke recognised him as the man Doctor Lawless had been sitting with outside Las Arcadas. It came to him, with certainty, that he was not her father, as that night he had taken him to be. He couldn’t have said how he knew this. He had been wrong about the man’s age, too, as he had been wrong about the young woman’s. The man was in his fifties, and his hair was prematurely grey, or silver, rather, and probably had been so since he was a young man. His manner was courtly and remote. He wasn’t given to smiling, being of altogether too serious a disposition.