He requested Evelyn to wait at the bench, while he led Quirke into a vast, crowded, noisy hall with makeshift cubicles closed off behind olive-green curtains. There were two chairs, and the two men sat down facing each other, their knees almost touching. Quirke was still indignant at having been abandoned by Doctor Lawless, and felt he should demand an explanation from this man as to why she should have departed so abruptly and without explanation. But he said nothing. A pulse of pain was beating dully in his hand. He had a dreamlike sense of everything gliding slowly past while he sat here, helpless and immobile. The body, he thought, is jealous of its lifeblood, and lodges protests at its shedding.

Doctor Cruz removed the pad of cotton wool and unwound the handkerchief underneath, on which the blood had stiffened to a kind of brick-coloured sludge. He let Quirke’s hand rest across both his palms, as if it were something dead that had been passed to him for inspection.

‘How did you do this?’ he asked.

‘I was opening an oyster.’

‘Ah. Always a hazardous undertaking. I see the results of it often.’

He stood up and swished his way past the plastic curtain and was gone. Quirke wondered if he would come back, or if he had been abandoned for a second time. He gazed before him blankly at a chart luridly illustrating the inside of the human chest, the epidermis slit and neatly folded back and the ribs removed so as to display the tightly packed organs within. What a thing it is, he mused, the human carcass. It never ceased to surprise him that within the sack of flesh that is a human being there should be pent up such a stew of lurid, squashy, quivering parts.

Presently Doctor Cruz returned, bearing a steel kidney dish in which lay a number of medical instruments, from which Quirke quickly averted his eye. He was not a good patient. He had no stomach for blood, not when it was fresh, and certainly not when it was his own.

The doctor sat down and set about inserting a plastic thread into the eye of a fine, curved needle. He looked as practical and homely as a seamstress at her work. Quirke would not have been surprised if he were to lick a forefinger and thumb and twirl the tip of the thread into a point prior to insertion in the needle’s tiny slit.

‘You are English, yes?’ Doctor Cruz asked.

‘No. Irish.’

‘Ah,’ the doctor murmured, indifferent.

‘Yes, I’m Irish,’ Quirke repeated, and paused. ‘Like your colleague.’

Cruz did not respond to this, only continued his preparations for the repair of Quirke’s gashed hand.