He heard afar the faint strains of last night’s palm-court orchestra, but thought perhaps it was only in his imagination. Some years previously he had gone through a period of suffering from mild hallucinations. At the time, he feared he was developing a brain tumour. Tests had been done, and it had turned out his fantasies were the result of having been attacked and beaten by a pair of thugs on the basement steps of a house in Dublin on a winter’s night long ago. Could all that be starting up again? he wondered uneasily now. Well, what of it. He could think of far worse things to be beset by than a ghostly melody on imaginary strings. But no, he was not mistaken. There it came again, ‘The Merry Widow Waltz’. The band must be practising somewhere, or giving a private performance, perhaps, in some gilded salon upstairs.

He wondered if there were such a thing as a merry widower. There was bound to be, of course, and bound to be many more of them than the female kind. All the same, his heart quailed. He had lost a wife, a long time ago. He couldn’t, wouldn’t, imagine losing this one.

‘All right, yes,’ Evelyn said, summoning him back from his maunderings. ‘Let us have a nice lunch, and invite our new friends. It is a good idea.’

He was about to protest that Doctor Cruz and his girl could not by any stretch of the imagination be considered friends, of him or of her. But he didn’t bother. She would only come back with something else, and have the last word.

Chapter 14

Of course, the organising of the thing turned out to be no simple matter. Quirke was already cursing himself for having suggested it. And why had he suggested it, anyway? Because there was something about this Doctor Lawless, something that nagged at him, although he couldn’t have said precisely what it was. She had laid a shadow over his mind, like the shadow that lingers after a nightmare, even though the frightful details of the dream are forgotten. Half the time he was convinced he knew her from somewhere, the other half he told himself it was all in his imagination. Yet if that was the case, why was she haunting his thoughts like this? She was on the tip of his mind, the way a sought-for word would be on the tip of his tongue.

He said nothing to Evelyn of any of this, and wondered why. Why the secrecy, why what seemed to be the sense of shame of some kind? It was almost as if he were on the brink of a love affair and was afraid of being found out. None of it made sense. Yet when he pictured the young woman’s face, something seemed to twang inside him, producing a dark tone that came out of the past.