Abruptly she rose and without a word to anyone at the table walked swiftly off in the direction of the Ladies’. Cruz watched her go, then turned back to his plate. No one spoke. The minutes trickled past. Then she appeared again, moving more slowly now, it seemed, and sat down and smiled about her blurredly.

‘I stopped to look at the river,’ she said, smiling, then blinked, and frowned. Quirke regarded her with interest. Cruz caught his eye and quickly looked away.

The waiter returned. Coffee? No, they would not take coffee. A digestif? Shakes of the head on all four sides of the table. Quirke cast a glance at Evelyn. What now? Hardly half an hour had passed since Angela Lawless’s arrival, but plainly the evening was at a close. Quirke had the sense of himself, of his entire being, opening in an irresistible, crackling, jaw-breaking yawn. Under the table, his bandaged hand ached. He turned once more to Angela Lawless. She looked away quickly, then down at her plate, and even ate a leaf of lettuce.

He was more than ever convinced that he knew her, somehow, from somewhere. Was there something about him that struck an answering echo in her? Was that why she had got herself up in this ridiculous disguise, afraid that he would recognise her? But why afraid? What harm did she think he might do to her?

She put down her fork and fumbled in her handbag – a dingy thing of pink leather with a broken clasp – and brought out a packet of Spanish cigarettes and lit one. As she smoked she seemed to feel cold suddenly, and drew her shoulders in around her hollowed chest like a pair of bony, bedraggled wings. She murmured something in Spanish to Doctor Cruz. The doctor nodded, in some annoyance, Quirke thought, and placed the fingers of both hands flat on the edge of the  table, preparatory to rising from his chair. He managed a smile, though it was hardly more than a stretching of his lips at one side, and said that they must be going, and thanked Quirke and his wife for a wonderful, wonderful evening.

Quirke, still seated, watched the young woman as she unfolded her scrawny wings and stood up, clutching her bag to her chest, not looking at any of them.

Outside, in the cool stillness of the night, none of the four knew quite what to do. There seemed to be a vaguely distressing recognition of something, of everything, having been left unfinished. Angela Lawless adjusted her mantilla, arranging one frilled edge of it across her shoulders. Along with the sunglasses, which she had still not taken off, it gave the look of a fantastically rarefied and probably poisonous creature, displaced here from some far-off and hardly inhabited tropical zone.