‘He told me he had seen April.’

‘April?’

‘My friend, April Latimer.’

‘But isn’t she dead? Didn’t her brother murder her?’

Again, that cold, detached way of speaking, as if he were taking a question from the floor at one of his international gatherings. Even Quirke, the pathologist, didn’t talk like that.

‘Yes.’ She turned away, and looked at the rained-on city passing blurredly by in the window. ‘But her body was never found.’

Could it be? she wondered. Could April be alive? Phoebe did not know what to think, what to feel. It seemed impossible, and almost too painful to think of. She had considered April Latimer to be her best friend, though she had never been sure if April would have felt the same towards her. After Quirke’s phone call, she had stayed awake half the night, turning what he had told her over and over in her mind, examining it for all its implications. As far as she was concerned her friend was dead, actually and, to her, metaphorically – would she now have to dig her up again, not metaphorically at all?

No, no, Quirke must be mistaken. April couldn’t be alive. Could she?

April had been a troubled soul, obsessed with, among much else, her older brother, as he had been with her, except that his obsession had deepened over the years, to the point that he had felt he had no choice but to murder her. But had he? – had he murdered her? He had confessed to the killing, had confessed it to Quirke and to herself, one dreadful, dreadful morning, in a motor car high up on Howth Head.

Yet there the unavoidable fact remained – there was no body. April had vanished, but her corpse was never found.

Paul was regarding her with a sceptical eye. His soft, silky hair was the colour of wet straw. A lock of it tended to topple down over his forehead, giving him a boyish look.

It came to her suddenly that she was a little jealous of him. Probably she always had been. It was a shocking thought, but one that wouldn’t be dismissed. He had only qualified eighteen months ago, and already he was publishing papers in learned journals, and going around the world to important meetings and conventions and giving advice to governments. Her brilliant boy, which was how she used to think of him. But he wasn’t a boy, not any more.

His field was immunology. She had only the vaguest notion of what immunology was – she had checked in Quirke’s copy of Black’s Medical Dictionary, but the word wasn’t even listed. If she asked him to tell her about his work, which she used to do, he would only smile, in his annoyingly arch, remote way, and smoothly change the subject. She was doing first year medicine herself. Should that not be enough to earn her even a modicum of his respect?