‘Quirke wants me to come down there,’ she said.

That, at least, caught his attention.

‘Down where?’ he asked suspiciously, staring at her.

‘Spain. San Sebastián. It’s in the Basque country, on the coast.’

‘I know where San Sebastián is,’ he informed her stiffly.

‘Sorry.’ She made an exaggeratedly contrite face. ‘You’ve probably been there lots of times.’

‘Really, Phoebe, I don’t have to have been somewhere to know where it is.’ He paused, and then went on, ‘He wants you to come there, you say? He cannot be missing you that much, surely.’

She decided not to respond to this. Paul believed he had the measure of Quirke, and never missed an opportunity to show his disdain for him. Not only did he know about Quirke’s drinking, he also knew that Quirke had pretended for years that Phoebe was not his daughter. And besides, he was a pathologist, which in Paul’s unspoken opinion – unspoken to her, anyway – was hardly more than being a butcher.

‘He wants me to see this woman that he met, and tell him if it could really be April. He has only the haziest notion of what she looks like – or looked like. He met her just once, with me, years ago.’

‘Was he drunk then, too?’ She said nothing, and Paul smirked. ‘Why on earth does he think this woman is your friend?’ he went on indignantly. ‘What put the thought into his head?’

‘I suppose he must have remembered her. And then there are her initials.’

‘Her initials?’

‘She told him, this woman in Spain, that her name is Angela Lawless. You see? Angela Lawless – April Latimer. A. L.’

Like Quirke, she didn’t think the name sounded genuine, somehow. Just as, she reflected, the word ‘father’, for her, didn’t sound quite right when applied to Quirke.

Paul was shaking his head. ‘This is so far-fetched as to be laughable.’

‘The woman is a doctor,’ Phoebe said, ‘and so was April. Two coincidences is one too many, Quirke says.’

‘Well, there’s no such thing as a coincidence,’ Paul said. ‘It is like believing in fairies. These chance things happen all the time, only we don’t notice.’

He had spoken in the lofty, superior way that she had got used to, though there were times, and this was one of them, when it made her quietly furious.

‘You believe in atoms, don’t you,’ she snapped, ‘even though you’ve never seen one.’

He chuckled. ‘If you are trying to start a fight, my dear, you are going to be disappointed.’

Doctor Blake – his ‘Tante Evelyn’ – used to call her ‘my dear’ in just that way, though without the sarcasm.