She heard him lighting a cigarette, without putting down the receiver. It was a knack he had, one of a number, which he liked to show off, with a casual air, whenever the opportunity arose. There was something of the ageless boy about Quirke, for all his darkness. And now here he was, in Spain, on the track of a girl who was supposed to have died. It was an adventure straight out of the Boy’s Own Paper.

‘She was nervous,’ Quirke was saying, ‘nervous, and agitated. In fact, she seemed scared out of her wits. She didn’t take her sunglasses off, not once, all through dinner.’

‘Maybe there’s something the matter with her eyes.’

‘And she left her veil on, too.’

‘Her veil?’ Phoebe gave a delighted squeal of laughter. ‘She hasn’t become a nun, has she? If so, then it’s definitely not April.’

‘No, not a veil, but that Spanish lace thing, what do you call it?’

‘A mantilla?’

‘That’s it. Left it on the whole time, covering her hair. At first I thought she must be afraid of being spotted by someone – a husband, maybe, though how she could imagine her own husband wouldn’t recognise her, even in that get-up, I don’t know.’

‘Didn’t you say her husband was there with her, at dinner?’

‘No, not her husband. Fellow by the name of Cruz, also a doctor, she works with him at the hospital. Sleek-looking fellow, quite a bit older. Altogether too plausible, I’d say.’

‘Too plausible for what?’

‘To be plausible.’

‘Is he her – her lover, do you think?’

‘Something like that, I imagine, yes. I don’t know what kind of arrangements they make, down here. They’re all Catholics, but not like at home.’

‘Oh, yes, those Latin lovers,’ she said drily.

‘The point is,’ Quirke said, lowering his voice, and she pictured him hunching more closely over the phone, ‘the point is, it was us, or me, anyway, that she was trying to keep from getting a good look at her. She was afraid I’d recognise her, if she let me get close enough. All the same, she knew I knew it was her.’

‘But why would she come to dinner with you?’

There was a pause. She heard him taking a draw at his cigarette. He said:

‘Maybe to find out if I had recognised her.’

‘But you said—’

‘I know, I know.’

Another pause, and Quirke’s breathing.

‘This is all crazy, you know,’ she said. ‘The heat must have gone to your head.’

‘It is her, Phoebe. I know it is.’

It had taken her an age to get him off the phone. At one point she had pretended that Paul had arrived and that she would have to go down and let him in, but Quirke kept on. In the end, while he was urging her to come down to Spain, she had hung up on him.