She looked out now at the grey spring rain slithering down out of a greyer sky. At least, she thought, the food and the wine down there were bound to make the trip worth doing.

She stood up from the table and went into the living room, carrying her mug of broth with her. The air in the room was laden with the flabby fumes of the gas fire. She stood by the window, sipping her drink and remembering her lost friend.

What if what Quirke had said was true and April wasn’t dead? What if it were she whom Quirke had stumbled on, by the merest chance? She could as well be in Spain as anywhere else. It would be like April to go off, just like that, without telling anyone, to start up a new life. April was strange. She had been Phoebe’s friend, but Phoebe had no illusions about her. There was something missing in April Latimer, some emotional connection to other people, and to the world.

Her brother had been the same. Oscar Latimer was a successful obstetrician – best baby-puller in town, Quirke used to say of him, and laugh. Then April had disappeared, and Oscar had confessed to her murder, before taking his own life. The whole ghastly business had been more or less hushed up, and even Quirke had been unable to find out all the facts. And April’s corpse had never been found. Curiously, this fact had never struck Phoebe as particularly significant. At the time, she had assumed it had been spirited away by the family and buried in secret somewhere. As time went on, however, her doubts had grown. What if April’s murder was a fantasy dreamed up by Oscar Latimer, for who knew what mad reasons of his own?

There had been some kind of awful, sick thing between April and her brother. When they were children they had both been sexually abused by their father, the famous Conor Latimer, hero of the 1916 Rising and, later, the country’s most successful heart specialist. It had left both of them horribly damaged, of course, Oscar more so than April, as it turned out. Indeed, it could be said of poor Oscar that he had died of a broken soul.

April, when she was still hardly more than a girl, had earned herself a bad reputation around town. People said she was a nymphomaniac. Certainly, she had slept with many men, and not a few women as well, or so rumour had it. Yet Phoebe had been fond of her, for all her faults – perhaps more than fond, she sometimes thought, with a twinge of unease, when she looked back on that never less than fevered friendship.