She blew the dust from the lid – how lovely dust could be, when it lay like that, like a smooth coating of fur, dull-mauve and almost too soft to touch – and sat down on the side of the bed and set the box on her knees. In it were spools of thread and samples of dress material, and a hat pin with a garnet set in it that was the only thing she had kept from the days when she had worked for Mrs Cuffe-Wilkes at the Maison des Chapeaux on Grafton Street. And there, at last, underneath all the other stuff, was what she had been searching for.

It was only a snap. The print was of the fancy, deckle-edged kind that used to be all the rage at one time. A corner of it had been torn off, and a jagged, whitish wrinkle ran athwart it from top right to bottom left.

She wondered who had taken it – she supposed it must have been Jimmy Minor. He was dead too, now. He had been a reporter, and had got caught up in one of Quirke’s ‘cases’.

The photograph showed April and herself posing in the shade of a tree beside the duck pond in St Stephen’s Green. The tree had white blossoms on it – chestnut, was it? – so the photo must have been taken in late spring or early  summer. The sunlight glared, and she stood in the angle of the tree’s shadow with one shoulder lifted and her cheek pressed against it, in the catlike way that Phoebe remembered so well. Dark hair cut short, the pale, sharp little nose, the wide thin mouth and pointed chin. A striking face, the expression withdrawn and enigmatic. April had never been a beauty, but no one seemed to notice, certainly not those who had desired her, and there had been many of them.

What the camera could not catch, of course, was the sleek, slightly sinister aura with which April surrounded herself, and which played about that sharp little face of hers like foxfire. Nor was there any trace of the dark humour, the taste for mischief-making, and, above all, the sense of a deeply hidden, ineradicable pain.

Yes, April was unhappy, always unhappy, for all the brittle brightness of her manner and the quickness of her wit. And cruel, too, in the way damaged people so often were, in Phoebe’s experience.

A sudden thought rose up and became caught in her mind, like a broken fingernail snagging in silk. If April was alive, who had she meant to deceive by the trick she had played of being dead? Perhaps there had been no choice for her but to disappear. Perhaps she had been under mortal threat, and had fled for her life. But who would have wanted her dead, and why? And for what reason would her brother have pretended he had murdered her, before taking his own life?