None of it made sense, none of it. Quirke was either drunk, or dreaming. Or—?

She returned to the front room, taking the photograph with her. It reminded her of the little cards of remembrance that families sent out to relatives and friends when someone had died.

Quirke wasn’t drunk when he phoned her in the night, she was sure of that – she knew when Quirke was drunk, from bitter experience – but he had a way of becoming fixated on things, to the point of mania, sometimes, especially when he was bored. And he was bound to be bored, on holiday. And Quirke bored was almost worse than Quirke drunk.

If April wasn’t dead, then the years that had elapsed since her disappearance would have to be run backwards, like a film, and adjusted to accommodate her invisible presence in them. It was a dizzying prospect.

One night, when she was a child of four or five, Phoebe had suffered through a nightmare so terrifying that the memory of it had stayed with her ever since, with awful immediacy. In it, she was wandering through a cemetery on a dark, wintry afternoon. Even yet she could clearly see the graves and the moss-grown gravestones, and the bell jars with bunches of flowers under them rotted to slime, and blurred and wilted photographs of the person who was buried underneath. She could see the yew trees standing like shrouded sentinels, and the narrow pathways running along and crossing each other at right angles. She could even hear the crunch and squeak of the damp gravel under her tread.

Eventually she had come upon a grave, newly dug, with a high mound of wet, yellowish clay, and a little white cross with a name printed on it, to identify who was buried there. She stopped – in the dream she could clearly see herself from outside, halted there, a child in a belted overcoat and thick woollen stockings and laced-up bootees – and a creeping horror came over her. Sprouting at an angle out of the grave, like a withered branch or the thick stalk of a dead flower, was an arm, a bloodless arm with a claw-like hand dangling at the end of it.

She knew the source of the awful vision. In school, she had been taught that girls who told lies would end up like that, buried in a dank wet grave with one arm sticking up, so that everyone would know they were sinful little deceivers. Now, suddenly, that image of the dead arm flashed again into her mind.

Could it be? Could April be at once dead and alive?

*

Outside, the rain had lost heart again and was slowly ceasing. She put on her coat and took up her handbag and her gloves, found an umbrella leaning against the wall behind the door, and hurried down the stairs.