Phoebe was nervous, and kept smoothing a hand over the pair of calfskin gloves she had set down beside her on the table. She felt she was in a dream from which she couldn’t wake. Before April’s disappearance, the word incest had been for her no more than that – a word. The thing itself was something that happened in the Bible, or in the old sagas, not in her own time, not among people she knew. Then had come that day in Howth, in the car, when Oscar Latimer had undone the leather clasps and opened before her the big lurid book recording the childhood horrors that he and his sister had endured under their father’s abusive rule. Now she didn’t know what to think.

The waitress came with the tea tray. Authentically dented silver teapot, milk in a silver jug, a dainty pair of tongs for the sugar cubes, a folded linen napkin plump and white as a snowdrift. The little multicoloured cakes were impossibly fiddly, and made her fingers sticky. She was sorry she had ordered them.

The Minister spotted her at once. He strode across the room and stopped by her table and stood looming over her.

‘Are you going somewhere?’ he demanded, in a tone of truculent jocularity.

Phoebe was puzzled for a moment, then realised she hadn’t taken off her street coat or even unbuttoned it.

‘Oh, no, not at all,’ she said, flustered. Should she stand up to take off the coat? No, it would be too much fuss. She undid the buttons. ‘I hope you didn’t mind my phoning,’ she went on, trying not to stammer. ‘I’m sure you must be very busy.’

‘I’m always very busy,’ he said curtly, and sat down opposite her on a small gilt chair that could hardly accommodate his bulk.

He was a big, forceful, impatient man with a thick shock of reddish hair and small, pale-blue, watchful eyes. There were broken veins in the skin over his cheekbones. He had a reputation for ruthlessness and guile, but was regarded nevertheless as the most able figure in government, one of the ‘new men’ who were reshaping the country. Her father considered him shallow and self-serving, and so did she.

‘Bloody weather,’ he said, brushing at the speckles of rain on the shoulders of his heavy black overcoat, which he shrugged himself out of now and passed to the waitress hovering behind him, without looking at her. He wore a dark-blue three-piece suit, a white shirt and an emerald-green tie. Pinned in his lapel was a little gold ring, a fáinne, the badge by which he announced himself a fervent Irish-speaker. He sat down, plucking at the knees of his trousers. His bushy eyebrows were so pale they were almost invisible.

‘Well, young lady,’ he said, with a feral grin, ‘what can I do for you?’