‘Anyway, I’d forget about it, if I was you,’ Latimer said, with what she clearly recognised as an edge of menace in his voice. ‘I’ll have a word with Doctor Quirke when he gets back.’

‘Yes,’ she said, not sure what it was she was assenting to.

She had no doubts, any longer, none. April was alive, and this man knew it, for all his scoffing denials.

What had made April abandon everything and flee, letting everyone think she was dead? Had her family made her go, terrified of the scandal there would have been if word had got out about the child, the one she had aborted, hers and her brother’s child? For that was the last, terrible secret Oscar had confided to Phoebe and her father that day in Howth, the secret of the child, April’s impossible child, that April herself had aborted. And when it all went wrong, and April was dying, it was Oscar, the father of her child, who had found her, and saved her, and then, for reasons only he knew, pretended he had murdered her.

Yes, it must have been the family who forced her to flee to a new life elsewhere. Her uncle was in the government, he could easily have arranged it, could have got her false papers and found a place where she could live, in Spain, and a hospital where she could work.

But how did they persuade her? She had already cut herself off from her family – what sway would they have had over her? And her mother – would she have agreed to her daughter’s banishment? What kind of mother would she be, to countenance such a thing? Maybe she wasn’t allowed to be part of it, maybe she wasn’t told. Maybe Bill Latimer and whoever else was involved had let the poor woman believe, like the rest of the world, that April was dead and lost to her for ever.

She gazed at the man before her in a kind of slow amazement. Could even he have been so wicked, so cruel? She closed her eyes briefly. In her life she had seen enough of people to know what they were capable of.

But how strange it was to think, again, of April being somewhere, now, at this moment, doing something, going about her day, sitting in a café, or walking down a hospital corridor, or making love in a white room, her clothes thrown over the back of a chair and the sun striking through a louvred window above the bed. A thing that for years Phoebe had believed to be the case was not the case, and all at once the past, or a part of it as she had thought it to be, was undone.

Yes, she had loved April, had been in love with her, even, a little. She could admit to herself now what she couldn’t have when she still thought April was dead.