‘I’ll thank you to keep a civil tongue in your head, my miss,’ he said quietly, making that grinding motion with his jaw again. ‘I didn’t come here to get smart answers from the likes of you.’

She was calm. It was easier to face up to him when he stopped pretending to be the hearty man of the world instead of the bully that he really was.

‘April was my friend,’ she said again, simply. ‘I thought I knew her better than anyone did, but I realised afterwards I must have been wrong, and that I didn’t know her at all.’

Latimer pounced. ‘Afterwards? After she died?’

He was hunched forward, his head drawn down between his big shoulders.

‘After she was supposed to have died, yes,’ Phoebe said evenly. ‘After she disappeared and left her friends no word of what had happened or why she had gone.’ She couldn’t keep the bitterness out of her voice. ‘Because I knew in my heart she wasn’t dead. I knew it.’

Latimer shrugged. He had relaxed. She could see he had decided she wasn’t the threat he had feared she would be. What of it, if her father had seen his niece alive? She was still far enough away to be as good as dead.

‘Tell me, who, besides yourself, were these friends of hers?’ he asked. ‘Was there a gang of them?’

‘There was Jimmy Minor—’

‘The reporter fellow, that was killed?’

‘ —And Isabel Galloway.’

He put his head back and flared his nostrils in disdain. ‘The actress one, from up at the Gate Theatre?’ Now he grinned. ‘Wasn’t she your father’s—?’ He made a pantomime show of interrupting himself. ‘Oh, pardon me, what shall I say? Didn’t her and Doctor Quirke go out together, for a while?’

Phoebe knew better than to take him up on this.

‘And Patrick Ojukwu,’ she went on.

This provoked a sour chuckle.

‘The black lad, the Nigerian? I knew about him. He was deported, as I recall.’ You would know it, she thought, since you were in the government then, too. Latimer shook his head, chuckling. ‘That’s a fine crowd for her to be going around with. A showgirl, a scribbler for the papers, a buck nigger—’

‘And me.’

‘And you,’ he said, with a kind of smirk. He looked her up and down with cold amusement, taking in her plain black dress with the white lace collar, her styleless hairstyle, her scuffed black handbag and sensible shoes. ‘You’d have been the odd one out, I’d say, among that gang.’

He picked up his cup and poured tea from it into the saucer and lifted the saucer to his lips with both hands and drank, making slurping sounds. She watched him with distaste.

‘That will be cold,’ she said.