Latimer summoned the waitress and ordered, this time, a glass of Guinness.

‘I shouldn’t,’ he said, giving the waitress a roguish wink, ‘but I’ve had a shock, so I have.’ He laughed, and coughed, and turned back to Phoebe. ‘And the dead arose and appeared to many, eh?’

Again he laughed. Phoebe gazed at him in fascination and disgust. His laughter wasn’t laughter, but a kind of humourless crowing. How did such a man live with himself?

The waitress brought the glass of Guinness. Latimer’s mood had shifted again. He was silent, brooding over his drink. Phoebe made a show of gathering up her gloves and her handbag, but the man seated opposite her seemed not to notice. His thoughts were again turned elsewhere.

‘I used to take her to the zoo, you know, when she was little,’ he mused, rubbing at his chin. ‘She loved the elephants. She said they were like animals from another world. I can see her saying it – “creatures from another world, Uncle Bill”, in that funny little voice she had, so prim and proper. She was strange, even then, a strange little girl.’ He stopped, and regarded Phoebe with sudden malevolence. ‘I never knew about all that stuff, you know,’ he said harshly, ‘about my brother doing things to her and Oscar, or about the two of them, Oscar and herself, later on. I only found out about it long after. If I’d known, I’d have done something.’ He drank, and sighed. ‘Oh, Lord, what a terrible tragedy.’

She eyed him with a shiver of disgust. She knew that lachry mose stoop, the droop of the eye, the sad shake of the head. Her father had made a way of life out of feeling sorry for himself.

‘If April is alive,’ she said, ‘and I’m convinced she is, then her going away must have been to do with her brother, and her father, and what they did to her – all that “terrible tragedy”, as you call it.’

Latimer gave her a quick, sharp glance. He could see she had the measure of him, and he didn’t like it.

‘If she is alive, after all this time,’ he said, ‘I’ll have a thing or two to say to her, when I see her.’

‘Are you intending to go down there, to Spain?’ she asked, unable to keep the note of alarm out of her voice.

He shook his head. ‘Too much on here – there’s an election threatened, God help us.’ He grinned bleakly, showing a set of surprisingly small, even teeth. ‘I’ll get on to the ambassador, or the consul, or whoever. I imagine we have someone to represent us there, in – what do they call it? The Basque country? Though what I’m supposed to ask him to do I don’t know. I suppose he should get in touch with Doctor Quirke, for a start. Where is he staying?’