Hackett’s voice reminded her of the tea in the café, strong, brown, warm and bittersweet. She found herself smiling again, into the receiver.

‘Miss Phoebe!’ the detective exclaimed. ‘Is it yourself?’ It amused him to exaggerate his Leitrim accent when he spoke to her, playing the country hick that he wasn’t. ‘And what can I do for you, at all?’

She told him of Quirke’s telephone call, and of her encounter with William Latimer. Hackett was silent for a good ten seconds. She could almost hear him thinking.

‘I’m sorry,’ she said, ‘I hope I haven’t—’

‘Come down here to the station, will you?’ he said, shifting to his official voice. ‘I’ll tell them at the desk to expect you. Just tell them your name and they’ll let you through.’

He hung up without saying goodbye.

Phoebe stood for some moments with the receiver in her hand, listening to the disengaged tone and frowning through the small square panes of the phone box into a tangled clump of greenery behind the railings of the square. She felt let down. It was plain, from the way his tone of voice had altered, that Hackett was no more pleased with the possibility of April being alive and living in Spain than William Latimer had been.

She felt as if she were stumbling through a barrier of thickets and thorns. She shouldn’t have called Hackett, any more than she should have called William Latimer. But then, maybe Quirke shouldn’t have called her, in the first place. Maybe the dead were better left in peace – even if they weren’t dead, but had chosen to seem so. After all, just how delighted had Lazarus’s family been, after Jesus restored him to life and he came home rubbing his hands and shouting for his dinner?

The afternoon light had turned to a shade of pearly grey, and above the trees big heavy silver clouds were trundling across the sky. Before leaving the phone box she fixed a hat pin in her hat to keep it from flying away. Everything seemed to be in motion, and nothing seemed content to stay still. The world itself was suddenly volatile.

Chapter 26

She went along pensively by the black railings. She was in no hurry. Shaken by her confrontation with Bill Latimer, she was chary of another possibly troublesome encounter, even though it was she who had just now requested it. Chief Superintendent Hackett, for all his appearance of avuncular good cheer, could be unpredictable.