The detective sat behind his cluttered desk with his back to the window. The air in the room was blue with cigarette smoke. His hat hung on a nail in the wall, beside a flyblown calendar that was a dozen years out of date. The rank of Chief Superintendent was a recent promotion, which he had accepted reluctantly and with bad grace, to the surprise and annoyance of his superiors. He had protested that he was perfectly happy as he was, but in the end had agreed to the new position, on condition that he could keep his old, pokey little office, where for so many years he had been happily perched, like a sailor in the crow’s nest.

He rose to greet her, giving her his wide-mouthed, froggy smile. She noticed flecks of grey at his temples, but otherwise he seemed not to have changed at all since she had last seen him – four years ago, was it? His shiny blue suit looked very like the one he used to wear then. The tie seemed the same, too. Across the top of his forehead there was a hat-wearer’s narrow band of babyishly pale skin. It pleased her, more than she would have expected, to find him much as she remembered him.

‘Sit down, sit down,’ he said, shuffling his feet and doing his snuffly chuckle. ‘I’d offer you a cigarette, except I suppose you still smoke those fancy ones that you used to.’ He pressed a bell push on the corner of his desk. ‘Will you have a cup of tea? Nice cup of Garda barracks “tay”?’

‘Yes, that would be lovely.’ She smiled, and groaned inwardly. More tea.

‘Did you get drenched, on your way here?’ he enquired solicitously.

‘It’s not raining.’

‘Is it not? It was, a minute ago.’ He turned about in his chair with a grunt and looked out of the window. ‘April,’ he said, the name giving Phoebe a start, until she realised it was the month and not her missing friend he was speaking of. He went on, ‘An undependable time of year – you wouldn’t know what it’s going to do,’ and she understood her mistake. Her nerves were so much on edge that everything seemed a sign or portent. Hackett turned back from the window. ‘Tell me,’ he said, ‘how is that father of yours, at all? I haven’t spoken to him since I don’t know when.’

‘He’s very well. He’s married – did you know?’

‘So I heard, indeed. He sent an invitation to the wedding, to me and the missus. Very thoughtful, very kind.’

‘But you didn’t go.’

‘No, no. Too busy, altogether.’

‘Ah. I see.’