‘I’m pretty sure it’s in the car,’ Luke said.

‘Hats, gloves, scarves, glasses. He puts them down for a split second and that’s that, you never see them again. It’s a kind of gift he has,’ Lorna said.

‘You missed Ciara here telling us about the fiend she met in the woods in Peru off her head on drugs,’ Emma told Barry.

‘Did I,’ Barry said absently, pouring the last of the coffee into a cup.

‘It wasn’t a fiend,’ Ciara said. ‘It was a Being.’

The women had moved into the hallway and were putting back on their coats.

Barry followed them out, sipping at his coffee.

‘Aren’t you all good neighbours, all the same,’ he declared.

‘There’s nothing wrong with being civil,’ Anne said.

‘What’ll me and Luke do for lunch?’ Barry asked Lorna.

Lorna opened the front door and stood ­side-­on to let the other women leave first. She reached into her coat pocket expecting to find her car keys there, but they weren’t, which meant she must have left them in the ignition.

‘I’m sure you can fend for yourselves,’ she told her husband.

Lorna was sitting alone at a table in the dining room of the Silver Coast clubhouse. Ciara and Emma had drifted away into the crowd. Anne had returned to the buffet for another cup of tea. The edges of the room thrummed with a tentative liveliness, people walking around exchanging guarded smiles.

At the far end of Lorna’s table an elderly woman was supping on a bowl of vegetable soup the colour and consistency of phlegm. The woman had neither spoken to or acknowledged Lorna and was concentrating entirely on her soup. In front of Lorna was a ham and coleslaw sandwich, soggy in the centre and cardboardy along the crusts. She’d managed one bite and didn’t have the stomach for the rest. It felt wrong to just abandon the sandwich. It felt disrespectful, and though she knew no one present would care whether she finished this little bit of food, the thought she could not dispel from her mind was that Lydia Healy would care. That if some remnant of Healy had survived her death, that remnant was surely here, present in the air of the Silver Coast clubhouse, watching the afternoon unfold. This thought unnerved Lorna, not because it was in any way something she believed but because its continued intrusion in her mind reminded her that she had not particularly liked Lydia Healy, that, finite as their contact had been, she had nonetheless found something lurking and coldly aloof in Healy’s manner and bearing, the way she bluntly avoided eye contact and seemed to speak only in curt, defensive remarks.