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the Shelbourne Hotel. It had not been intended that they would go for a drink but here they were, perched side by side on stools at the black bar, uneasy in each other’s unaccustomed company. Sinclair drank beer, and Quirke took a cautious glass of wine; he was supposed to be off all alcohol, having spent some weeks the previous winter drying out in St. John’s. The experience had been sobering in more ways than one. He did not want ever to have to go back into that place.
    Sinclair began to speak of Dannie Jewell. He had met her in college, and they still played tennis together out at Belfield. “She’s a good sport,” he said. Quirke did not know how to reply to this. What, he wondered, would constitute being a good sport in a woman, and in this woman, in particular? He tried to imagine Sinclair on the tennis court, diving and slashing, or crouching menacingly at the net, his hairy forearms bared and those shiny curls plastered to his sweating brow. He wanted to hear more of Sinclair’s relations with Dannie Jewell, and at the same time he did not. Of the things in life that Quirke disliked, or feared, or both, the one that ranked highest was change. He and Sinclair had a perfectly good working arrangement; if they were to start trading confidences now, where were they to stop?
    “Did you meet her brother?” he asked.
    Sinclair had a catlike way of licking his upper lip after each sip of beer, moving the sharp red tip of his tongue slowly from the left corner to the right; Quirke found this faintly repellent and yet every time he could not but watch, fascinated.
    “I met him once or twice, yes,” Sinclair said. “He seemed all right to me. Not a man to make an enemy of.”
    “I imagine he had quite a few of them—enemies, I mean.”
    They were alone in the bar, this quiet Sunday evening. The barman, hardly more than a big overgrown boy, with a shock of red hair, was wiping the counter with a damp cloth, round and round, marking out gray circles on the black marble that faded as quickly as they were made.
    Sinclair was frowning. “Dannie said something about him, last time I saw her,” he said. “Something about some business deal that went wrong.”
    Quirke felt a stirring at the very back of his mind, a tickle of interest, of curiosity, that same curiosity that had got him into trouble so many times in his life. “Oh?” was all he said, but he feared that even that was too much. He had the foreboding sense that he must not get involved in the mystery of Richard Jewell’s death; he did not know why, but he felt it.
    “I don’t remember the details of the row, if Dannie told me. All very hush-hush, nothing about it in the papers, not even in the ones Jewell didn’t own. Carlton Sumner was involved somehow.”
    Quirke knew who Carlton Sumner was—who did not? The only man in the city whose reputation for ruthlessness and skulduggery could rival Richard Jewell’s, Sumner was the son of a Canadian timber baron who had sent him to Dublin to study at University College—the Sumners were Catholic—but he had got a girl pregnant and had been forced to marry her, since her father was in the government and had threatened disgrace and deportation. Quirke, who was at college at the same time, remembered Sumner and his girl, though he had been a year or two ahead of them. They were a golden couple about the place, shining all the more brightly against the drabness of the times. After they were married and the child arrived they had dropped out of circulation; then a few years later Sumner, with the backing of his father’s fortune, had suddenly emerged as a fully fledged tycoon. His specialty was buying up venerable and respectably down-at-heel businesses—Bensons’ the gents’ outfitters, the Darleys’ café chain—and sacking the boards and half the staff and turning them into gleaming new money spinners. The rivalry between him and Richard Jewell was an ample source of gossip and vicarious delight in