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Tuesday…”
    “Eight o’clock, at Jammet’s,” Quirke said. “My treat.” Their drinks arrived; Quirke lifted his. “Well, cheers.”
    Sinclair smiled queasily; he had the slightly dazed look of a man who has been maneuvered into something without realizing until too late what was being done. Quirke wondered what Phoebe would make of him. He drank his wine; it was remarkable how the taste was softening with each new sip he took.
    *   *   *
     
    In the papers next day the reports of Richard Jewell’s death were unexpectedly muted. The Clarion ran the story on its front page, of course, but confined it to a single column down the right-hand side. The leader page was cleared, however, and given over entirely to accounts of the late proprietor’s life and achievements, along with Clancy’s editorial, which Miss Somers had quietly knocked into more or less literate shape. The Times put the story into three paragraphs at the bottom of page 1, with an obituary inside that was out of date on a number of points. The Independent , the Clarion ’s main rival, which might have been expected to splash the story, instead ran a restrained double-column item on page 3, under a photograph of a distinctly furtive-looking Richard Jewell receiving the seal of a papal knighthood from the Pope in Rome three years previously. All the press, it seemed, was holding back out of nervous uncertainty. In none of the reports was the cause of death specified, although the Clarion spoke of a “fatal collapse.”
    Quirke read this and snorted. He was sitting up in bed in Isabel Galloway’s little house in Portobello, with a cigarette burning in an ashtray on the sheet beside him and a large gray mug of tea, which he had not yet touched, steaming on the bedside table. Morning sunlight streamed in at the low window, and, outside, the bluish air over the canal was hazed already with the day’s heat. Isabel, in her silk tea gown, was seated at the dressing table in front of the mirror, pinning up her hair. “What’s that?” she asked.
    Quirke looked up from the page. “Diamond Dick,” he said. “The papers don’t know what to make of it.”
    He was admiring the cello-shaped line of the woman’s back and the twin curves of her neat bum set just so on the red plush stool. She felt his eye on her and glanced at him sideways past the angle of her lifted arm. “And you?” she asked, with a faint smirk. “Do you know what to make of it?” He could not understand how she could hold three hairpins in her mouth and still manage to speak. The silk sleeve of her gown had fallen back to reveal a mauve shadow in the hollow of her armpit. The harsh sunlight picked out the tiny wrinkles fanning out from the corner of her eye and the faint soft down on her cheek.
    “Somebody shot him, that’s for sure,” he said.
    “His wife?”
    He put his head back and stared. “Why do you say that?”
    “Well”—she extracted one of the pins from her mouth and fastened a wave into place—“isn’t it always the wife? Goodness knows, wives usually have good cause to murder their ghastly husbands.”
    Quirke saw again Françoise d’Aubigny standing between the two tall windows with the softly billowing curtains and turning towards him, holding the snow globe in her left hand. “I don’t think Mrs. Jewell is the type,” he said.
    Catching something in his tone, she glanced at him again.
    “What type is she?”
    “Very French, very self-possessed. A bit on the cold side.” Was she cold, really? He did not think so.
    “And to cap it all, smashing-looking.”
    “Yes, she’s good-looking—”
    “Hmm,” she said to her reflection in the glass, “I don’t like the sound of this at all.”
    “—a bit like you, in fact.”
    “Alors, m’sieur, vous êtes très galant.”
    Quirke folded the newspaper and put it aside and got out of bed. He was in his underpants and a man’s old string vest, which Isabel had found for him at the bottom of a