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Yale: good-looking, charming, bright and social. Charley always felt vaguely scruffy around her. Jan and Maggie got along with a functional neutrality, as many wives do when they have no great interest in each other but are occasionally thrown together because of their husbands. Maggie was quite pleasant to Charley, no complaints on that score. ‘Folklore, wasn’t it?’
    â€˜That was her field of study at UCD,’ Malcolm said, ‘Gaelic folklore. And, in a way, I guess that was what led to this other thing. Psychic phenomena, the paranormal.’
    â€˜Oh, Lord, yes,’ Charley exclaimed, suppressing a chuckle. ‘That’s right. Mind-readers and fork-benders.’
    Malcolm smiled ruefully. ‘Yes. It seems a bit silly, but she’s serious about it, and I must say she approaches the subject with a healthy scepticism.’
    â€˜Good.’
    â€˜And, in all fairness, there are a great many incidents that appear to defy reasonable explanation. People do witness strange things, some very strange things.’
    â€˜Yes, no doubt about that.’
    Poor Malcolm. Maggie must be going overboard on this hooey, and it could get awkward if word leaked out. New Haven was small enough as cities go, Yale a bloody hothouse of jockeying egos. A typical Parnassus, slippery when wet or dry.
    â€˜I don’t even know if I should be talking to you about this. It’s so preposterous and – painful.’
    â€˜Come on, mate. Out with it.’
    â€˜Maggie insisted that she needed another body, someone to be at the table with them. I had no interest in it, but she dragged me along to see this woman who’s supposed to be psychic.’
    â€˜A medium, a channel.’
    â€˜Sort of. Have you ever been to anything like that?’
    â€˜Not really,’ Charley said. ‘A few years ago, at the Yeats Summer School in Sligo, I sat in with a group of people who were fooling around with a ouija board, but all they did was use it to make lewd suggestions to each other. That was the year Ned Brady lost his thumb in the rope-pull at the farewell party.’
    â€˜Oh, yes. Well, anyhow.’
    â€˜Your woman.’
    â€˜Yes. So I went along, and it was quite a show. There were none of the things you might expect. No table-rapping, no Indian warriors, no eerie lights or bits of cheesecloth. This woman sat there, and these voices seemed to come from – inside her.’
    â€˜An actress, yes.’
    â€˜Different voices.’ Malcolm was so caught up in it now that he appeared to be looking directly into his own memory. ‘And the thing is, you could hear two or three different voices coming out of her at the same time. I mean, you really could.’
    â€˜That wouldn’t be hard to do.’
    â€˜Possibly, but it looked and sounded real,’ he said. ‘But it doesn’t matter how she did it or where the voice came from. It’s what the voice said that concerns me. And you.’
    â€˜Oh? What was it?’
    Malcolm’s eyes dodged around nervously. ‘One of the voices sounded very small, very young,’ he went on. ‘And several times it said Fiona. ’
    A small hole opened in Charley’s stomach. ‘Yes?’
    â€˜And, Ravenswood. The two words alternated, Fiona and then Ravenswood. I heard them both several times, very clearly.’
    The hole got much larger. The panatella stub slipped in his fingers, and without looking at it Charley put it in the ashtray beside his hand.
    â€˜That can’t be.’
    â€˜It happened,’ Malcolm insisted. ‘I was there.’
    Charley felt a flash of anger, which dissolved at once. He never thought about this, never. He had put it away long ago, in a precious box at the bottom of a trunk at the back of his brain, locked away for ever. Because it could only hurt.
    â€˜It must have been Maggie,’ he said.
    â€˜No.’
    â€˜She must have let on.’ Malcolm shook his