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the direction from which they had come. The tall terrace of houses on the other side of the road loomed in the glistening darkness. Humans build square, Quirke thought, nature in the round.
     
"Laura Swan," Mal said. "Sounds vaguely familiar, I don't know why."
     
"She had a place in Anne Street, over a shop. It was a success, it seems. Rich ladies from Foxrock came to her to have their legs shaved, their mustaches dyed, that kind of thing. Fake tans, creams to smooth away the wrinkles. Billy, the husband, travels for a pharmaceuticals firm, probably supplied her with materials at cost price or for nothing. Harmless people, you would think."
     
"But?"
     
Quirke, his hands in his pockets, rolled his great, bowling-ball shoulders. He was developing, Mal noticed, a definite paunch; they were both aging. Under the brim of his black slouch hat Quirke's expression was unreadable.
     
"Something wrong," he said. "Something fishy."
     
"You suspect he might have pushed her?"
     
"No. No one pushed her, I think. But she didn't drown, either."
     
They did not speak again until they came to the house on Rathgar Road. They paused at the gate. All the windows were dark. The garden's mingled fragrances seemed for a second a breath out of the past, a past that was not theirs, exactly, but rather one where their younger selves still lived somehow in a long-gone and yet unaging present. Mal released the dog and it scampered up the path and onto the stone steps and began scratching frantically at the front door, its paws going in a circular blur that made Quirke think of a squirrel on a wheel. The two men followed slowly, their heels crunching on the dusty gravel. The walk was over, yet they were not sure how to make an end.
     
"How was my father?" Mal asked. "Did you see him today?"
     
"Same as usual. He doesn't know how to die. Pure will. You have to admire it."
     
"And do you?"
     
"What?"
     
"Admire it."
     
They came to the foot of the granite steps and paused again. A bat flittered above the garden in the lamplight; Quirke fancied he could hear the tiny, rapid, clockwork beating of its wings.
     
"He hates me," he said. "It's there in his eyes, that glare."
     
"You tried to destroy him," Mal said mildly.
     
"He destroyed himself."
     
To that Mal answered nothing. The dog was still scratching at the door. "Oh, that animal," Mal said. "When he's inside he howls to be let out, and when he's out he can't wait to get back in." They stood, Mal gloomily watching the dog and Quirke looking about for the elusive bat. Mal said: "This young woman, this Deirdre Hunt—are you going to get yourself in trouble again, Quirke?"
     
Quirke sighed, rueful, and scuffed the gravel with the tip of his shoe.
     
"I wouldn't be surprised if it comes to that," he said. "Trouble, I mean."
    4
     
     
HE FOUND IT IMPOSSIBLE TO SLEEP IN THESE NIGHTS THAT SEEMED NO more than the briefest of intervals between the glow of evening and the glare of morning. By four o'clock the daylight was already curling insidious fingers round the edges of the curtains in his bedroom. He had tried wearing a sleep mask but found the blackness disorienting, while the elastic loops that held it in place left angry lateral V-shaped prints along his temples that lasted for hours. So he lay there, desperate as a beetle fallen on its back, trying not to think of all the things he did not want to think of, as the dawn sifted into the room like a radiant gray dust. This morning, as on every other recent morning, he was pondering the puzzle of Billy Hunt and his young wife's death, although this was probably one of those very things he should not be pondering.
     
If he was wise he would have nothing more to do with Billy Hunt and his troubles. He should have had nothing to do with him from the start. His first mistake had been to return his call; his second had been to agree to meet him. Was it that he felt a sympathy for Billy, an empathy with him, since they had both lost young