Quirke turned and walked into the body room and went to Christine Falls’s trolley and pulled back the sheet. He hoped the two assistants did not see the start he gave when he found himself confronted with the corpse of a half-bald and mustached old woman, the eyelids not quite closed and the thin, bloodless lips drawn back in a rictus that revealed the tips of a row of incongruously white, gleaming dentures.

He returned to the office and took Christine Falls’s file from the cabinet and sat down with it at his desk. His headache was very bad now, a steady, dull hammering low down at the back of his skull. He opened the file. He did not recognize the handwriting; it was certainly not his, nor that of Sinclair or Wilkins, and the signature was done in an illegible, childish scrawl. The girl was from down the country, Wexford or Waterford, he could not make out which, the writing was so bad. She had died of a pulmonary embolism; very young, he thought vaguely, for an embolism. Wilkins entered the room behind him, his crepe soles squeaking. Wilkins was a big-eared, long-headed Protestant, thirty years old but gawky as a schoolboy; he was unfailingly, excessively, infuriatingly polite.

“This was left for you, Mr. Quirke,” he said, and laid Quirke’s cigarette case before him on the desk. He coughed softly. “One of the nurses had it.”

“Oh,” Quirke said. “Right.” They both gazed blankly at the slim silver box as if expecting it to move. Quirke cleared his throat. “Which nurse was it?”

“Ruttledge.”

“I see.” The silence seemed a demand for explanation. “There was a party, upstairs, last night. I must have left it up there.” He took a cigarette from the case and lit it. “This girl,” he said, in a brisk voice, lifting the file, “this woman, Christine Falls-where’s she gone?”