“Well now, ladies, you’re grand, grand-all grand!”

Quirke hung back at the end of the corridor, watching with sour amusement Mal making his stately progress through his domain. Quirke sniffed the air. Strange to be up here, where it smelled of the living, and of the newborn living, at that. Mal, coming out of the last ward, saw him and frowned.

“Have a word?” Quirke said.

“As you see, I’m on my rounds.”

“Just a word.”

Mal sighed and waved his students on. They walked a little way off and stopped, hands in the pockets of their white coats, more than one of them suppressing a smirk: the love that was not lost between Quirke and Mr. Griffin was well known.

Quirke handed Mal the fountain pen. “You left this behind you.”

“Oh, did I?” Mal said neutrally. “Thanks.”

He stowed the pen in the inside breast pocket of his suit; how judiciously, Quirke thought, Mal performed the smallest actions, with what weighty deliberation did he address life’s trivia.

“This girl, Christine Falls,” Quirke said.

Mal blinked and glanced in the direction of the waiting students, then turned back to Quirke, pushing his spectacles up the bridge of his nose.

“Yes?” he said.

“I read the file, the one you had out last night. Was there a problem?”

Mal pinched his lower lip between a finger and thumb; it was another thing he did, had always done, since childhood, along with the fingering of the spectacles, the twitching of the nostrils, the loud cracking of the knuckles. He was, Quirke reflected, a living caricature of himself.

“I was checking some details of the case,” he said, trying to sound offhand.

Quirke lifted his eyebrows exaggeratedly. “The case?” he said.