"Ah, you don't remember me," he said. "Do you?"

"Of course I do," Quirke lied.

"Billy Hunt. You used to say it sounded like rhyming slang. We were in college together. I was in first year when you were in your last. I didn't really expect you to remember me. We went with different crowds. I was mad into the sports-hurling, football, all that-while you were with the arty lot, with your nose stuck in a book or over at the Abbey or the Gate every night of the week. I dropped out of the medicine-didn't have the stomach for it."

Quirke let a beat of silence pass, then asked: "What are you doing now?"

Billy Hunt gave a heavy, unsteady sigh. "Never mind that," he said, sounding more weary than impatient. "It's your job that's the point here."

At last a face began to assemble itself in Quirke's laboring memory. Big broad forehead, definitively broken nose, a thatch of wiry red hair, freckles. Grocer's son from somewhere down south, Wicklow, Wexford, Waterford, one of the W counties. Easygoing but prone to scrap when provoked, hence the smashed septum. Billy Hunt. Yes.

"My job?" Quirke said. "How's that?"

There was another pause.

"It's the wife," Billy Hunt said. Quirke heard a sharply indrawn breath whistling in those crushed nasal cavities. "She's after doing away with herself."

THEY MET IN BEWLEY'S CAFÉ IN GRAFTON STREET. IT WAS LUNCHTIME and the place was busy. The rich, fat smell of coffee beans roasting in the big vat just inside the door made Quirke's stomach briefly heave. Odd, the things he found nauseating now; he had expected giving up drink would dull his senses and reconcile him to the world and its savors, but the opposite had been the case, so that at times he seemed to be a walking tangle of nerve ends assailed from every side by outrageous smells, tastes, touches.