"I don't know why she did it."

Quirke nodded. "Did she leave anything?" Billy peered at him, uncomprehending. "A letter, I mean. A note."

"No, no, nothing like that." He gave a crooked, almost sheepish smile. "I wish she had."

That morning a party of Gardai had gone out in a launch and lifted poor Deirdre Hunt's naked body off the rocks on the landward shore of Dalkey Island.

"They called me in to identify her," Billy said, that strange, pained smile that was not a smile still on his lips, his eyes seeming to gaze again in wild dismay at what they had seen on the hospital slab, Quirke grimly thought, and would probably never stop seeing, for as long as he lived. "They brought her to St. Vincent's. She looked completely different. I think I wouldn't have known her except for the hair. She was very proud of it, her hair." He shrugged apologetically, twitching one shoulder.

Quirke was recalling a very fat woman who had thrown herself into the Liffey, from whose chest cavity, when he had cut it open and was clipping away at the rib cage, there had clambered forth with the torpor of the truly well fed a nest of translucent, many-legged, shrimp-like creatures.

A waitress in her black-and-white uniform and maid's mobcap came to take Quirke's order. The aroma of fried and boiled lunches assailed him. He asked for tea. Billy Hunt had drifted away into himself and was delving absently with his spoon among the cubes in the sugar bowl, making them rattle.

"It's hard," Quirke said when the waitress had gone. "Identifying the body, I mean. That's always hard."

Billy looked down, and his lower lip began to tremble and he clamped it babyishly between his teeth.

"Have you children, Billy?" Quirke asked.