Jenkins, his head cocked attentively, was watching them with lively attention.

Hackett sighed and shut his eyes and pressed bunched fingers and a thumb to the bridge of his nose, which was as shapeless as a potato and had something of the same grayish hue. “Are you saying,” he said, looking at Quirke again, “that what we have here may not be a suicide?”

Quirke met his gaze. “Just what is it you’re driving at, Inspector?” he asked, putting on a clipped accent. They grinned at each other, somewhat bleakly. As youngsters they had both been keen attenders of the picture palaces of the day.

“Come on,” Hackett said, “let’s go and have another word with the grieving widow.”

In fact, Quirke remembered perfectly well where he had met Francoise d’Aubigny, which was how the independent-minded Mrs. Richard Jewell had introduced herself to him, and he could not think why he had pretended otherwise to the Inspector. It was at a Bastille Day cocktail party in the French embassy the previous summer. There had been a diplomatic flurry early on when someone had declined to shake hands with the Ambassador, an old Petainist with exquisite manners, a majestic mane of silver hair, and a sinister tic in his left cheek. Quirke came upon the woman standing alone at a window overlooking the garden. She was pale and tense, and he did not know what had drawn him to her other than her classical if slightly severe beauty. She was wearing a gown of diaphanous white stuff, high-waisted in what he believed was called the Empire style, and her hair was piled high and bound with a scarlet ribbon; bathed in the gold light from the garden she might have been a portrait by Jacques-Louis David. She was clutching a champagne flute in the intertwined fingers of both hands and almost upset it when he spoke, startling her. He was momentarily taken aback by the look she gave him, at once hunted and haunted, or so it seemed to him. She quickly recovered herself, however, and accepted a cigarette.