“‘We’?”

“I-I mean Toby and I. My horse.”

“So you didn’t hear the gunshot?”

“How could I? I was out on the Curragh, miles away.”

Quirke saw that what Mrs. Jewell was holding in her left hand was a snow globe, with a tiny stylized French town in it, complete with houses and streets and a chateau flying a tricolor from its narrow turret. “I feel,” she said, addressing Hackett, “that we are being-how do you say?-cross-examined.” She gave an apologetic little laugh. “But I’m sure I am mistaken.”

Dannie Jewell lifted her glass from the arm of the sofa and took a long drink from it, thirstily, like a child. She held the glass in both hands, and Quirke thought again of Francoise d’Aubigny standing at the window in the embassy that day, with the champagne glass, and of the look she had given him, the odd desperateness of it. Who were these two women, really, he wondered, and what was going on here?

Hackett had lifted both his hands and showed the palms placatingly to Mrs. Jewell. “I’m only asking a few questions, ma’am,” he said easily, “that’s all I’m doing.”

“I should have thought,” Mrs. Jewell said, with a sharper glint to her look now, “there can be no doubt as to what has happened.”

“Well,” Hackett answered, all ease and smiling, “that’s the question, you see-what did happen.”

There was another silence. Mrs. Jewell looked at Quirke, as if for enlightenment, then turned back to Hackett. “I don’t understand, Inspector.” She was holding her gin glass in one hand and the snow globe in the other; she might have been an allegorical figure in a tableau, illustrating some principle of balance or justice.

Dannie Jewell sat down again abruptly on the sofa. With her head bowed she groped beside her blindly to set the tumbler down where it had been before and then covered her face with her hands and let fall a single muffled sob. The other three looked at her. Mrs. Jewell frowned. “This has been a terrible day,” she said, in a tone of mild amazement, as if only now registering the full weight of all that had happened.