They were content, it seemed, to keep the relation between them as it was, not unfriendly but not friendly, either, and strictly if tacitly demarcated. Quirke had no idea of what Sinclair thought of him; he knew, however, that Sinclair wanted his job, and he recognized an irritation in the young man, an impatience for Quirke to be gone and himself to be in charge of the department, even though Sinclair knew as well as Quirke did that such a development was not in view, not in the foreseeable future.

An indication that Sinclair was living a solitary life was the fact that he never seemed to mind being called in to work outside regular hours. That Sunday evening he brought with him a faint suggestion of the beach-the smell of suntan oil and salt water. He had been at Killiney all afternoon and had barely arrived home, he said, when Quirke had telephoned.

“Killiney,” Quirke said, “I haven’t been out there in years. How was it?”

“Stony,” Sinclair said.

He was putting on a white coat over his corduroy trousers and cricket shirt-cricket? did Sinclair play cricket?-and was whistling softly to himself. The skin of his face was swarthy and somewhat pitted, and he had a mop of gleaming black curls. His lips were very red, remarkably so, for a man. He would be, Quirke supposed, attractive to women, in an alarming sort of way, with that mouth slashed like a wound across the bottom of his dark and slightly cruel-seeming face.

“I was in Kildare,” Quirke said. Sinclair appeared not to be listening. He had not even glanced through the long window that gave onto the dissecting room and the corpse laid out there under a white nylon sheet. Quirke had not yet said who it was they were going to work on, and was rather enjoying the prospect of what would surely be the young man’s shocked surprise when he heard that it was the famous Diamond Dick Jewell. “Inspector Hackett asked me to come out, since Harrison is down.”