“Did you meet her brother?” he asked.

Sinclair had a catlike way of licking his upper lip after each sip of beer, moving the sharp red tip of his tongue slowly from the left corner to the right; Quirke found this faintly repellent and yet every time he could not but watch, fascinated.

“I met him once or twice, yes,” Sinclair said. “He seemed all right to me. Not a man to make an enemy of.”

“I imagine he had quite a few of them-enemies, I mean.”

They were alone in the bar, this quiet Sunday evening. The barman, hardly more than a big overgrown boy, with a shock of red hair, was wiping the counter with a damp cloth, round and round, marking out gray circles on the black marble that faded as quickly as they were made.

Sinclair was frowning. “Dannie said something about him, last time I saw her,” he said. “Something about some business deal that went wrong.”

Quirke felt a stirring at the very back of his mind, a tickle of interest, of curiosity, that same curiosity that had got him into trouble so many times in his life. “Oh?” was all he said, but he feared that even that was too much. He had the foreboding sense that he must not get involved in the mystery of Richard Jewell’s death; he did not know why, but he felt it.

“I don’t remember the details of the row, if Dannie told me. All very hush-hush, nothing about it in the papers, not even in the ones Jewell didn’t own. Carlton Sumner was involved somehow.”

Quirke knew who Carlton Sumner was-who did not? The only man in the city whose reputation for ruthlessness and skulduggery could rival Richard Jewell’s, Sumner was the son of a Canadian timber baron who had sent him to Dublin to study at University College-the Sumners were Catholic-but he had got a girl pregnant and had been forced to marry her, since her father was in the government and had threatened disgrace and deportation.