Quirke, who was at college at the same time, remembered Sumner and his girl, though he had been a year or two ahead of them. They were a golden couple about the place, shining all the more brightly against the drabness of the times. After they were married and the child arrived they had dropped out of circulation; then a few years later Sumner, with the backing of his father’s fortune, had suddenly emerged as a fully fledged tycoon. His specialty was buying up venerable and respectably down-at-heel businesses-Bensons’ the gents’ outfitters, the Darleys’ cafe chain-and sacking the boards and half the staff and turning them into gleaming new money spinners. The rivalry between him and Richard Jewell was an ample source of gossip and vicarious delight in the city. And now Diamond Dick was dead.

“What do you think the disagreement was about?” Quirke asked. “A takeover bid, maybe?”

“I don’t know-something like that, I suppose. There was a meeting at Sumner’s place in Wicklow and Richard Jewell stormed out in the middle of it.”

“That sounds serious.”

Sinclair was frowning into the dregs of his beer. He seemed distracted, and Quirke wondered if he knew more about that angrily terminated meeting in Roundwood than he was prepared to admit. But why would he hold something back? Quirke sighed. That niggle at the far end of his mind was growing more insistent by the minute. The itch to find things out would only be eased by being scratched, yet there was a part of him that would rather put up with the irritation than take on the burden of knowing other people’s sordid secrets. From personal experience he knew about secrets, and just how sordid they could be. “You said the girl, Dannie, has troubles?”

Sinclair stirred himself out of his thoughts. “She had a breakdown. I don’t know the details.”

“When was this?”