Quirke read this and snorted. He was sitting up in bed in Isabel Galloway’s little house in Portobello, with a cigarette burning in an ashtray on the sheet beside him and a large gray mug of tea, which he had not yet touched, steaming on the bedside table. Morning sunlight streamed in at the low window, and, outside, the bluish air over the canal was hazed already with the day’s heat. Isabel, in her silk tea gown, was seated at the dressing table in front of the mirror, pinning up her hair. “What’s that?” she asked.

Quirke looked up from the page. “Diamond Dick,” he said. “The papers don’t know what to make of it.”

He was admiring the cello-shaped line of the woman’s back and the twin curves of her neat bum set just so on the red plush stool. She felt his eye on her and glanced at him sideways past the angle of her lifted arm. “And you?” she asked, with a faint smirk. “Do you know what to make of it?” He could not understand how she could hold three hairpins in her mouth and still manage to speak. The silk sleeve of her gown had fallen back to reveal a mauve shadow in the hollow of her armpit. The harsh sunlight picked out the tiny wrinkles fanning out from the corner of her eye and the faint soft down on her cheek.

“Somebody shot him, that’s for sure,” he said.

“His wife?”

He put his head back and stared. “Why do you say that?”

“Well”-she extracted one of the pins from her mouth and fastened a wave into place-“isn’t it always the wife? Goodness knows, wives usually have good cause to murder their ghastly husbands.”