against her throat and her teeth bared and her rib cage heaving. It was as if she had been fleeing headlong from something and at last had made her escape, although the thing, what ever faceless thing it was, was still out there, hiding in the dark, waiting for another night to come creeping out again and terrorize her.

She switched on the bedside lamp and laid her head back on the damp, hot pillow and squeezed her eyes shut. She did not want to be awake, but there would be no sleep now for a long time. Sighing, she got up and put on her silk dressing gown- peignoir was what it was properly called, she liked the word. It had belonged to the woman who for the first nineteen years of her life she had thought was her mother.

She went out to the kitchen. Night smells, she had often noticed, were different from day ones, were mustier, fainter, more insidious. She drew open the lapels of her silk gown and put her face into the hollow there and sniffed. Yes, her smell too was different, a babyish, secret staleness.

The thought came to her that she had never got used to being alive.

She took a half-full bottle of milk from the cupboard and shook it to make sure that it had not curdled- she had no refrigerator- and poured some into a blackened saucepan and set it on the gas ring to heat, adding a spoonful of raspberry jam. There was a slice of pound cake left from the piece she had bought two days ago to have after her dinner; it had gone hard and crumbly, but she needed to eat something. Behind her the milk begin to seethe, and she whipped it off the flame just as it was about to come to the boil. A wrinkled scum had formed, of course, and she had to lift it off as best she could with a teaspoon, trying not to let it break, a thing that always made her feel slightly sick. She poured the scalding, pink-tinged milk into a mug and unwrapped the cake from its greaseproof paper and put it on a plate and brought the mug and the plate to the table and sat down. She shut her eyes and sat motionless for a moment, then reopened them. She had not pulled down the blind- she hated blinds, they looked to her like unrolled sheets of pale-gray skin- and the window beside her was a tall rectangle of shining blackness. It was not very late, one o’clock, maybe, yet all outside was silent. She drank her milk with the jam in it and ate the morsel of dry, sweet cake. Her heartbeat even yet was uneven, from the stress of the forgotten dream.

Her thoughts turned, of course, to April, as they always did in sleepless hours such as these, although she thought of her in the daytime, too. It was strange, the sense of helplessness she had about her friend. Indeed, it was like being in a dream, one in which there is something of great importance to be done- a warning to be delivered, a secret revealed-yet everybody else is relaxed and indifferent and there is no one who will bother to listen to the dire news that only she is in possession of. Even though no one else seemed to be as worried as she was, she had thought that Quirke surely would appreciate the awfulness of April’s disappearance- of her just being gone, without a word, without a trace left behind- for after all, another young woman whom she had known had disappeared last summer and Quirke had discovered her to have been murdered. Yet when he went with her and the detective to April’s flat, and then next day to see April’s brother, he had said hardly a word and had seemed not to care about April or what had become of her. But perhaps he was right and she was wrong; perhaps she was being fanciful and melodramatic about the entire thing. Or maybe, simply, it was true that he did not care. Did any of them, really, Isabel, Patrick, Jimmy Minor? They did not seem to be very worried, or not as worried as she was, anyway. She was filled with dread; she could not rid herself of it.

Odd, how clear and sharp the mind can be at this time of night, she thought. Is it just that there are so few distractions in the small hours, or does the brain make use then of energy that normally it would be storing to fuel the next day’s mental business? Thinking of April now, and the seemingly careless attitude of Quirke and the others, she, too, had a sense of estrangement, a sense of alienation, which, to her surprise, seemed to be allowing her to consider her friend’s case with a new and calm dispassion. Somehow in her mind April became separated from all the things that together made up the image she had of her friend, and floated free, as sometimes in one’s consciousness a word floats free of the thing it is attached to and becomes something else, not just a noise, exactly, not a meaningless grunt or bark, but a mysterious, new entity, new and mysterious because it is itself only and not merely a means of signifying something.

Who is April? she asked herself. She had thought she knew her, but now she wondered if she had been wrong all along, if April was someone else entirely from the person she had always taken her to be. Instead of the frank and open friend that she had spoken to almost every day, had chatted and gossiped with, there appeared now in her mind a different creature altogether, secretive, guarded, one who hid her real self from Phoebe and maybe from everyone else, too. Yes, guarded, that was how April was, not open at all, but concealed. And behind this figure there was something else again, that was hidden too, or someone else, perhaps, always there in the background, some secret, all-pervasive presence. Yes. Someone there, always.

She had seen Jimmy Minor last evening. They had met in O’Neill’s in Wicklow Street. The pub had been crowded and noisy- Trinity students were celebrating a win in some match or other-and they could hardly hear themselves speak. She had suggested they go somewhere that would be more quiet, but of course someone only had to suggest something to Jimmy for him to dig his heels in and resist, and instead of agreeing to move to another pub he had ordered drink and lit up a cigarette. He was telling her something about April and his newspaper. She could not believe her ears the first time and made him say it again: he had gone to the Editor and told him that April was missing.

“Oh, Jimmy, you didn’t!” she cried.

He looked at her in hurt surprise. “I’m a reporter,” he said, holding up his miniature hands in a show of simple sincerity. “Someone is missing, I report it.” Anyway, the Editor, it seemed, had not been interested in April Latimer, or had pretended not to be, and had told him to drop the story. “I said to him, ‘Do you know who she is, who she’s related to?’ That only made him put on his stony-faced look- he doesn’t like what my old fellow used to call backchat. I kept on, mentioning the Minister her uncle and her brother the Fitzwilliam Square consultant, but it was no good, there was no-”

A raucous cheer went up from the crowd of red-faced young men at the bar, and she missed the rest of it. “But did he know something about it?” she asked. “Did he already know April was missing?”

“I told you, all I got was the stony face. But yes, I had the impression someone had been on the blower to him, telling him to keep the lid on any stories about missing girls.”

She stared at him, speechless for a moment. “Who would call him?” she asked, baffled. “Who would make that kind of phone call?”

“Oh, Phoebe,” he said, with a pitying smile, shaking his head. “Don’t you know anything about this town, how it works?”

“You mean her uncle, Mr. Latimer, the Minister, would telephone the Editor of a newspaper and order him not to publish a story, not even to follow it up?”

“Listen, sweetheart, let me explain,” he said, putting on his Jimmy Cagney voice. “The Minister wouldn’t phone, and there would be no order. Someone from the Department would give a little tinkle, some flunky of the Minister’s, a super-Gael with a name like Maolseachlainn Mahoganygaspipe, and talk for ten minutes about the weather and the shocking price of spuds, and then, just as he was about to ring off, would say, Oh, by the way, Seanie, the Minister’s young one has gone off on a bit of an adventure and the family is trying to get her to come home- there’d be no use in the paper running any kind of a story on it, don’t you know, you’ d only end up with egg on your face, or should I say printing ink, ha ha ha. That’s how it’s done. The velvet word, the silken threat. Wise up, sister.”

“And the Editor of a national newspaper would give in to a threat, just like that?”

This was greeted with a whinny of laughter. “Threat?- where’s the threat? Friendly advice, a word to the wise, that’s all. And then there’s grace and favor- next time Seanie the Editor needs a bit of inside info he’ll call up Mr. Mahoganygaspipe and mention the little Service he did for the Minister and his family by keeping his newshounds on the leash that time when the Minister’s troublesome niece went off on her travels. See?”

Now Phoebe, sitting by the black window, went over again all that Jimmy had said, trying to decide if it could be true, if it could be what had happened. But what of it, she thought then, even if it was? If the Latimers were using their influence to stop the newspapers reporting April’s disappearance, was that so terrible? Any family would do it, that had a wayward daughter and the power to keep stories about her out of the papers. Yet the thought of that pinched, insinuating voice on the telephone- Jimmy was a good mimic- whispering menaces into someone’s ear gave her the shivers.

She must concentrate. Think. Remember. Summon up. Who is April Latimer?

The milk in the mug had gone tepid, but she drank it anyway, drank it to the dregs, and got a raspberry pip,

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