“Not that you’d know by listening to his wife or brother,” I replied, putting some plates on the table. “They seem to think he was a saint.” It was only when I said that aloud that I realized how odd that was, particularly when it came to Derek, in the context of what Jude had told me about their childhood.

Molloy took some mugs out of a cupboard above his head and put them on the draining board. “There’s no denying that someone, or more than one person, wanted to kill him in as unpleasant a way as possible. Someone went to some trouble to get hold of that snake, get it up here and out to Mamore. It may have been harmless, but the fact remains Bob Jameson was bitten and grass snakes are generally not aggressive unless handled or stepped on. So what the hell happened?”

“And why all the way out at Mamore?”

“Exactly.”

“Less chance of him being saved,” I suggested. “Take him to a remote spot to kill him?”

“Possibly. Anywhere less remote and they’d have been seen.”

“Even out there, if Maeve had seen a vehicle, she’d have stopped to see if anyone was in trouble. Especially on a night like that.”

Molloy nodded, pouring out coffee. “Hopefully the post-mortem will tell us more. At least we’ll know how he actually died.”

I took the mugs to the table and fetched some milk from the fridge while Molloy examined the rolls as he took them out of the oven. “God, I think these are going to be a bit chewy.”

“What about the rope?” I asked.

He tipped the rolls onto a plate and put the plate on the table. “Brand new, the kind you could get in any hardware shop. He was overpowered, tied up, then bitten, then died.”

I gave him a quizzical look. “But the bite definitely didn’t kill him.”

“No, unless there was an allergy or something. Subject to the post-mortem confirming that, of course.”

I got some knives out of a cutlery drawer and stood there absorbing the image. “I wonder if he was conscious when he was bitten? If he knew what was happening to him? Would he have been frightened?” It was hard to imagine the confident, cocky individual I’d met, tied up and fearful.

“He wasn’t tied up when we found him, so he was conscious at some stage.” Molloy shrugged. “And if he’d spent time in Africa, he’d have known the implications of being bitten by a snake. He wouldn’t necessarily have known it was harmless.” He took the knives from me and put them on the table; I wasn’t moving quickly enough.