Jack took a drink of his tea and put the cup carefully down onto its saucer. “Well, that man was feckin’ terrified of snakes. Scared out of his wits. And he told me that, just hours before he came face to face with one.” He leaned back and crossed his arms. “Now what are the odds of that?”

“Really?” I tried to imagine how something like that would have come up in conversation at midnight between two strangers having a cigarette in a car. But I didn’t need to ask. Now that Jack had decided to speak, he was in full flow.

“Aye. We were talking about films. The kind of chat you have sharing a fag when one of you has had a few pints. He was going on about some charity premiere or some such he’d been to the week before. Some posh do.” He raised his eyes to heaven. “Full of old big talk, he was, to be honest. But then I said I loved Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, that I’d watched it seventeen times and he said he couldn’t watch it because of the snake pit. That he was absolutely shit-scared of them, he had a snake phobia.”

He shook his head sadly. “It was stupid chat really, but I thought afterwards, the poor feckin’ eejit. It must have been his worst nightmare, being up on that hill with something he had a mortal fear of.”

I tried to take this in. Fear of snakes wasn’t unusual, and not exactly a major problem if you lived in Ireland where there were none. But Bob Jameson had lived and worked in Nigeria, so it must have come up at some stage. The man was bitten by a snake before he died and there was even a point at which it was assumed by most people that the snakebite had killed him. Surely somebody should have mentioned that he had a fear of them. Someone who knew him well. Like a wife? Or a childhood friend? I glanced over but Phyllis and Jude had left the pub.

The taxi driver took a deep slug of his tea. “Do you think I should tell the sergeant?”

I nodded. “I do. I definitely do.”

Before I could process anything further, Tony handed me my sandwich over the bar. I re-joined Leah and I ate my lunch while I tried to work out what to do next.

When I emerged from the Oak half an hour later, Marina was coming out of Harry’s place across the street. Her gaze dropped when she saw me, wishing to avoid an encounter, but I wasn’t going to let that happen. So I told Leah to go on without me.

“Half three,” she called after me as I hurried across to cut Marina off. “Your first appointment is at half three, remember.”