“Stoop’s making a bit of a leap,” McFadden said. “What we actually said was that a man’s body was found last night at Mamore Gap, and that we wanted people to be vigilant, and contact us if there were any sightings of a snake.”

I gave him a wry look. “I suppose you can’t blame people for adding two and two together and getting five.” I paused. “So was Bob Jameson bitten then?”

McFadden nodded. “Aye, he was. On his hand.” His brow was furrowed. “So Dr Harry tells us. He’s seen snakebites over in Canada, so he recognized it.”

I knew Harry had worked in both Canada and the States. His mother was from Inishowen but he’d grown up in Canada. “But you don’t know if that was what killed him?” I asked.

McFadden took a deep breath, choosing his words carefully. “What Harry said was that from what Maeve told him, it looked as if the man was dead when he hit her jeep, that he couldn’t find any broken bones and that it appears as if the man was bitten by a snake at some point. But we don’t know if it was a poisonous snake that bit him, or if it was the bite that killed him. We can’t tell anything without blood tests, which can’t be done until the pathologist gets here.”

“Right.”

McFadden rested his head on his hands; he looked as if he could easily drift off if he was allowed to. “The doctor’s being very careful to say that we have to wait for the post-mortem. But we can’t afford to take any risks if there’s a poisonous snake out there. We have to let people know.”

“So, we don’t know what kind of snake it was?”

The guard shook his head wearily. “Not a clue.”

Questions tumbled through my mind one after the other. Where had the snake come from? And why would it bite? I’d thought snakes were generally not aggressive. In Florida I’d been told that they were usually as scared of us as we were of them, or more so.

Before I had a chance to ask any of this, McFadden spun his computer around. He was looking at a website with images of poisonous snakes.

“I’m to do up some posters with pictures so people will know to be careful and call us if they see anything.” He tutted to himself. “Seems a bit pointless to me. It’s not as if we’re so used to having non-poisonous snakes about the place that we’d be able to tell by the marking if it was harmful or not. A snake’s a snake as far as an Irish person is concerned.”