McFadden was right. We have no native snakes in Ireland at all. Not even a harmless grass snake. He pointed at the screen, to a photograph of a two-foot-long snake with red, yellow and black stripes. “Look at this one.”

“He’s colorful,” I said.

“It’s a coral snake. Red to yellow, kill a fellow, red to black, venom lack,” he rhymed.

“What?”

McFadden gave me a half smile. “It’s a saying apparently, to determine whether he’s poisonous or not.”

I looked again at the picture. The red and yellow stripes were next to one another. “Hopefully he’s not in the vicinity.”

“Or this boy.” He pointed to another snake, an olive-colored creature with dark brown scales. “This one is the Inland Taipan, poisonous enough to kill 100 people or 250,000 mice.”

“Yikes.”

McFadden was getting a taste for this.

I crossed my arms, still trying to take it in; a snakebite, in Inishowen. It did suggest a new possibility, though, as far as the death was concerned. “So could the death have been accidental, then? Bob Jameson was just unlucky enough to come across a snake that had escaped from somewhere?”

McFadden shook his head. “The sergeant doesn’t think so. It’s not as if he would have been out for a stroll on a night like last night. Plus his car wasn’t there, so someone else drove him. And didn’t bring him back.”

I leaned on the counter. “That’s what Maeve and I thought, last night. So what was he doing up there, then?”

McFadden gave a little shrug.

I looked around me. “Where is Molloy, by the way?” It couldn’t have escaped McFadden’s notice that Molloy and I had arrived together last night, in the early hours, but he made no comment. I supposed he had more pressing things on his mind than gossip.

“He’s back at the Gap. Mountain Rescue were helping him do a search of the area, though they’ve had to call it off for health-and-safety reasons. It’s started lashing up there again.” He returned his gaze to the screen.

“Right.”

He looked up from his snake images, as if something had just occurred to him. “Of course, we should be asking the vet about this, shouldn’t we? She’d know about snakes, wouldn’t she? What species it might be, where it might have got to, how far it could travel, that kind of thing.”

“Well,” I said slowly. “She’s more of a sheep, cows, and horses type of a vet but she might know something. Or know how to find out, at least.”

At that point the door opened, and Molloy came in shaking the rain off his coat.

Chapter Nine