He nodded solemnly. “I know, it sounds incredible. But Dr. Harry saw the puncture marks on the hand when he was checking the man’s pulse and recognized them as a snakebite. Obviously, there’s been no post-mortem yet, so we don’t know the cause of death and it may not be the bite. But we have to alert people to the possibility of a poisonous snake in the area, especially with the town being cut off. We can’t have kids approaching it.”

“No, I can see that.” I asked Molloy the same question as I’d asked McFadden. “Is there any possibility that the death was an accident?”

He shook his head. “Someone drove him out to Mamore Gap and left him there. There was no car there when we arrived, so he didn’t drive himself. We know where he died or at least where his body lay at some point.”

I raised my eyebrows.

“We found his other shoe. He was only wearing the one when we found him.”

I gave an involuntary shudder – a sudden image of the body under the tarp came into my head. Was that what was in one of the bags he’d given McFadden? I wondered. “Where did you find it?”

“On the ridge. The rocky outcrop just above the road,” he said, rubbing his jaw. “The flood must have washed his body down the hill.”

“And onto Maeve’s windscreen.”

“Yes. There seems to have been a bit of a slide. We found mud and stones around the jeep. The floods are causing landslides and earth falls on any steep slopes.”

“How long was he there, do you think?” I asked.

“We’re not sure. Another matter for the post-mortem, unfortunately.”

“I suppose it couldn’t have been too long if he was in the pub last night.”

“True.”

“A matter of hours.”

Molloy nodded. “In the meantime, we need to find the bloody snake, just in case it’s venomous. Harry told us his suspicions last night, so we did as thorough a search as we could in the conditions, and we could find no sign of it.”

“How far can they travel?”

He shook his head. “I’m not sure. But I’m not taking any chances. Even if it’s completely harmless, we need the creature found. Most snakes aren’t normally aggressive, so this one lashed out for some reason.”

“Did you talk to Bob Jameson’s family yet?”

Molloy rubbed his eyes, wearily. “I’ve just been up at the B & B. His poor wife was in a state already because he hadn’t come to bed. She said she went to bed after they came back from the pub, fell asleep, then woke up at the crack of dawn to find that he wasn’t there. She wears earplugs apparently. Her husband snored.”