Leila undid her seat belt and turned to Jude.

“We’ll get you looked at soon and cleaned up. But I need to ask you a few questions. First of all, your injuries. What happened to your foot?”

Jude looked down at her foot, almost as if it belonged to someone else.

“That was from yesterday. I went for a run and fell over. It was stupid, really.”

“And your hand?”

Jude lifted her throbbing left hand and looked at the inflamed palm, now starting to break out in large puffy blisters. “It was the kettle. I threw the kettle of boiling water at him. I think some of it hit him because he screamed, but I don’t know how badly he was hurt. Bacitracin.”

“What?”

“That’s what I need to put on my hand. It hurts quite a lot at the moment.”

“Did he attack you?”

“I saw there was a knife missing. A knife with a blue handle. I knew I had to act quickly. Before he used it.”

“You think Dermot took it?”

“I know he did. I’d been cleaning. There were four different-colored knives on the wall, and then he came and there were three. The blue one was missing.”

Leila Fox nodded slowly.

“Has he admitted it?” Jude asked.

“He was gone. We have a witness who saw him running down the road, shouting and holding a hand over his face.”

“So he can’t have been that badly burned.”

“We’ll get him soon.”

Jude shivered violently. “Why me? I didn’t know anything.”

“It wasn’t what you knew.”

“What do you mean?”

In answer, the detective tapped the young man at the wheel and said, “Pass me those photos, please.”

He took a folder from the pocket on his door and handed it back. Leila slid out a sheaf of glossy photos and shuffled through them.

“Here,” she said. “This is a photo from the scene of the crime. Don’t worry,” she added hastily. “Not of Liam’s body. Just things that were there.”

Jude peered at it.

A churn of mud and brambles and trampled grass; an old tin can and an empty crisp packet, a rusting bicycle bell, a couple of cigarette butts, a shredded plastic bag, a few scatterings of twigs, the grisly remains of a dead bird.

“I don’t get it,” she said. “Except it’s a horrible place to die.”

“Look.” Leila tapped something small on the edge of the photo. “Do you see what that is?”

“What?”

Leila selected another photo and put it on Jude’s lap.

“This.”

It was laid out on a shiny blank surface, lit from above, and taken from close up.

“Oh,” said Jude.

A small, delicate wooden wishbone, minus its string.

She was bewildered, looking helplessly from the laboratory photo to the scene of the crime.

“I still don’t understand.”