‘I told you, she was just visiting friends. Why are you interrogating me about her? She was a good woman who never caused any trouble. Why would you mention her private business like this? It’s disrespectful.’

‘I’m trying to work out how your sister died,’ said Jake through gritted teeth. ‘How she ended up in the middle of a vineyard in the dead of night. You want me to find out, so why aren’t you helping me by telling me more about Ava?’’

‘Not trying to be difficult.’ O’Brien waved a hand across his eyes. ‘I do want you to find out. Only I don’t know. You should be asking …’

‘Asking who?’

‘Well, I don’t know! Not me!’

‘Right. Well, if there’s nothing that’s caught your eye here, let’s head to the hospital.’

*

As he drove along the twisting dirt road into the mountain’s embrace, Jake felt a sense of relief wash through him as he broke through the fog line into bright sunshine, heading for the antiseptic atmosphere of the district hospital.

Finally, an hour of biblical epithets and scriptures later, Jake pulled into the car park. If nothing else, O’Brien’s commitment to his religion was certain.

‘Mr O’Brien,’ Jake said once they had reached the entrance, ‘once you’ve had a chance to see Ava I’m going to need you to formally identify her; to say aloud if it’s her that you see. Do you understand?’

Liam O’Brien pursed his lips and nodded.

‘It’s her,’ he said, seconds after Meena Gill led them in to the viewing room.

Meena, or someone who worked with her, had cleaned Ava’s face and combed back her hair to make her look more as she would have in life. Jake and Meena stepped to the corner of the room behind Liam leaving him to quietly mourn his sister. He murmured passages from the Bible at her still form.

‘I had an opportunity to perform a CT scan this morning,’ Doctor Gill said to Jake in a low voice, flicking her eyes toward Ava O’Brien’s body.

‘Was it what you thought?’

The doctor nodded, though she obviously shared Jake’s discomfort at discussing the mode of Ava O’Brien’s death in front of Ava’s brother.

In the centre of the room, Liam O’Brien unexpectedly began lifting the sheet covering his sister just enough to slip one hand underneath.

‘No!’ Meena stormed to the examination table. ‘What are you doing?’

Before she could stop him O’Brien pulled Ava’s hand from under the sheet and clutched it in both of his. ‘But she—’ He stared at her fingertips. ‘Bloody hell!’ He dropped her hand and it flopped bonelessly against the side of the stainless-steel slab.

O’Brien staggered back two steps. Jake rushed forward to catch him under the armpits before he fell, but he steadied himself.

‘Mr O’Brien?’

O’Brien’s face had blanched ghostly grey. ‘I’m all right, I’m all right. You didn’t say anything about her hands.’

‘We haven’t released that information yet,’ Jake said, aiming for the right balance of stern and commiserating. ‘It’s vital that you don’t tell anyone else about that detail.’