Meena tapped her chin once more. ‘If you give me an hour I might be able to at least tell you if I’m going to be able to use this sample. It’s old and may be too degraded or contaminated for me to extract anything useful.’

‘Whatever you can do.’

‘At this rate you’re going to owe me dinner, Detective Hunter.’

Jake’s eyebrows shot up in surprise.

Meena waved her hands apologetically. ‘Oh, my mistake.’

Jake took a moment to reorient. ‘No, not at all, just unexpected.’ He smiled tentatively. ‘It’s a debt … uh, date.’

The warm, glowing cloud that enveloped Jake as he entered the lift to ascend to the general ward meant it took him three attempts to hit the right button for Amelia’s floor.

‘How are you feeling after yesterday?’ Jake asked Amelia as he settled on to the visitor’s chair beside her bed.

‘Better. Let’s continue the interview.’

The Amelia that Jake had first met in her lounge room several days earlier had returned. She was firm and in control.

‘I was asking you about your fingernails,’ he said. ‘Was anything done to them the first time you were attacked?’

She looked startled. ‘You know there was a second time?’

‘I suspect.’

‘My hands weren’t touched the first time.’

‘How was the second time different?’

She swallowed, her eyes brimming. ‘Ms O’Brien went on one of her trips a few months before Mum came to claim me.’

‘Did she go every year?’

‘Usually, mostly around Christmas.’

‘And what happened?’

‘I woke up in pain but didn’t know why again. But this time the pain was inside, not outside, if you understand?’

‘I think I do.’

Amelia flapped her hands. She was becoming distressed.

‘There was blood again, a lot of blood, but this time the pain was more like something having been broken. Like a broken bone.’

That raised a question Jake had never thought to ask. ‘Amelia, did you ever break a bone? An arm or a leg?’

‘Both my arms, at different times.’

She held them out—they looked straight.

‘Did you have plaster casts?’

She nodded.

‘Who set them?’

‘Mr O’Brien made Ms O’Brien wet strips of this gauze stuff, then put some white clay—I guess it was plaster—on my arm. It hurt so much. But when he cut them off they were straight.’

Her voice was becoming croaky,

‘Would you like a drink of water?’ he offered.

‘Keep going,’ she said, tears beginning to slide down her cheeks. ‘If I go quiet, please tell Mum not to worry.’

Jake forced himself to override his sympathetic reaction to her tears. He had seen victims of trauma do this before—their bodies crying in response to emotional strain, even while the person maintained control over their thoughts and continued to communicate cogently.