When this case was over, Jake would explore the possibility of putting Lilith in touch with Amelia and Charlotte. Perhaps they might find some solace in one another.

He felt a pang as her smile faded and she receded into herself, placing her arms across her abdomen and rocking.

Jake stepped into the corridor and found Meena Gill waiting for him. They glanced shyly at each other.

‘On to business,’ she said.

‘Absolutely,’ Jake said.

‘You must have considerable sway in Melbourne. They’ve already sent some results from Lilith Haverstock’s blood sample.’

‘And the cord?’

‘It’s viable, but I have some bad news.’

‘And here I thought my investigation was going so smoothly …’

‘That’s the spirit.’ Meena winked, her warm brown eyes twinkling. ‘So I’ve been able to retrieve blood, and viable DNA from the sample, I think. I already have the alleged mother’s blood type, and with the results of the DNA analyses I should have for her by tomorrow morning I’ll be able to confirm if she was the mother of the child the cord came from. Then I can start work on paternity.’

‘So the bad news?’

‘If the blood type for the mother is correct, then there’s no way Liam O’Brien could have been the biological father of the baby.’

‘How can you know that already?’

‘The foetal blood from the cord is A positive. Lilith is O negative, as is Liam O’Brien.’

‘There’s no way …?’

‘It’s not possible for two O negative parents to produce an A positive offspring.’

‘Right …’

So O’Brien wasn’t the rapist—or at least he wasn’t the man who fathered Lilith’s child. Even if O’Brien wasn’t responsible for that particular atrocity, however, he had to have been involved in Ava’s scheme somehow. A children’s home that had no record of how children came into it; no record of where they went; at least one girl impregnated and later dumped interstate, not to mention her unaccounted-for child born at the home … every instinct told Jake he was looking at a group of perpetrators, not a single older woman.

And Jake hadn’t completely ruled out O’Brien being involved in Ava’s death. Murphy had been right about that the first day of this investigation—nine times out of ten the person who ended a woman’s life with violence was a male relative or ex-partner. Normally, that would put O’Brien at the top of Jake’s list of suspects.

He was supposedly dead to the world in a bedroom above the pub all night, though there would have been nothing to stop him from going out for several hours without being seen. What would have prevented him from being solely responsible for her death was his decrepit physical condition. He would have needed help to move her body.