One was that Jim, like she and Fallan, believed the truth might lie buried in a shallow grave somewhere in the Campsie Hills, where the Ramsays had been in the wrong place at the wrong time to witness something nobody was supposed to see. However, even if Jim found the bodies, what would this prove that posed such a threat that he had to be killed for it?

A DNA match with Anne Ramsay could identify the bodies and thus demonstrate that their disappearance had been murder, but that wasn’t going to offer any clues as to whodunit. Even if Fallan could make a connection between his late father and some cops still working today, there would be nothing to say that they’d been involved in this.

There had to be something else, but she wasn’t going to find it tossing and turning sleepless in the dark.

The other, more unsettling question concerned the fact that she was even alive to be asking it, and only Fallan could possibly offer any illumination on that one.

With her heart still thumping and a dryness in her throat, she decided to get herself a drink of water fresh from the cold tap. As she crossed the hall, she saw from a glow around the door that the kitchen light was on, and entered to find Fallan still at work with the maps and the magnifiers. The kitchen clock now read two thirty, and he didn’t appear to have moved from where she’d left him when fatigue had deceitfully enticed her to bed almost four hours ago.

She really wouldn’t want this man as her enemy. He was a machine.

As she let the water run, draining the tepid stuff out of the system first, this last observation prompted her to broach the subject that was troubling her most.

‘Back at the map shop this afternoon, how did you know we were about to get shot at? That car was behind us when you reacted, and prior to that you hadn’t given it a second look. Then all of a sudden you’re throwing me out of the way just in time. It was like you’d eyes in the back of your head. Same as on Wednesday.’

Fallan stared at her, as though weighing up whether she was worthy of a response, and for a long second she thought she’d come up short.

‘Fear,’ he said eventually. ‘I listen when it speaks.’

Jasmine looked quizzically at him, not understanding, and simultaneously worrying that this was what he’d suspected.

‘I felt fear too,’ she explained herself, ‘but after he started trying to kill me, when I knew there was a threat. You seemed to know before. How does that work?’