Rufus Boyle was a man who had a bob or two. It was written all over him, from his herringbone tweed plus fours to his matching flat cap and bodywarmer. It was there in his body language, and in the way he spoke, too. He had that tone shared by true toffs everywhere—the one that said that no matter what experience you might have, or what position you’d reached, they somehow knew better than you did thanks to lineage and bank balance alone.

He was in his fifties, with the ruddy complexion of someone who spent a lot of time outdoors. Probably shooting, or fly fishing, or hunting the working class for sport.

Suffice to say, Logan had not taken to him. It wasn’t the overpriced outerwear, the upper-class lilt, or even the way one finger appeared to be permanently fixed in an angry pointing gesture. Those things, irritating as they were, the DCI could have looked past.

It was the things he had said, and the tone in which he’d said them, that had made Logan grind his back teeth together, and fight to resist squashing the toffee-nosed wee prick into his own makeshift driveway.

“It’s my property. You hear? My property. No one else’s,” he said. “I have a right to go inside. You can’t stop me. I mean it, you can’t stop me.”

This was the fourth time that the bastard had insisted he could go inside. No amount of reasoning, or calm explanation as to why he couldn’t had thus far proven to be a deterrent, so Logan decided it was time for a different approach.

“I can think of ten ways I could stop you, sir, just off the top of my head,” he replied. His mouth was curved in such a way that it might almost, under different lighting conditions, be considered a smile. “Why don’t you pick a number, and we’ll see what happens?”

Rufus Boyle was not a particularly clever man. Most of his wealth had been inherited, and the rest had come as a result of sound financial advice.

But, while he wasn’t especially intelligent, he was a survivor. He knew danger when he saw it, and right now alarm bells were ringing.

Not wishing to show weakness—he didn’t get where he was today by being bullied, or not since those nine years of boarding school, at least—he made a show of sighing dramatically and rolling his eyes, then quietly aborted his quest to get inside.

“What am I meant to tell the other guests?” he demanded. He shot daggers at the front door of the cottage like he was about to challenge the whole building to a square go. “They’re arriving at three.”