The first shot hit McCracken high in the upper left of his body, the thudding impact spinning him like a top. The second hit Charlie in the middle of the back, knocking the wind out of her. They struck the tarmac together, dead weights. As Shallicker drew up alongside them, he’d already drawn his Colt Cobra, and now took aim at the fleeing shape, which had only managed two shots before turning and haring back into the shrubbery.

Shallicker squeezed one round off but knew that he’d missed; the figure was already out of sight. He dashed in pursuit, his huge feet pounding the floor. It was a thin belt of undergrowth, and on the other side lay a subsidiary car park, where the shooter’s vehicle, a Volkswagen Golf, waited close by. Neither the colour of the Golf nor its registration mark was clear in the dim light, and when Shallicker got there the shooter was already behind the wheel and spinning the car in a tyre-screeching semicircle. Before he could let off another round, it veered through the car park exit and vanished, its engine roar fading as it sped into the night. Shallicker sprinted back along the passage he’d torn through the shrubbery. No one had come out from the restaurant yet. The old building’s thick stone walls might have absorbed the sound of the shots, while the kitchen, where the windows were likely to be open, would be clattering with crockery.

Not that it made a lot of difference to Frank McCracken and Carlotta Powell, both of whom lay face-down in widening pools of blood.

Chapter 23

Malcolm Peabody waited glumly about thirty yards from the dog-pit, halfway up one of the encircling slopes, though even there he wasn’t out of range of the choke-inducing stench. He still wore the same civvies he’d been wearing earlier, though when Lucy had popped back on her motorbike, bringing the forensics tent, she’d also, at his request, brought him a black police-issue waterproof jacket. In the end the rain hadn’t come, but Peabody was still wearing it, because, as the night drew on, the breeze stiffened.

They’d managed to erect the tent over the pit, but clumsily. It would normally be a square, boxy structure, but here it was lopsided, leaning precariously, partly because of the unstable ground surrounding the hole. To compensate, they’d deployed an extra barrier of incident-scene tape around the outside. Not that anyone was likely to come snooping out here.