At last, they arrived at the small village of Kinlochardaich before darkness fell. Tuesday had already scouted the place in detail on Google Maps, using Street View to pinpoint the address they’d copied from Ben’s contacts book.

They were confident that they’d covered their tracks perfectly. Nothing about the Trev’s Light Haulage van could be remotely traced back to them, to Le Val, or to Ben himself. Jeff was wearing his smiley-face baseball cap pulled low over his eyes. Tuesday clambered behind the seats and perched on the makeshift rear bunk, staying out of sight, scanning the parked vehicles by the kerbside for her car. Ben had told them that Grace drove an ancient green Land Rover that she never washed and seldom maintained.

‘There it is,’ Jeff said, pointing at the scabby old 4X4 parked outside a small house near the edge of the village, on the right side of a quiet, narrow street. Grace lived in a small, pretty stone house, set back a little off the road behind a low drystone wall, with hanging baskets by the door and roses growing around the windows. In front of the house was a tiny but neatly tended front garden with pot plants, a bird table and a curly wrought-iron gate. Definitely a place with a woman’s touch about it. The neighbouring houses looked peaceful and settled in for the evening. A few vehicles besides Grace’s Land Rover were parked along the kerbsides, many of them sitting angled with two wheels up on the pavement to make space in the narrow street. The only movement was an old man walking a chocolate Labrador. The dog was fat and grey around the muzzle and seemed to have difficulty walking. The bent, overweight old guy wasn’t faring much better. Shoogly.

Jeff drove straight by Grace’s home at a steady thirty, glanced to his right as he passed and could see the glow of a TV screen flickering in the living room window. A net curtain blocked out any more detail or movement inside. Thirty yards past her home the street curved around to the left, and opened up into a little square. Offset to one side of the square was a small municipal park with some trees and benches. The other side of the square was a village hall with a clock tower, near to a block of public toilets and probably the last traditional red phone box left in the British Isles. There was a plumber’s van parked outside the toilets. Sandwiched between the block and the village hall was a narrow building with boarded-up ground-floor windows and a sign saying TO LET.