Ben rose to his feet and moved up the track. Just as he was wondering what it meant that the shooting had stopped, now it suddenly started up again with a fusillade of reports that sounded much closer by, no more than a few hundred metres away beyond a rocky mound further up the path. It sounded to Ben as though the action up there was moving across the terrain, a running battle. He kept moving quickly up the track, chasing the sound. The going was steep and treacherous in places. In less than a minute he’d climbed a long way. Glancing back over his shoulder he could see the lights of the town far in the distance, and his car and the van like miniature models below. The rocky mound was just up ahead of him, overhanging the slope and surrounded by scrubby bushes. He stuck the Browning in his belt so he could use both hands to scramble up around it; and now he had a clear view of the escarpment above him.

Craggy rocks cast long, dark shadows everywhere in the darkness. As he scanned left to right, watching for movement, the momentary white blossom of muzzle flash lit up a patch of rocks at eleven o’clock from Ben’s position. A millisecond later, the blast of a rifle shot shattered the silence and the crashing echo rolled out across the valley. Ben redrew his weapon and kept moving towards the source of the gunshot, staying low, keeping to the shadows, not taking his eyes off the spot where the muzzle flash came from. Now he spotted the running figure of a man break from cover and dart across a gap between the rocks, just fifty or sixty yards ahead. The man was a silhouette, half swallowed by shadow and too dark to make out any detail except that he was clutching what was unmistakably a scoped hunting rifle. Ben froze. Kept watching as the figure paused in his stride and seemed to be looking around him, as though searching, hesitant, unsure of himself. Ben wondered what was happening.

That was when one of the patches of impenetrable shadow that lay all around the figure of the man seemed to flicker. It was the briefest movement, so barely noticeable that Ben couldn’t even be sure he hadn’t imagined it. But the man with the rifle must have sensed something too, because Ben saw him turn abruptly around and raise his rifle as though startled.

And then the man with the rifle disappeared. He was there; and then he wasn’t. As if the shadows had simply reached out and taken him, without a sound or a struggle. From the rocks where Ben had seen the muzzle flash before came a hoarse yell in Spanish. ‘¡Diego! ¿Dónde estás?’