When he did return, she would be there waiting for him. Ready to tell him her secret. That she’d chosen him from the delegates that weekend to escape a psychopathic former partner. A criminal lawyer with friends in high places. One of them being Aidan Stratton, who might even now have informed Richard where she was.

She’d been dozing when the crack of a rifle shot woke her. Panic immediately sent her flying to the door and outside. She began to run, heading in the direction Greg had gone, hearing her heart and feet beat furiously in time.

Sound carried far here on the hills, with no traffic noise and the air as still as this. He could be a mile away or close by, she had no way of knowing.

He could be alive or dead. The writer in her was already fashioning an image of him with the rifle between his knees, its point in his mouth, his brains scattered around.

Meeting the edge of the woods, she sought the path, but – unused to the darkness within – soon stumbled and fell, cracking twigs and announcing her presence to anyone or anything nearby.

A sudden meeting with a low branch sent her sprawling. Winded and defeated, she hauled herself up to her knees, knowing she could go no further. Tasting blood trickling down from where her forehead had met the branch, she felt a sharp pain which may have been a stitch in her side from running, or something else.

Something she’d wanted to happen, but now no longer did.

He found her there, minutes later.

Catching sight of a figure sitting slumped against a tree, he’d been seized by a terrible premonition that it might be her, trying to escape Beanach and him. His horror that it should have come to this propelled him onto his knees beside her.

‘Joanne?’ he said, gently lifting her head so that he might read her face and check her pulse.

Seeing the blood smeared across her eyes, he washed it gently away with the water from his flask.

‘Joanne,’ he tried again.

This time her eyes flickered open and, instead of the fear and suspicion he’d seen earlier, he saw only pleasure and relief.

‘I heard the shot. I was worried that . . .’ She didn’t finish.

‘A stag by An Lochan Uaine,’ he told her. ‘He got away.’

He didn’t tell her he was glad about that. Killing the stag tonight in that setting, in the mood he’d been in, would have felt like an execution.

‘Can you rise or would you rather I carried you?’

When she told him that she was too big to be carried, he said, ‘The stag would have been a lot heavier than you.’

He sensed that something had changed again between them. That they were perhaps back where they had been that glorious day at the lochside.