It looked as though the cop was coming home for lunch, in which case he might be there for a while. Boonzie decided to follow Macleod inside and confront him there. If the man was alone, so much the better. If not, Boonzie would have to deal with it. His plan was to force Macleod to confess everything, then make him call his minion Coull to get him to come over to the house on the pretext of needing to have a secret meeting.

Then Boonzie would decide what to do with the pair of them. His current favoured option was to drive them out into the middle of nowhere and slit their throats before he buried them.

He reattached the scope to the bow, then cocked the weapon and fitted a hunting bolt before applying the safety catch and slipping it into its carry bag. Just as he was about to step out of the camper and start making his way over to the house, he saw Macleod re-emerge from the front door and stride quickly back towards his car, speaking on a phone. He dived behind the Jag’s wheel, and moments later the car reversed sharply out of the driveway and sped off. Wherever he was going in such a rush, Boonzie intended to follow.

Macleod’s Jaguar led him out of town, and it wasn’t long before they were miles out into the snowy countryside. Boonzie was still hanging right back, partly to avoid notice in Macleod’s rear-view mirror, but partly also because the wheezy old camper van was hard pressed to keep up with the fast car.

More than eight miles into the middle of nowhere, the Jaguar turned off the road and went bumping and sliding down a twisty track with dilapidated barbed-wire fencing and overgrown gorse bushes and brambles on both sides. Boonzie waited until the car was out of sight, then cautiously followed. He continued along the track for a hundred yards, until he could see the Jag parked another hundred yards ahead at the bottom of a slope, next to a dead tree and the ruins of an old grey-stone chapel.

Boonzie pulled in behind a clump of gorse and got out of the camper with the cocked crossbow in his hands and his sheathed knife and a handful of extra hunting bolts stuck in his belt. The icy wind wrapped itself around him and his breath clouded like smoke. He had no idea what Macleod was doing, but saw his chance to catch the bent cop alone where there would be no witnesses. Eyeing the lie of the land he saw a natural path through the bushes and over a snowy rise from whose top he would be able to work his way around the back of the ruined chapel and approach Macleod by stealth. The ghillie suit would do him no good in this terrain, even if he’d had time to put it on.