He dropped the cartridge case back into the snow, then looked around him. The sniper’s position was a fine vantage point, with a sweeping view over the loch’s western end and the frozen whiteness of its shoreline. Ben couldn’t have chosen a better one, and he decided to make use of it for a while. He fully intended to stay out here all day and all night, if that was what it took. With no other leads and the clock in his head ticking away the twenty-four-hour countdown until Mirella involved the authorities in the search, he was feeling the pressure.

Ben unpacked the ghillie suit from his bag and put it on over his clothes. It would help to keep him warm as well as unseen. When he lay down in the snowy undergrowth he looked like just another immobile patch of vegetation, invisible from more than a few steps away. Now it was just a question of waiting and watching. Two things Ben Hope was exceptionally good at. He was good at a lot of things. And like all high-achieving people he was confident in his talents and hard-learned capabilities. When you took the kinds of risks he’d taken in his life, you needed to be. Because if you didn’t believe you were up to the challenge, then you were already setting yourself up to fail.

But Ben was still just a man, and in common with all his fellow humans he wasn’t immune to self-doubt. There had been times in his life when his belief in his abilities had hit rock bottom, when he’d felt as lost and weak and helpless as a rudderless ship in the teeth of a raging storm. As he lay there now, his body slowly numbing in the cold, watching the empty loch and the icy wilderness that hugged its banks, he could feel those same old haunting doubts and fears closing over him like a curtain of darkness.

What if nobody turned up, neither the mysterious poacher nor the men who were hunting him? What if Ben was just chasing shadows and squandering what little precious time remained to him, while his friend was still out there somewhere, maybe sick, maybe hurt, maybe dead?

What if Mirella was right, and it was time to hand the search over to someone else?