‘You mean, not too late to go back to my cosy little world as a provincial backwater copper and forget this shit is happening right under my nose?’

Ben said nothing and set about checking the dead shooter’s pockets. They were completely empty, except for a spare loaded magazine for his Glock. There was no wallet, no cards, no cash or change, no keys, no phone, no form of identification whatsoever. It was pretty much what Ben had expected.

As Ben was finishing up, the dead man’s head lolled over to the side – and that was when Ben spotted the tattoo inked onto the side of his neck, just visible over his collar. A sinister human skull enmeshed in a Gothic-script capital D that passed through one eye socket and between its grinning jaws. Two crossed military daggers behind the skull formed an X.

It was a distinctive design. And to Ben, one that held a very particular and interesting significance. He reached down and picked the dead man’s floppy right arm out of the snow. Yanked off the blood-spattered glove and rolled the guy’s jacket sleeve up to the elbow. Nothing.

Grace looked puzzled. ‘What are you doing?’

‘Looking for something.’ Ben picked up his bag. It was a wreck, with a big ragged hole in the bottom that he’d have to patch up later. From it he took the Ka-Bar survival knife that he’d bought in Inverness. He unsheathed the black blade and used the razor-sharp tip to slash open the dead guy’s jacket sleeve all the way to the shoulder. The dead guy was wearing a fleecy cold-weather shirt underneath. Ben slashed that too, exposing the pallid, rapidly cooling flesh of his upper arm. And there was the second tattoo he’d been looking for. Older, less sharp and more faded than the skull on the dead guy’s neck.

Ben said, ‘Bingo.’

Grace peered. ‘So he had tattoos. So what?’

‘Not just any tattoos,’ Ben said. ‘The one on his arm is the regimental wings of the Parachute Regiment. He’s ex-military.’

‘Maybe. Or maybe the tat’s a fake.’

‘It could easily be. There’s a lot of losers and wannabes running around harbouring infantile warrior fantasies. But the one on his neck suggests that it’s real. See?’ Ben used the knife to slash the jacket collar so that Grace could get a better look at the skull-and-daggers Gothic D.

‘I see it, but I don’t get it. D could just be his initial. How do you know his name isn’t Dave, or Donald, or Darren?’

‘Trust me. Even if it was, this is something else.’ He put the knife away, took out his phone and used its camera to snap three images, one of each tattoo and one of the dead guy’s face.

She frowned. ‘How can you be so sure?’