She jutted out her chin in defiance. ‘Not on your life, pal.’

‘Fine. Do you want to swing by your place and pick up a change of clothes or whatever else you need? We’ll be away all night long.’

Grace shook her head. ‘Nope. I’m good.’

‘Then let’s get moving.’

It was 4.52 in the afternoon.

Chapter 38

At 4.55, Carl Hacker was returning upstairs from checking on the prisoner when his phone burred and he saw the call was from his guy Mitch Graham. Over an hour had passed since Graham and Carter had been despatched back to Kinlochardaich in the same fast 4x4 their associates had used earlier in the day, to perform a couple of important tasks. The first of which was to revisit Jamie McGlashan’s trailer site, check whether the place was crawling with police, and if not, then to remove O’Donnell’s body from the scene.

Once that was taken care of, their second task was to pay an unannounced home visit to the Kirk woman. Their orders were different from those issued to O’Donnell and Banks earlier that day. Rather than be simply slaughtered and left where they found her, Kirk was to be taken alive and brought to the castle for interrogation.

‘Well?’ Hacker asked. ‘How’d it go?’

‘We took care of Kev. Cops were nowhere near the place.’

‘Good. Where is he now?’

‘Boot of the car. Or what’s left of him. He was so frozen solid we had to break the poor sod into pieces to get him inside a bin liner. If he starts to thaw, it’s gonna make a hell of a stink.’

‘What about the woman?’

‘No sign,’ Graham said. ‘Place is empty. Lights are off, no sign of life. Her car’s not there either. And it ain’t been there any time recently, either. There’d be tyre tracks.’

‘You definitely got the right address?’

‘Come on, mate. We ain’t the local spastics who work for Stuart.’

‘All right, all right.’

‘Good news is, we found the Land Rover parked outside a cottage at the other end of the village. It’s a one-horse town. Didn’t take long to scope the place out.’

‘Are you at the cottage now?’ Hacker asked hopefully.

‘Yeah, but don’t get your knickers in a twist. Whoever was here, looks like we just missed them. Two sets of fresh footprints in the snow, from the front door to where a car was parked. One set of prints is bigger, tread looks like your typical sort of combat boot. The other smaller, could be a woman’s. Tyre tracks are wide apart and have a pretty fat tread. Looking at a big car.’

‘Like a Mercedes GLS?’