Before he got into the car he turned and shook his fist at the hospital, and screamed, ‘I’ll be back for you too, you bitch!’ Then he dived in behind the wheel of the Rolls, cranked the engine and squealed out of the hospital car park and away into the night. Two miles outside of Fort William, he stopped in a layby to get his breath back. Turning on his phone, he saw he had three missed calls from Carl Hacker.

Stuart called him back.

‘Where’ve you been?’

‘Watch how you speak to me, Hacker. I’ve been attending to some important business. What do you want?’

Hacker relayed to his boss the report from Graham and Carter. ‘So now we know where Hope lives. When he comes back, he’s ours.’

‘It’s obvious that Hope and Kirk are up to something,’ Stuart said. ‘We need to act fast before this situation gets any worse.’

‘What do you sugg—?’ Hacker began, but Stuart cut him off and instantly began dialling Macleod’s number.

‘I’m at home now,’ Macleod complained when he picked up. ‘In the middle of my tea.’

‘I don’t give a tuppenny fuck where you are. I need you to have Ben Hope arrested immediately.’

Macleod spluttered as though he was choking on his pie and chips. ‘On what charges? I can’t have someone arrested just like that, for no good reason.’

‘Try murder,’ Stuart said. ‘Hope is the prime suspect in the brutal killing of a local citizen called Jamie McGlashan. A name I’m sure you’ll recognise. The same man we’ve spent the last several days trying to identify. And the same individual in whose police files your officer Kirk was showing an unhealthy interest earlier today. Which suggests to me that she may be acting as an accomplice. I’ve reason to believe that the two of them are together as we speak, and there’s no telling what they’re up to.’

‘How—?’

‘Shut up and listen. If you send your officers out to the scene, you’ll find McGlashan’s corpse inside his trailer. In the meantime, you need to put out a BOLO alert, or an all-points bulletin, or whatever the hell you people call it, on Hope’s car. I want him pulled off the streets, and Kirk too. Then I want them both brought to me. Understood?’

‘That’s insane,’ Macleod protested. ‘The system doesn’t work that way.’

‘Then improvise,’ Stuart said. ‘Make it happen by whatever means possible. Unless you want to find yourself implicated in the murder of Ross Campbell and the assault on Ewan McCulloch. That wouldn’t be too beneficial for your career, now would it?’

‘You tell on me, I’ll tell on you.’

‘I’d like to see you try,’ Stuart said.

Chapter 39