‘I reckon we’re about to find out.’ Ben stepped out of the Mercedes into the night-time chill. The patrol car was a Mitsubishi 4x4 with POLICE and the Gaelic POILEAS emblazoned across its bonnet. Both doors swung open and both cops climbed out. Two men, thirties, bulky with black winter coats over their uniforms, batons and cuff holders and Taser holsters dangling from their thick middles, cap peaks pulled down low. Ben supposed that was to make them look mean. It didn’t. They just looked tired and sour, as if they’d been driving around half the night. Ben could empathise with that, though he might have been able to empathise more if he hadn’t just been pulled over in a bullet-holed car containing a bag of illicit guns and ammunition.

The cops walked around the front of their vehicle and came striding over, lit from the rear by their own headlamps and from the front by the red glow of the Mercedes’ tail-lights. Puffing billows of steam on their breath, like bulls. Radios crackling and fizzing. Long metal torches in their gloved hands. Definitely trying to look as intimidating as they could.

Ben closed the driver’s door. He stepped around the rear of his car to see if maybe something wasn’t working properly back there. Tail-lights: check. Number plate light: check. Indicator: ditto. The taped-over bullet holes weren’t visible from the rear, either. And he’d been going steady at about 1 mph below the limit. No obvious reason why he should have been stopped.

He greeted the approaching cops with a pleasant ‘Anything in particular I can help you with, officers?’ He got no answer, only a couple of ugly stares in return. One of the cops was wearing the hint of a smirk on his face. The other one just looked surly.

Ben said, ‘Maybe you’re lost and you need some directions. Bad luck, I’m not from around these parts.’

Still no reply. The smirking one stood a few feet away and aimed his torch in Ben’s face. The surly one stepped around the passenger side of the Mercedes and shone his beam through the window. He glared for a moment at Grace inside the car, then turned and gave his colleague a confirmatory kind of nod. His colleague nodded back, still wearing the smirk. Maybe he had Bell’s palsy or something. Not taking his eyes off Ben he pulled out a phone, jabbed keys to make a call, and a moment later muttered in a low voice, ‘It’s me. We found them. Uh-huh. Copy that, it’s Hope and Kirk, all right.’