He watched the message go, and felt suddenly very alone and empty. In a sudden fit of hopeless rage he ripped the page out of the notepad, screwed it into a ball and flung it at the wastepaper basket. It missed, and rolled into the corner. He was too despondent to care.

He was beginning to worry that maybe his uncle wasn’t coming at all.

Chapter 5

Early next morning, with the surveyors’ office still closed and having heard nothing from his uncle, Ewan decided to drive over to the golf course development site and take a look around. He avoided the ubiquitous crowd of demonstrators who never seemed to tire of camping by the main entrance, and sneaked around to the same discreet spot on the perimeter fence where Ross’s van had been found. He quietly let himself in through the locked side gate and spent a while wandering among the woods. The chances of finding where Ross had made his fateful discovery were pretty slim, and he knew it; he didn’t really know why he’d come here except for something to occupy his mind.

From the southern edge of the forest’s tree line he made his zigzagging way down the steep, heathery slopes to the lochside. The sky was pale and the air was chilly, making his breath billow in clouds. The craggy hilltops that surrounded the loch like the defences of prehistoric fortresses were wreathed in mist, now and then a shard of sunlight breaking through the cloud and casting a golden streak across the rugged landscape. All his life Ewan had marvelled at the magnificent scenery, but it was now forever tainted by the tragic event that had taken place here.

He hung around for a while, ambling up and down the bank in the vague hope of spotting the mysterious poacher. Which was a silly bit of wishful thinking, at best. The loch was twelve miles from end to end and it occurred to him that, of course, the spot where Ross was found wasn’t necessarily the same place where the witness claimed to have seen him being killed. The body could easily have floated some distance. To make matters worse, it was unlikely that the poacher would visit the same location twice in such a short time, even under normal circumstances. The fishing rights on the loch were tightly controlled by the Fisheries Board, whose tough bailiffs were known to patrol the shores regularly.

In short, Ewan knew all too well that he was wasting his time here. Utterly demoralised, he trudged back through the woods and reached the van just as it started to rain again. He slumped in behind the wheel and drove off.