By the time he’d finished patching himself up as best he could, he still had a few minutes left to find the Kirk woman before his reinforcements arrived to join him in the task of cornering Ben Hope. Now the meth and the morphine were kicking in nicely and he felt a ferocious buzz of energy course through his veins as he hurried back downstairs from his quarters to the buttery room. Stuart had vanished; Hacker didn’t give a damn where to. Graham’s body would have to be cleared up, but that could wait too.

Hacker tracked the trail of footprints from the buttery doorway. Half an hour had now passed since Graham had alerted them to the woman’s escape, and the bloodstains on the ground were already drying russety-brown. They led up the passage and around a corner. After a few dozen yards the trail was beginning to fade out; but then he spotted a partial print on one of the steps leading towards the stone arch and the residential part of the castle’s ground floor. Hacker knew there would be more blood tracks to follow. After escaping the slaughterhouse mess of the buttery room, she wouldn’t just be trailing it on her shoes. It would be spattered on her clothes, her hands, her hair, her face. Sure enough, a few yards on he came across a sticky red palm print on the wall where she’d gone racing around a corner.

Okay, bitch, he thought to himself with a grim smile. The effects of the meth and morphine were spiking inside his brain. He was burning with elation and as micro-focused as a fighter pilot. He drew his pistol, clutching it in his one hand and ready to spray lead at anything that moved. She had to be somewhere in the castle, searching for a place to hide rather than take her chances out there in the cold. He walked slowly further up the passage, his footsteps clicking on the marble floor.

That was when he spied the red smear of blood on the brass handle of a door up ahead. It was a room Hacker had entered only once before, Stuart’s formal dining room where he liked to treat his dickhead corporate pals to orgies of food and champagne.

Hacker’s grim smile spread into a crocodile grin. He pressed an ear to the dining room door, listening for sounds of movement inside. Then pushed the door open and quickly stepped inside the room. In a taunting, singsong voice he said, ‘Come out, come out, wherever you are!’

Hacker gazed at the table. The satin cloth hung down almost to the floor, like a tent under there. He moved quickly over to it and lifted up a corner of the cloth, bending down to peer underneath with the gun pointed.