We all know each other, Grace had said. Ben could see she’d been right about that. ‘My friend is Ewan’s uncle,’ he said to the old guy. ‘I’m trying to find him. Did he happen to mention anything about where he was going?’

The old guy shook his head. ‘Just bought a load of stuff and left.’

‘What kind of stuff?’

The storekeeper scratched his head, trying to remember. ‘Let me see, now. Like he wiz goin’ on a campin’ trip, at this time of year. Tinned provisions, bottled water, coffee. And something else, too.’ He pointed a gnarly finger over at the hardware section. ‘Must’ve known the snow wiz comin’, ’coz he bought one of them there shovels.’

Ben looked at the shovels and something with thousands of icy-cold little feet crawled down his spine. They were good quality hardware. Sturdy wooden shafts, big square steel blades enamelled in dull black. And he knew that Boonzie hadn’t been thinking of digging snow when he’d bought one.

No, Boonzie was thinking that when he caught up with the men who’d put his nephew in a coma, he wasn’t just going to punish them. He was going to kill and bury them.

‘Thanks for the information,’ Ben said to the old guy.

‘Ye’re welcome. I hope you find your friend.’

‘Yeah, so do I.’

Ben left the store with his supplies jinking inside a carrier bag and walked on to where his car was parked. Ewan McCulloch’s house was as dark and silent as a grave. Ben drove the Mercedes back through the quiet streets to the Gunn cottage. His landlady was still watching TV. He let himself back inside his new digs, dumped his canvas bag on the floor and carried the groceries into the kitchen. He searched through the cupboards for a couple of saucepans, filled one with water for the rice and emptied a can of stew into the other. Chunky cubes of beef in some kind of sauce that smelled like something Storm would like to eat, but it would do. Like he always said, he’d had worse.

He sat at the blue Formica kitchen table to eat, and washed his meal down with a pint of Kilt Lifter. Then he rinsed out the glass, grabbed the whisky bottle and wandered through into the living room. It was meat-locker chilly in there, so he piled some kindling and small wood from a wicker basket into the wood-burner along with a crumpled ball of newspaper and lit it with his Zippo. The flue was cold and the fire smoked for a few moments, then bright flames danced up and ate the smoke, and soon the cast-iron box of the stove was clicking and ticking as the metal expanded with the heat.