Ben settled into a fireside armchair, cracked open the scotch and poured out a couple of measures, then lit a Gauloise. Mrs Gunn had said nothing about not smoking, and even if she had, Ben figured he was paying for the privilege. Watching the fire grow and feeling the warmth slowly spread through the cottage, he sipped the scotch and watched his cigarette smoke trickle to the ceiling, and thought about how things stood and what he needed to do next.

The fact was that Boonzie could be anywhere, dead or alive. As skilled a finder of missing people as Ben was, not even he stood much chance of locating his friend in a thousand square miles of hills and forest with only a vehicle number plate to go on. But there was a way he could narrow his field of search to a sharp focus and that was to put himself in Boonzie’s shoes. Emulate his methodology. Follow in his footsteps. Arrive at the same point on the road.

Find the poacher.

All the arrows were aligned in the same direction. The poacher knew, or claimed to know, who had killed Ross Campbell. By association, assuming he was telling the truth, he probably also knew who put Ewan McCulloch in a coma. And by further association, if something bad had happened to Boonzie then the poacher’s information would potentially lead Ben straight to the door of those responsible.

He set down his glass and took out his phone. Kinlochardaich might be lacking a lot of modern commodities but he was getting a strong mobile signal. He pulled up Google, the oracle with the answer to All Things, and tapped in the search keywords SALMON POACHING SCOTLAND.

Illegal freshwater fishing was a subject Ben knew nothing whatsoever about, and as he trawled randomly from one web article to another he was surprised at what big business it was. From what he could glean, the reason why the Fisheries enforcers had such a hard time catching offenders was twofold. To begin with, it was almost impossible to police the waters of Scotland’s thousands of lochs and rivers, whose combined area was larger than some seas. Loch Ness alone held more than seven million cubic metres, more than the total volume of water in all the lakes of England and Wales.

The second reason illegal salmon fishing was so hard to stop was that it was so lucrative, because the untraceability of the stolen goods meant that a lot of it ended up on the tables of top restaurants in Edinburgh or London, who were happy to pay cash and ask no questions in return for quality merchandise.