Unconsciousness would last no longer than a couple of minutes. By then, Ben was hoping that the other two men would have wandered further away, and he’d be able to make this one tell him the name of the man they were looking for, why and for whom.

In the meantime, Ben wanted to have a look at his victim. He picked up the fallen torch and cupped his hand over the lens, so that the light shone dull and red through his fingers. He flashed it on the guy’s head and shoulders. He was a fairly large man of about thirty-five, balding, unshaven, acne pits on his cheeks, earring in his left lobe. He wore a camouflage-pattern winter jacket cinched around his thick middle with a shotgun cartridge belt.

Ben recognised him as one of the men from the pub. A pal of Kenny Mitchell and Angus Baird, evidently. Which Ben was suddenly finding very interesting indeed. He unbuckled the shotgun cartridge belt from around the guy’s waist and slung it over his shoulder. Then he searched inside the guy’s jacket and found a wallet. He was about to open it up to look for ID when something zipped very close by his head and cracked sharply off the tree trunk right beside him. Flying bark splinters stung the side of his face.

Then a fraction of a second later, trailing in the slipstream of the supersonic bullet, came the muted cough of a silenced rifle shot far away.

Ben was already diving into the bushes, grabbing his bag and the unconscious man’s shotgun as he went. A second bullet pierced the night and smacked hard into the ground just inches away from him, blowing a crater in the dirt and sending up a spray of grit and snow. Close again. Too close. Ben kept moving, no longer concerned about making his way silently through the undergrowth because he no longer had that luxury. He cut a path between the trees that curved away from the two other searchers, but as the torchlight now swept back around in his direction he knew that they’d picked up the sound of his movement. They were about thirty yards to his right. One guy pointing the torch, the other clutching a shotgun, tracking him through the forest as though he was a running squirrel. Then the shotgun went off with a loud BOOM and buckshot pellets carved a bite out of a pine trunk in Ben’s wake.