There was little question in his mind that the men had come to the lochside for the same reason as him: to search for the poacher. Ben knew only that he was overweight and had a scar on his face. But the men hunting him clearly knew much more. The killers had somehow discovered the identity of the star witness and were closing in, intent on taking him out of the picture and thereby covering their tracks. Covering also the connection that Ben now understood existed between the killers and the men who’d tried to assault him in the Kinlochardaich Arms.

Ben flashed back to the events of earlier, and remembered how it had been the talk of Ross Campbell that had triggered Angus Baird’s aggressive reaction. It had been more than just bad blood and Baird being an angry moron who hated everybody, as Grace had said. It had been the behaviour of guilty men with something to hide. Knowing that, Ben was getting a strong urge to drive straight to the police station in Fort William, find his way inside the cells where Baird and his pal Mitchell were being held, and extract some truth out of them. Jails were generally easier to break into than out of, in Ben’s experience. But a little patience could save him the trouble. A simple affray case like this one, they’d probably be released after a couple of days, pending trial. Ben could catch up with them then.

As much as he was itching to talk to Baird and Mitchell, what he really wanted to know was the identity of the hidden sniper. The more he thought about it, the more he became convinced that the man was a world apart from his companions at the lochside. The goons with the torches and shotguns were noisy, clumsy and amateurish. The rifle shooter was anything but. The time interval between the bullet impact and the suppressed report told Ben that the guy had been some distance away, probably hunkered down in a sniper’s nest on higher ground with a decent view of the terrain below. Shooting in pitch black conditions meant he was certainly using some kind of infrared night-vision scope, Gen 2+ image intensifier technology or better. Expensive, professional kit. And the fact that he was capable of making accurate shots through thick cover hinted at skill and training that was far beyond that of the stooges he was with.

They might have been working together, but this guy wasn’t one of them. Ben was certain of it. Which suggested a hierarchy of command in operation. It was almost as though the sniper was using his lower-rank underlings as beaters to flush out his quarry so that he could execute him from a distance, clean and surgical.