And that fate had very nearly been Ben’s when the killers had mistaken him for the poacher. The first bullet had missed his head by maybe an inch and a half. In those conditions, such a near miss was still excellent marksmanship. The bullet’s trajectory might have been slightly deflected by a tree branch midway to the target; if it hadn’t, it would have struck exactly to point of aim and Ben would not have been sitting here wondering about it. He’d be a semi-headless corpse lying in the woods. And that was an unsettling thought. Sometimes you got a brush with death so up-close and personal that you could smell it. Ben was smelling it now. Get over it, he scolded himself.

One thing he couldn’t get over was his deepening worry about what might have happened to Boonzie. He remembered his words to Grace earlier: For someone to get the better of him, they’d have to be extremely skilled. And that’s what the rifleman was, for sure.

Ben vowed that he would find him, too. To get close enough to do that, he was going to have to equip himself appropriately. That would be tomorrow’s mission.

It was not yet dawn by the time he got back to his base, tired and aching and demoralised. The icy rain had turned the snow on the pavements rock-hard and slippery smooth. Inside the cottage, the fire had died and the rooms were cold. Ben relit the wood-burner, stripped off his damp clothes and hung them over the back of a chair to dry. He took a shower and changed, then drank a pint of hot black instant coffee and napped for an hour in the armchair by the fire. Feeling a little revitalised when he woke, he dropped to the floor and forced his weary muscles to pump out a hundred press-ups and a series of stretching exercises.

The double-barrelled shotgun he’d taken from his opponent last night was still in the car, tucked out of sight behind the front seats. He went outside with a blanket to roll it up in, then carried it around the side of the cottage to the shed, where he found an old hacksaw with a reasonably sharp blade hanging on a nail above the workbench. He clamped the shotgun in the bench vice and used the saw to chop the barrels off flush with the wooden fore-end, about twelve inches long. Then he did the same at the other end, removing the stock to leave just the pistol grip. He now had a twelve-bore hand cannon that was useless for most normal purposes a shotgun was good for. But if a man wanted a devastating close-range combat blaster that would fit unobtrusively into a bag, he need look no further.