Back in the cottage, Ben swallowed another pint of black coffee while he searched the internet for stores in the area dealing in hunting and outdoors equipment. He found one in Inverness, and the 140-mile round trip duly became his first task for the day.

The shop stood between a newsagent’s and a small restaurant on a narrow street opposite the sloping, sculpted rear lawns of Inverness Castle, seat of the city’s Sheriff Court. Ben was waiting outside when the owner opened the place up for business. A little bell jingled as he pushed through the door and was hit by the unique smell of outdoor clothing and hunting supplies stores: a scent of burnished leather and slightly musty waxed cotton, blended with the mixed aromas of boot polish and gun oil. The place was an Aladdin’s cave stacked from floor to ceiling with shelves and display units, stuffed and mounted deer heads and antlers occupying every area of unused wall space. The proprietor was a flabby middle-aged guy with a threadbare comb-over hairstyle and glasses thicker than pint-glass bottoms that magnified his eyes like a bush baby’s. Ben nodded him a polite good morning and set about threading his way through the maze of country wear, fishing tackle, camping equipment, hiking accessories and firearms-related apparel to pick out the items on his list.

Next to a rack of tartan-lined shooting jackets of the sort upper-class ladies and gents might wear to an exclusive pheasant massacre at a Scottish manor estate, Ben found something altogether more utilitarian and suited to his purpose. The two-piece ghillie suit was the kind of outfit used by deer stalkers and woodland hunters as well as military snipers, covering the wearer from head to toe in artificial mossy foliage like something that had just crawled out of a thicket: the best form of camouflage clothing ever devised. Ben pulled it down from its hanger, laid it on the counter and went on shopping.

He paused to gaze at a display rack of scoped hunting rifles, one of which would have nicely complemented the ghillie suit if he’d possessed the necessary UK firearms licensing paperwork. Instead he made do with something much quieter and just as deadly, a Ka-Bar survival knife with a razor-sharp black carbon steel blade. The last item on Ben’s list was the most expensive, a pair of infrared night-vision goggles. Several hundred pounds for a piece of kit indistinguishable from what Special Forces had been using fifteen years earlier, now available to the general public. Just the thing for prowlers, voyeurs, perverts and folks who needed to be able to stalk dangerous killers at night in a dark and remote forest.