But what troubled Jamie even more profoundly than the haunting vision of Ross Campbell’s last moments was the knowledge of who the killers were. Two of them, at any rate.

Knowing what he knew, a sensible man would have stayed away from here. Not Jamie McGlashan. Still, he had taken what he considered to be reasonable precautions. Such as giving the murder scene a wide berth by sticking to the far western end of the loch, nearly twelve miles away; and such as not returning to the shithole mobile home that his housing benefit cheques paid for, and instead living rough in the stone bothy where he’d camped with his father as a boy, when the old man had taught him the poacher’s craft.

Those were mixed memories for Jamie. His father had been a brutal and volatile tyrant whom he’d loathed as much as he’d loved. Every time he thought about him, Jamie touched his scarred lip and thought about the legacy it had left him with.

The bothy was little more than a ruin now, but he was content to stay there until all the heat died down and he could be certain that the killers had no interest in him.

He stuffed his waders into the bin bag he kept them in, chucked it into the back of the Subaru and pulled on his boots. Out of habit he took out his phone to check his Facebook page, though he had no real friends and wasn’t expecting anything. Reception was crap out here anyway. He replaced the phone in his breast pocket, then stretched and yawned, closed the tailgate lid, dragged his weary feet around to the driver’s door and hefted his bulk in behind the wheel. He was getting fatter all the time, not that it worried him that much any more, with nobody around to taunt him about it.

The Subaru’s interior light hadn’t come on when he opened the door. Which didn’t surprise Jamie, because virtually everything else about the old wreck was failing. He reached up and prodded the switch, and the car’s interior filled with a dim yellow glow.

And Jamie McGlashan let out a scream as he saw the figure sitting in the passenger seat next to him.

The apparition was more like a creature than a man. It looked like something that had crawled out of a swamp, all covered in leafy foliage and green dangling mossy fronds. For a bowel-loosening moment Jamie thought it was one of the mythical beasts that had filled his grandfather’s stories. But mythical beasts didn’t wear hi-tech night-vision goggle apparatus and go around with crossbows. This one was cradled in the swamp thing’s lap, cocked and loaded and pointing a razor-tipped arrowhead right at Jamie’s big round stomach.