At last, Dr Fraser came on the phone, having only just got into work and already sounding as though she was running in eight directions at once. Boonzie repeated who he was and asked about Ewan. He was ready for the worst, but even so the news that there had been no discernible change in his nephew’s condition left him feeling flat and grim. He thanked her for the update anyway, gave her his number and asked if she would call if there were any developments, good or bad. Dr Fraser promised that she would.
Boonzie put the phone away and continued waiting and watching. At 8.47 a.m. the first glint of the sun’s disc peeked over the hills in the east. Two and a half minutes later, at precisely ten to nine, a black Jaguar luxury estate veered in sharply through the gates and rolled up in front of the building. The driver’s door swung open and Boonzie felt a small, sharp blade of pain and fury stab his heart as his Number One target, Detective Inspector Fergus Macleod, emerged from the car, grabbed a briefcase and raincoat from the back and then marched up to the entrance. Macleod’s face was blotchy and red and he walked uncomfortably, as though he’d overstuffed himself with fried eggs and bacon that morning. Boonzie thought briefly about reattaching the scope to the crossbow and pinning him like a butterfly to the doorway before he made it inside, then dismissed the idea as maybe not practical. Macleod disappeared into the building. Boonzie made a note of his car make, model and registration.
He was finishing scribbling down the number when a red Toyota Corolla arrived and parked a few spaces away from the black Jag. Boonzie put the telescope to his eye and saw that it was Jim Coull. He observed his Number Two target enter the building, took a note of the reg number and settled back for the wait.
From nine a.m. onwards the police station gradually came to life. Vehicles came and went from both the staff and visitor car parks. Boonzie brewed up a mug of strong black coffee and kept watching the building in case either of his targets left. Time passed. If anyone had even noticed the camper van sitting in the visitor car park, it seemed nobody was interested enough to come and check it out.
Boonzie didn’t care how long he needed to wait. He had food and water, heating and toilet facilities, and could remain there all day if necessary. In the event, he didn’t have to bide his time for too long. Three hours after reporting for duty, DI Macleod and DS Coull emerged together from the building. Macleod had on the raincoat and still looked blotchy. They appeared deep in serious conversation as they walked towards the car park. The pair hovered there for half a minute longer, still talking, the winter wind ripping at their hair, then split up and walked to their vehicles. Boonzie wondered where they were going. He moved up the narrow aisle to the driver’s seat as the black Jaguar took off, followed by the red Toyota. Boonzie started up the camper van and let it roll gently out of the visitor car park after them, making sure to keep a good distance behind.
As they reached the gates, the Jag turned left towards the bypass roundabout and the Corolla headed in the opposite direction. Now Boonzie was torn as to which one to follow. He opted to go after Macleod in the Jag.
Boonzie hung back and allowed a few other vehicles to slip between himself and the Jag as Macleod led him around the snowy-edged bypass skirting Fort William. A couple of miles later they entered a residential area on the edge of the town, filled with white-roofed modern houses that all looked like clones of one another. By now the vehicles spaced between them had filtered off, and Boonzie had to be careful not to be spotted while at the same time not losing sight of the Jag for too long, in case it disappeared among the Legoland warren of suburban streets. Finally Macleod pulled up in the driveway of a large detached residence with a prim garden and a double garage. Boonzie slotted the camper by the kerb eighty yards back, moved quickly back to the net-curtained side window and grabbed his telescope to watch Macleod climb out of the Jag and walk up to the house.
It looked as though the cop was coming home for lunch, in which case he might be there for a while. Boonzie decided to follow Macleod inside and confront him there. If the man was alone, so much the better. If not, Boonzie would have to deal with it. His plan was to force Macleod to confess everything, then make him call his minion Coull to get him to come over to the house on the pretext of needing to have a secret meeting.
Then Boonzie would decide what to do with the pair of them. His current favoured option was to drive them out into the middle of nowhere and slit their throats before he buried them.
He reattached the scope to the bow, then cocked the weapon and fitted a hunting bolt before applying the safety catch and slipping it into its carry bag. Just as he was about to step out of the camper and start making his way over to the house, he saw Macleod re-emerge from the front door and stride quickly back towards his car, speaking on a phone. He dived behind the Jag’s wheel, and moments later the car reversed sharply out of the driveway and sped off. Wherever he was going in such a rush, Boonzie intended to follow.
Macleod’s Jaguar led him out of town, and it wasn’t long before they were miles out into the snowy countryside. Boonzie was still hanging right back, partly to avoid notice in Macleod’s rear-view mirror, but partly also because the wheezy old camper van was hard pressed to keep up with the fast car.
More than eight miles into the middle of nowhere, the Jaguar turned off the road and went bumping and sliding down a twisty track with dilapidated barbed-wire fencing and overgrown gorse bushes and brambles on both sides. Boonzie waited until the car was out of sight, then cautiously followed. He continued along the track for a hundred yards, until he could see the Jag parked another hundred yards ahead at the bottom of a slope, next to a dead tree and the ruins of an old grey-stone chapel.
Boonzie pulled in behind a clump of gorse and got out of the camper with the cocked crossbow in his hands and his sheathed knife and a handful of extra hunting bolts stuck in his belt. The icy wind wrapped itself around him and his breath clouded like smoke. He had no idea what Macleod was doing, but saw his chance to catch the bent cop alone where there would be no witnesses. Eyeing the lie of the land he saw a natural path through the bushes and over a snowy rise from whose top he would be able to work his way around the back of the ruined chapel and approach Macleod by stealth. The ghillie suit would do him no good in this terrain, even if he’d had time to put it on.
Boonzie cleared the barbed-wire fence and scrambled up the slope, gorse overgrowth scratching at his legs and his feet sinking into deep snow. As he made it to the top of the rise he flattened himself low to the ground and crept forward until he could see Macleod’s car from a different angle. And something else he hadn’t been able to see from the track: another car, parked a few yards away from the Jaguar around the side of the ruined chapel. The second car was a big silver tank of a Rolls Royce. Boonzie realised that Macleod had driven out to this remote spot for a rendezvous with someone he obviously didn’t want to meet in public.
This could be interesting.
Boonzie scrambled the rest of the way down the slope and approached the back of the roofless old chapel. He could hear the sound of voices: two men in conversation, though he couldn’t make out what they were saying. Peering through a crumbled window he saw Macleod standing below the remains of an archway, talking with another man Boonzie had never seen before. The other man was older and trimmer than Macleod, and much better dressed in a tweedy suit under a long cashmere overcoat. His hair was silver like his Rolls Royce, expensively styled and swept back from his high brow. Boonzie wondered who he was.
Only one way to find out.
He stepped around the corner of the chapel and pointed the crossbow at the two men.
They stopped talking and stared at him. Macleod’s florid features went the colour of beetroot and he said loudly, ‘What do you think you’re doing, McCulloch?’ He looked angry, but strangely unsurprised by Boonzie’s sudden appearance.
Boonzie kept the bow levelled in their direction. He stepped closer.
‘You’re making a very big mistake, McCulloch.’
‘You’re out of your bloody mind.’
‘Shut yer hole,’ Boonzie snapped savagely at him. He jerked the bow towards the older man. ‘Who’re you?’
The older man smiled. ‘Come, Mr McCulloch, let’s be reasonable about this. Why don’t you lower the weapon and we can talk?’ His voice was smooth and mellow, the accent perceptibly Scottish but attenuated.
‘On yer knees,’ Boonzie grated.
But Macleod and the older man didn’t move. ‘You’re going to regret this, you know,’ the older man said.
That’s when Boonzie saw what at first glance looked like a large red insect hovering in front of his chest. Except it wasn’t an insect. It was the bright red dot of a hidden marksman’s laser sight drawing a bead on him from a distance.
And at that moment he knew that he had walked into a trap.
‘As you can see, you’re not really in a position to dictate terms, Mr McCulloch,’ the older man said. ‘Now, you have three seconds to drop your weapon or my security employee, who currently has a high-powered rifle aimed at your heart, will shoot.’
Boonzie might not have been as fast as he once was, but he was still fast. He made a dive for it. There was an explosion of dirt and snow as the rifle bullet blew a crater in the ground behind where he’d been standing a split-second earlier. Macleod and the older man retreated behind the stone archway. Boonzie’s blood was frozen in his veins as he raced towards the cover of the dead tree near the ruins, ducked behind its thick trunk and pressed up tight against it. Glancing past its gnarly edge he saw four more men stepping out of the bushes and striding towards him.
Men with pistols.
Boonzie knew he was cornered, and the sudden realisation started up a heavy thudding in his heart.
The armed men were coming closer. Someone called out, ‘Give it up, McCulloch, you’re done!’
Boonzie began to sweat. The perspiration sheeted down his face and prickled his eyeballs. The thumping in his chest was so strong it felt as though it would shake his ribs apart. A ripping pain seared his whole left side, from hip to shoulder. He blinked to try to clear his vision, which had suddenly gone blurry. Something was happening to him. Something catastrophically bad that he had no strength to fight back against.
In the next moment, he was staring up at the grey sky. He realised that he’d fallen over and was sprawled on his back on the hard, cold ground.
In his last moments before he fell into a faint, the men reached him. Through his blurred vision he caught glimpses of their grinning faces. He could hear their laughter. Felt their hands taking away his weapons and searching through his pockets. They found McGlashan’s phone and took it.
And Boonzie’s final thought before the world went black was that he hadn’t called Mirella.
Chapter 27
On his return from Inverness around ten-thirty that morning, Ben stopped off at the Gunn cottage for a bite to eat, to inspect his purchases and phone Boonzie’s wife.
Mirella had still heard nothing, and she sounded as if she was falling apart from worry, grief and lack of sleep. She was sobbing bitterly when she picked up the phone, and the tears barely stopped flowing during the three minutes they spoke. From the beginning he sensed from her tone that something had changed. He was right.
‘It’s not that I don’t trust you, Ben. I wouldn’t have asked for your help otherwise. But—’
‘But?’ Ben guessed what was coming next.
‘The days are going by. I feel so helpless sitting here waiting for the phone to ring. I can’t eat. I’m up all night pacing. How long before we have to admit you can’t find him, and we need to involve the police?’
‘If I was unable to find him, what do you think the police could do?’
‘What about INTERPOL and people like that? They have all kinds of ways to help, don’t they? Helicopters and sniffer dogs and things.’
Just what the world needed. Another botched police operation with too many chiefs and not enough Indians, which would send the bad guys running for the hills and virtually guarantee that Boonzie was never found, dead or alive. Assuming that the joint powers of European law enforcement bothered to do anything at all. But Ben couldn’t tell her that. ‘I’m close, Mirella. So close I’m following right in his footsteps.’
‘I don’t know what to do.’
‘It’s your choice, Mirella. Whatever you decide, I will respect it. But I won’t give up.’
‘Another day,’ she said with a sniff. ‘Twenty-four hours. Then I think I’ll call them. I’m sorry, Ben. I’m going to go crazy if I don’t do something.’
‘You do what you feel is right,’ he said with a sinking heart. ‘And call me anytime, day or night. Okay?’
She was still crying when she ended the call. Ben gazed out of the window at the snowflakes spiralling from the grey clouds, and heaved a deep sigh. Twenty-four hours to find Boonzie before his wife pressed the panic button, come what may. Perfect.
There was no time to lose. Ben finished packing his equipment, wrapped up his weapons and then went out to the car and sped off along the now-familiar road out of the village leading towards Loch Ardaich. Now that he knew for certain that he was on the right track, he needed to believe that his second attempt to find the poacher would bear fruit. If the bad guys didn’t find him first.
Whoever the bad guys were. Ben had no idea. But their involvement in this situation offered him a new lead to follow. Whatever information they already had about the poacher, he could use that knowledge to his own advantage by tracking their movements. He was looking forward to meeting them again, especially the rifleman. And he was sure he would. Their next encounter would be a different game entirely.
Out of caution he left the car hidden in a different spot from last night, nearly half a mile away among the dense pine cover close to the western shore. It was cold out here. Seriously cold. Stepping from the warm Mercedes into the subzero wind chill made the skin on his face feel raw and papery-thin. Snow clumped heavily on the pine branches, dragging them low to the ground. Now and then one would shake itself free of its load and spring up, adding a cascade of powdery snow to the depth that was already on the ground. The going was tough in these conditions. An ordinary person would have left a trail of prints that a blind man could follow. But Ben Hope was no ordinary person. Moving slowly and carefully without leaving a trace of his passing, he spent nearly an hour working his way back to the spot where only luck had spared him from getting shot the night before.
Surveilling the terrain by daylight only confirmed to him what he’d already known. Whoever had been behind the rifle was a hell of a shooter. Probably almost as good as Ben was himself. Only a supremely skilled marksman would have attempted to steer his bullet through dense tree cover, in darkness and fog. There weren’t many angles from which he could have done it; and it was by calculating the bullet’s likely trajectory over the challenging terrain that Ben was able to work out the possible origin of the shot. His best guess told him that the shooter had been positioned on a tree-lined ridge to the west, about sixty metres above the waterline. Ben used the crossbow’s laser rangefinder to confirm the range. Two hundred and eleven yards.
It took another thirty minutes to trek around the shoreline and clamber up the ridge. When he finally got there, Ben soon found that his best guess had scored a bullseye. Fresh snowfall couldn’t quite mask the man-sized indentation in the ground where the sniper had lain marking his target. But the real proof was the small hole in the snow a few inches to the right. Ben dug his fingers into the hole and found the ejected shell casing which, hot from the rifle’s breech, had melted the hole and buried itself among the grass underneath. The case was shiny and new. The headstamp markings on its base said .308 WINCHESTER. A chambering almost identical to the military 7.62 round used by NATO forces. It co
uld punch through a human target with devastating effect at over a thousand metres.
Ben was feeling luckier than ever.
He dropped the cartridge case back into the snow, then looked around him. The sniper’s position was a fine vantage point, with a sweeping view over the loch’s western end and the frozen whiteness of its shoreline. Ben couldn’t have chosen a better one, and he decided to make use of it for a while. He fully intended to stay out here all day and all night, if that was what it took. With no other leads and the clock in his head ticking away the twenty-four-hour countdown until Mirella involved the authorities in the search, he was feeling the pressure.
Ben unpacked the ghillie suit from his bag and put it on over his clothes. It would help to keep him warm as well as unseen. When he lay down in the snowy undergrowth he looked like just another immobile patch of vegetation, invisible from more than a few steps away. Now it was just a question of waiting and watching. Two things Ben Hope was exceptionally good at. He was good at a lot of things. And like all high-achieving people he was confident in his talents and hard-learned capabilities. When you took the kinds of risks he’d taken in his life, you needed to be. Because if you didn’t believe you were up to the challenge, then you were already setting yourself up to fail.
But Ben was still just a man, and in common with all his fellow humans he wasn’t immune to self-doubt. There had been times in his life when his belief in his abilities had hit rock bottom, when he’d felt as lost and weak and helpless as a rudderless ship in the teeth of a raging storm. As he lay there now, his body slowly numbing in the cold, watching the empty loch and the icy wilderness that hugged its banks, he could feel those same old haunting doubts and fears closing over him like a curtain of darkness.
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