Even so, something wasn’t right. The way Jock had said the canoeists had abandoned their canoes halfway down the river but hadn’t told him where; and the fact that there was no sign of them now, even though there was a four-door Toyota Rav parked on the other side of Jock’s Nissan that almost certainly belonged to them.

Scope had an antenna for trouble. It was what came from fourteen years in the British infantry, serving first in Northern Ireland at the tail end of the Troubles, then in the killing fields of Bosnia, and finally in Basra in southern Iraq where, along with the rest of his battalion, he’d spent six months being shot at, bombed, and abused by people who’d smile and wave at you one minute, then walk round the corner out of sight the next and detonate a shrapnel-filled IED aimed at ripping your whole patrol to pieces. It made a man cautious, and Scope had long ago learned that being cautious could save your life.

First he had a look inside the Rav – the kids’ books and sweet wrappers on the back seat confirming that this was the canoeing family’s car; then he crossed the yard and peered in the office window. Nothing looked out of place, and Jock’s A4 diary, in which he wrote down pretty much everything to do with the business, was open on the desk at today’s date. Scope tried the door. It was unlocked and he stepped inside, closing it very slowly behind him so that it didn’t make the whine it usually did.

The first thing he noticed was the silence. He couldn’t hear anything, which was a surprise if Jock and a family of four were in residence. He took a couple of steps further into the room, moving as quietly as possible, and stopped next to the door that led into the cottage’s living room. He put his ear to the wood, but still couldn’t hear anything. It was as if no one was here.

But if they weren’t here, where were they? And why had Jock insisted he come back?

He reached down to open the door into the cottage, which was when he saw it on the carpet. A dark, penny-sized stain that he didn’t remember being there last time he’d been in the office. Crouching down, he touched it with the tip of his middle finger.

It was blood. And it was fresh.

Scope tensed. Jock had called him back here. Jock had sounded under duress. There was no sign of the canoeists. Now there was blood on the floor.

Scope had made enemies in his past, some of whom were very powerful. It was possible that they’d tracked him all the way to here, and that this was an ambush.

He thought fast. If people were here waiting for him, they’d have heard the minibus pull in a couple of minutes earlier, which meant they’d be suspicious if he didn’t put in an appearance soon. Retreating the way he’d come, he opened the office door and shut it again, loudly this time. ‘Jock, it’s me,’ he called out, keeping his eyes trained on the door leading into the cottage, just in case someone came rushing through. ‘I’ve just got a couple of things from the van to put away, then I’ll be through, okay?’

There was no sound or movement from behind the door to the cottage, and for a second Scope wondered if this time his paranoia might be misplaced, but he quickly discounted this. Something was definitely wrong; even if it wasn’t as bad as he was suspecting, it didn’t matter. It was always better to be safe than sorry.

He went back out through the office door again, as if he was going back to the minibus, then ducked down low and raced round the side of the cottage out of sight. The logical course of action would have been for him to take off out of here and call the police, but he couldn’t do that without at least some evidence that some wrongdoing had occurred. And there was something else too. He was fond of Jock. The old man had been good to him. If someone had hurt him, then Scope wasn’t going to let whoever it was get away with it.

He continued round to the back of the cottage, listening for the sound of anyone coming out looking for him, but could hear nothing. The whole place remained silent, except for the occasional noise of the night animals that lived in the woods surrounding the yard as they came out to hunt in the gathering darkness.

Scope fished in his jeans pocket until he found the spare keys to the cottage, which Jock had given him a couple of weeks earlier, in case of an emergency. He’d been touched that the old man had entrusted him with a set of keys when they’d only known each other a matter of months. It wasn’t often that Scope got close to people. He tended to keep his distance, a result of the fact that the two closest relationships of his adult life – those with his wife, and his beloved Mary Ann – had ended in tragedy. But he’d seen a kindness and a vulnerability in Jock that had drawn him in. Like Scope, Jock was lonely, having been on his own since his wife had left him for the bright lights of Edinburgh more than twenty years earlier. The two of them had talked over a bottle of decent whisky on more than one long night, and though Scope had never really opened up about his own past on those occasions, he’d always felt that he could have done if he’d needed to – even the darkest parts – and the old man would have understood, and not condemned him. And for that he was thankful.

He owed Jock. And he owed anyone who might have hurt him.

The back of the cottage was dark but, as Scope peered through the frosted glass in the back door, he could see the living-room lights were on. He carefully unlocked the door and crept inside, conscious that he was unarmed and acting with a complete disregard for his own safety. But that was Scope all over. He’d never been able to turn his back on danger, even though he was always trying to convince himself that his days of walking into the lion’s den were firmly behind him.

The back door opened directly into a narrow hallway that led past the stairs and into the living room, with a kitchen on one side, and a spare room where Jock liked to hoard all kinds of junk, on the other. Scope couldn’t see the door that led through to the office from the angle he was at, nor could he hear a thing from anywhere inside. Slowly, and making as little noise as possible, he made his way through the hallway, past the staircase, being careful not to trip on the boxes that littered the floor like obstacles, containing everything from boat engines to old paperbacks. Jock was a hoarder. He seemed incapable of chucking anything away, unlike Scope, whose possessions tended to be few and temporary.

The living room opened up in front of him as he reached the end of the hallway, revealing a scene that made him retreat into the shadows.

Jock lay dead on his front in the middle of the floor about ten feet away, next to the two easy chairs where he and Scope had sat when they’d shared those bottles of whisky. His face was pressed into the carpet, his arms down by his side, and the beanie hat he always wore – indoors and out – was missing. Somehow its absence made him seem much smaller and more diminished than he had in life. He was no longer Jock. He was just a corpse, and the sight of him, hollowed out like this, filled Scope with an intense emotion that he couldn’t quite define. It wasn’t sadness. It wasn’t even anger. It was something darker and more hopeless than that, and he had to force himself to suppress it as he took in the injuries that the old man had suffered.

A thin rivulet of blood had run from a deep cut on his nose onto the multicoloured, 1970s-style carpet that had always given Scope a headache, and there was a gaping, messy hole where one ear had been. More blood was clustered round Jock’s right hand, although Scope couldn’t see the cause of it, nor did he want to. One thing was certain, though. Jock had suffered terribly before he’d died, and the man responsible for that suffering was leaning against the far wall next to the door leading out to the office, a pistol with suppressor in one gloved hand. He was short and well built, with the cool poise of a professional killer, and it was clear that he was waiting for Scope to come walking through the door from the office, so he could put a bullet in him.