He thought he heard a car starting nearby, but couldn’t say for sure, because the next thing he knew, Mo Khan was kneeling next to him, asking if he was all right.

‘Get after him,’ he managed to say, although his voice sounded muffled, as if he’d just been anaesthetized.

Mo frowned, and then he said the words that Bolt had been dreading. ‘He’s gone, boss.’

And he had gone too. Within twenty minutes of Mo’s first call for backup, a blanket cordon had been placed round an area of more than a square mile, and a full-scale house-by-house search was in progress, involving more than four hundred officers. It was widely believed that there was no way Leonard Hope could have left the area on foot without being apprehended, and yet twenty-four hours later, when the search ended, there was still no sign of him. There were no witness sightings; there was no footage of him on any of the many CCTV cameras surrounding the area; and there were no reports of stolen vehicles.

It was as if he’d disappeared into thin air.

Twenty-five

Today 19.00

SCOPE KAYAKED FAST through the darkness, making good progress. The distance from Jock’s place to Tayleigh along the river was just over 11 miles. It was a lot of ground to cover, but the wind had picked up from the east, and was helping to push him along as it whistled down the natural tunnel made by the river. Pine- and beech-covered hills rose up majestically on both sides of the water, and above him the first stars were beginning to appear, joining the thin slither of moon, and providing just enough light to see by, as Scope scanned both banks for any sign of the canoeists or the canoes.

He was no longer wondering why a local family of four had been targeted by professional thugs, including the scar-faced man he’d seen earlier. The simple fact was that they had been and, if it wasn’t too late, then it was his duty to help them. What was really preying on his mind, though, was the fact that once again his life had been disrupted by violence. Sometimes it felt as if death stalked him like a relentless hunter. He could escape for a while – weeks; months; years sometimes – but it always caught up in the end, even here in one of the quietest, wildest parts of the country.

Scope considered himself a quiet, reasonable man. He preferred to turn his back on trouble. He liked people. Sometimes he even dreamed of meeting someone special again, and starting another family. Living happily ever after, as they did at the end of the movies. But it never worked out like that. And, whichever way he chose to look at it, he was fully prepared to use violence to achieve his ends. He’d killed six men in cold blood to avenge the death of his daughter, even though none of them had been directly responsible for Mary Ann’s death. In the end, she’d voluntarily injected the heroin herself. Only one of the six he’d killed had even met her. And yet even when one of them – a young, mid-ranking dealer – had been on his knees begging and crying for mercy, Scope had put a bullet in his head, and only occasionally had he lost sleep over what he’d done. Other people would have gone to the police, let them deal with it, but Scope hadn’t. He’d taken the law into his own hands.

It was the same when his nephew had been kidnapped six months earlier by men trying to blackmail the boy’s father. He’d gone after the kidnappers himself and kept the police out of it. And now, here he was, paddling like a madman down a lonely river, far from the place he’d once called home, a gun in his waistband, his heart pumping, not just from the exertion of the last hour and a half, or from the intensity of killing a man, but from something else. The excitement of what he was doing. A part of Scope – a very primitive part – was actually enjoying this.

He was going to miss Jock. He was going to miss this place too. He stopped paddling for a moment, getting his breath back, and looked up at the vast night sky as it stretched over towards the west, where just the faintest hint of pink glowing light still lingered. Sometimes, at night, Scope would sit outside the tiny cottage he rented, and watch the stars that swarmed across the night sky, wondering if his wife and daughter were up there, watching him. The air up here was sharp and fresh and, as he sat in the kayak, he took a long deep breath, thinking that the scene in front of him – the tar-black river vaguely shimmering in the light of the moon, and the forest rising up on either side of it – was much the same as it would have been a thousand, even a million years ago. It made him feel insignificant, a tiny intruder in a tiny boat who would soon be gone, while this would remain here forever. Right now, knowing that he was about to risk his life to help people he’d never met, it was a comforting thought.

Somewhere amidst the greenery came the plaintive call of a heron, breaking the silence, and Scope began paddling again, keeping close to the bank as he rode a series of shallow rapids, enjoying the sensation of the kayak bouncing up and down in the water.

And then, as he rounded a bend in the river, he saw the two Canadian canoes sitting on a sand spit that jutted out from the left-hand bank thirty yards in front of him. He rode the kayak onto the spit and climbed out, looking around. The two canoes were about five yards apart, and straight away Scope noticed there was no sign of any paddles, which struck him as odd. There was something else too. A long dark stain running down the inside of one of them, next to the back seat. He’d picked up a mini-Maglite torch at Jock’s and he shone it at the stain, tensing as he realized it was blood. Then he saw the golf-ball-sized holes at various points in the canoe. He counted five of them on one side, and a corresponding number on the other. There was no doubt in Scope’s mind that they’d been caused by bullets, and from a high-calibre weapon as well. The entry holes appeared to be on the right side of the canoe, suggesting someone had been shooting at the canoeists from somewhere on the other side of the river. Looking in that direction, Scope saw a small gap in the trees at the top of the hill, and recognized the lookout point. So the shooter had been up there and, for whatever reason, he’d ambushed the canoeists as they’d paddled downriver.

He’d clearly hit at least one of them, and yet there was no sign of any bodies.

Turning away, Scope walked slowly into the trees that ran down to the bank, which was where he found the bodies of the man and the woman. Their names, Scope remembered Jock as saying, were Tim and Jean Robinson, a local couple from somewhere up between Tayleigh and Inverness. Tim Robinson was lying sprawled over the top of his wife and, as Scope shone the torch down, he could see that he’d been shot in the back, roughly between the shoulder blades, by someone who knew what they were doing when it came to high-velocity rifles. Jean Robinson was lying on her back beneath her husband, staring upwards. Her eyes were open and a thin trail of dried blood ran from one corner of her mouth.

Scope wasn’t sure how long they’d been dead, but it looked as though it had been a while. Although he was wearing gloves, he didn’t want to touch the bodies and contaminate the scene. He was in enough trouble as it was, and it would be far better if no one knew he’d ever been here. According to Jock, the Robinsons had been with their two nieces who were up from London. One was only a young girl, whom Jock had described as a real sweetheart, and Scope didn’t know how he’d handle finding her body, if it was round here. Ever since he’d become a father, aged only nineteen himself, he’d been hugely protective of young children. He hated the idea of them suffering violence. He’d done two tours in Iraq during his decade in the army, and during the second tour, an IED meant for the patrol he was a part of, had been detonated prematurely by the insurgents who’d been lying in wait for them, killing two boys riding past on a rusty old bicycle instead. The boys had only ridden past the patrol a few seconds earlier. They’d been smiling and laughing as they balanced precariously on the bike, and Scope remembered smiling back at them, thinking at the time that – wherever you went in the world – kids were always kids. They’d been no more than twelve, those boys, and the impact from the blast had flung their bodies more than fifty feet through the hot desert air. They’d landed in the dirt just in front of the lead soldier in the patrol, and Scope remembered vividly the scene of chaos as, deafened by the blast, they’d all dived for cover at the side of the road, several of the men letting off bursts of gunfire into the surrounding uninhabited scrubland in a vain attempt to flush out the insurgents.