The drinkers were scattered around the single room but there was one sitting alone at the bar, as if lost in thought. There was a spare bar stool. Williams took it. They exchanged glances.
‘Nice day.’
‘Aye.’
‘You a single-malt man?’
‘Aye.’
Williams caught the eye of the bartender and nodded towards the man’s glass. The barman took a fine Islay single malt from his whisky array and poured a measure. The man raised an eyebrow.
‘And the same for me,’ said Williams. His new companion was much older, nudging sixty at least. His face was tanned with wind and summer sun, wrinkled, laughter lines at the corners of his eyes, but not the face of a fool. Harry might have weeks to spend at Craigleven. He just wanted to make friendly contact with the locals. He had no idea it was about to pay a huge dividend.
The two men toasted and drank. Now Mackie began to suspect that the laird’s guests might not be mere tourists. The man sitting beside him reeked of soldier.
‘You’ll be staying at the castle?’ he said.
‘For a while,’ said the soldier.
‘Do you know the Highlands?’
‘Not well, but I’ve taken salmon on the Spey.’
The ghillie was a shrewd ex-soldier. He knew how many eggs made a dozen. The man he was drinking with was not a regular infantry officer on leave. He was lean and hard, but most of the laird’s other guests seemed to be civilians. So this one was their protection.
‘There’s another stranger just moved into the forest,’ he said conversationally. The soldier stiffened.
‘A camper? Tourist? Birdwatcher?’
Mackie slowly shook his head.
In seconds Harry Williams was out of the bar, speaking into his mobile phone. The man at the other end was his sergeant.
‘I want everyone away from the windows,’ he ordered. ‘All curtains drawn. All sides. I’ll be back shortly. We’re all on alert.’
As chief gamekeeper, like his father before him, on the laird’s estate, Stuart Mackie was much concerned with vermin and the control of them. Inverness is the home of the red squirrel, but the vermin grey version was trying to move in and he was concerned to stop them. So he set traps. When he caught both types he liberated the reds and put down the greys.
That morning he had been tending his traps when he saw something that should not be there. His eye had caught a flash of white in a wall of green. It was a twig, fresh cut at a slanting angle, the white inner wood glinting in the morning light. He examined the cut. Not broken, not snapped, not ragged. Sliced as by a razor-sharp knife. So … a human agent. A stranger in his forest.
A man in the forest cuts a branch, even a twig, only because it is in the way. But a twig cannot be in the way. It can be pushed aside. So the foliage was needed for something, and there is only one thing that could be. Camouflage.
Who needs camouflage in the forest? A birdwatcher. But the twitchers, with their field glasses and cameras, lust for the rare breeds, the exotic. This was Stuart Mackie’s forest and he knew the birds. There were no rare ones. Who else hides himself beneath camouflage in the forest? In his youth, Mackie had served in the Black Watch regiment. He knew about snipers.
Harry returned to the bar and ordered two more single malts, though he never touched his own.
‘The people I and my men are protecting are very valuable,’ he said quietly. ‘I think I may need your help.’
Stuart Mackie sipped his replenished glass and made a speech.
‘Aye,’ he said.
Now it was dawn again and Mackie stood in the forest silent as a tree, watching, listening. It was the creatures of the forest he was observing. He knew them all. Occasionally, he moved, soundlessly, a few yards at a time, close to the steep slope that ran down to the stream flowing along the bottom of the glen. A thousand yards across the valley was the south face of the castle, the windows, the lawns.
It was the fawn that gave him the tip. The little roe deer was also moving through the undergrowth, looking for a tuft of fresh grass. He saw her; she did not see him. But she jerked up her head, turned, sniffed and ran. She had not seen anything, but she had smelt something that should not be there. Mackie stared where the deer had pointed.
Misha had found a perfect nest. A jumble of fallen logs and trunks, a tangle of branches on the slope facing the south aspect of the castle. His loupe-shaped range-finder had told him a thousand yards, half the lethal range of his Orsis.
In this camouflage-striped jungle clothing, flecked with twigs and leaves, he had become almost invisible. The stock of his rifle was snug in his shoulder, the metalwork shrouded in hessian sacking. He lay motionless, as he had through the night, and he would not move a muscle, or twitch, or scratch for hours yet to come, if need be. It was part of the training, part of the discipline that had kept him alive in the undergrowth of Donetsk and Luhansk as he had picked off Ukrainians, one after the other.