He slotted home the piece of plywood and returned the four cookery books to the space beneath the counter. He went to fetch the sketchpad with Harland’s final message and picked up the painting using the wet canvas clips attached to the top, brought both into the kitchen area and put the sketchpad and Werner’s Nomenclature into his backpack. He made himself another cup of tea. He stirred some sugar into it, unusually for him, and sat down to think things through in a pool of sunlight that came from the skylight at the back of the kitchen. He had the names and the five IBAN numbers, which he guessed were the account numbers used to finance five separate investigations, a good haul for a day’s work.
His attention went to a peacock butterfly fluttering at the window of the back door. He remembered Anastasia moving a table in his flat and standing on it with a jar to capture a butterfly and nearly breaking her neck in the process. He smiled to himself and reached to release the catch on the door. At that moment, the panelling to the right of the door exploded. He heard shattered glass falling into the sitting room. Someone had fired from the front of the cabin at his silhouette and missed because he had moved to get the door. He fell to the floor, grabbed the backpack and waited. The door catch was already released – the door would open with a shove. He looked up and saw no one and concluded that the gunman was some distance away – a sniper. He lunged at the door handle and threw his weight at the door. Another shot. There was no report, just the sound of splintering wood to his right as he tumbled across the threshold on to the gravel. He crab-crawled up to the rock behind the house to gain cover and a better view. When he got there, he took the binoculars from the side pocket of the backpack and moved to a gap in the rock where he could search the land in front of the house. Nothing moved. There was no glint of metal or glass in the sunlight, and no sound. He waited. It was vital to know the shooter’s position before deciding which way to escape. His leg was giving him less trouble, but running was still out of the question, so he bloody well needed to make the right choice. A killer would expect his quarry to try to escape, whatever the chances. Samson wasn’t going to oblige by making a panicky move – another lesson he’d learned in Syria when a sniper pinned him and two guides in a building just over the Turkish border. The guides had sat down with their backs against the wall, propped the guns beside them and closed their eyes. Samson had smoked a lot in those days, and he’d offered them cigarettes. They’d shaken their heads. Smoke could be seen through a telescopic sight and they needed to make the gunman think they had gone. It was very hot. They had no water. They had waited twelve hours and, when they’d eventually moved, they took the hardest, least obvious route, climbing up the side of the building and working their way across roofs pitted by mortar shells. So, now, he waited and watched. But he also texted Ulrike: ‘Under fire and pinned down at cabin. Can you call local police?’ A reply came a few minutes later. ‘Have done. Neighbour coming armed.’
The neighbour was probably a long way off, as were the police, in this empty part of Estonia, but it was better than nothing. Samson waited, certain that between the moment the shooter had fired three shots in quick succession and his own scramble to the rocks there had been very little time for the man to change position. Two other things were in his favour. Unlike a sniper on a battlefield, sooner or later this character would have to check whether he’d killed, wounded or missed his target. The reason he hadn’t already done so was because he didn’t know whether Samson was armed and lying in wait for him in the cabin. Again, there was a feeling of amateurishness about it all. A professional hit man would have made sure of the shot and kept on coming until he saw the target’s body lying at his feet.
Also in Samson’s favour was that night would come, though not for another few hours. He passed the time by conducting a minute survey of the terrain to the east of the cabin, where he paused at every tussock and ambivalent shape or shadow. He found the sniper after half an hour in a slight dip in the land, the gun poking through a tussock of marsh grass. The shooter had come prepared for the particular hue of the landscape and was wearing a very effective pale camouflage. Now that Samson knew where he was, he could work out his best route of escape. The trouble was that the land to the south of him – the direction of his car – was very exposed. He waited some more and it dawned on him that he might not necessarily be the target. If the gunman had been after Zoe and her friend, then he would expect a second person in the cabin, who might, of course, be armed.
He had been there well over an hour when he decided to make a move. He tightened the straps on his pack and stumbled as fast as he could towards the shore. There was one area where he would be vulnerable, a rise in the land, which he had to take before descending to
