Page 28 of The Final Vow (Washington Poe #7)

Perfect sniping country.

The kind of place where gunshots would be an everyday sound.

‘You the guy from London? The city slicker they’ve sent tae tell us carrots what tae do?’

Carrots was what cops in the cities called cops in the rural forces.

‘I’m from Cumbria, mate. Pitlochry’s an urban hellscape as far as I’m concerned. I’m the carrot, not you.’

Ma Goonie grunted something unintelligible. Poe doubted it was anything polite. ‘I’ll take ye tae to the briefing room,’ he said. ‘They’re waiting for you.’

The briefing room was full. Poe stood at the back with a couple of bored-looking armed cops. Armed cops always looked bored in Poe’s experience. He reckoned it was so they looked cool.

A uniformed chief superintendent stood up and nodded at Poe.

She was a tall woman. An old scar ran from the corner of her lip to the middle of her cheek.

Looked like she’d been glassed. Poe wondered if she was a local cop or if she’d been parachuted in from Glasgow or Edinburgh.

Police Scotland was a national police force.

It covered the whole country. The smaller regional forces had been merged for more than a decade.

And with 23,000 personnel, it was the second biggest police force in the UK.

Only the Met was bigger. Poe thought Police Scotland was still finding its feet, particularly when it came to balancing the expertise needed for complex operations with the need for local cops and their unrivalled local intelligence systems. It was possible, probable even, that the chief superintendent had never set foot in Pitlochry Police Station.

‘Now that London have bothered to show up, we’ll crack on,’ she said.

She brought up some slides and took them through what the gamekeeper had found.