Charles Todd - A Cold Treachery

Rutledge had had to be satisfied with that.

And now as he drove through the darkness, Hamish kept him company in the lonely silence.

T his part of the Lake District was bounded on the east by the Pennines and on the west by the sea where the high country fell away to coastal plains. It was a land of farming and sheep, where damsons ripened in August but apples were gnarled and sour, where a man's nearest neighbor might live out of sight in a fold of the great fells, and such roads as there were often became impassable in winter.

Urskdale was not one of the famous valleys of the lake country. It possessed no poetic views or famous prospects. It was, simply, a rough, lonely, and wildly beautiful place where ordinary men and their families eked an existence in hard soil and harsh conditions, and felt at home. Safe. Until now…

What had turned a killer loose in their midst?

H e'd had the forethought to add a Thermos of tea to the sandwiches the hotel had put up for him, and stopped only to refuel the motorcar or walk for five minutes in the snow while the wind brought him back from the edge of sleep. In the cold night air, there was only the warmth of the engine to keep his feet from numbness. There was no such help for his gloved hands or the back of his neck.

How long would a child survive in this weather, lost in the open?

No' verra long… Hamish, at his shoulder in the rear seat, had for miles been making comparisons with the Highlands, the poor ground and narrow valleys, streams that ran crookedly over stones and sang sometimes in the silence. It's no' the same, but it makes a man homesick, he added. In the trenches I sometimes dreamed about the glen. It was verra real. Wi' all my heart, I wanted to come home again.

“I came to the Lake District as a boy, with my father. For walking holidays.” The words were whipped away by the wind, and Rutledge, concentrating on the road running before his headlamps, was unaware that he had answered aloud.

They had driven through Kendal two hours before, one of the handful of small towns that serviced this part of the country. He had seen the bridge by the church, where he had stood with his father and leaned over the sun-warmed stone wall to watch for salmon in the Kent. Years ago. A lifetime ago.

The road just outside Keswick was barricaded by police. Rutledge was stopped and questioned, his papers examined in the light of a torch. Then it swept the rear of the motorcar. Rutledge flinched as it passed over where Hamish sat. But the constable nodded and stepped back.

The sergeant in charge, hands jammed into the pockets of his heavy coat, leaned into the open window and said, “Sorry, sir. Orders of the Chief Constable.”

“Any news?”

“None, sir, that we've heard. There's little enough traffic just now, seeing the state of the roads. At least no one's come out since we've been posted here.”

“Or he got through long before that,” Rutledge answered. “Still, we can't take that chance. Carry on, then.”

He turned off the Buttermere road soon after, following what was little more than a well-traveled track that looped the flanks of some of the tallest peaks in the district.

They loomed overhead, hidden by the swirls of snow, hulking shadows unseen but always- there. It was odd-he could feel them, their presence confining.

Rutledge shivered, fighting a rising panic. Unexpected panic-almost as if it had been conjured up by the prison sentence handed down to the young man in Preston But it wasn't that. The heights above him, the encircling fells, once familiar and beautiful, were now watchful and malevolent, pressing in on him, smothering him.

It was the first time he'd come here since the war. And in his concern for the missing child, his concentration on road conditions, it hadn't occurred to him that the very things that made the Lake District what it was-the high peaks and inaccessible valleys-would now threaten him as effectively as the heavy gates of a prison clanging shut at his back.

He had been buried alive in that nightmarish dawn when Hamish was shot. He had felt the earth shift and tilt under his feet as the shell exploded, then he'd dropped far down in the pitch dark of the erupting hole as mud and bodies and debris thundered down on him. All that had saved him was the bloody tunic of one of his men, his face pressed against the still-warm cloth where a tiny pocket of air survived between the living and dead. Deaf and blind, his extremities pinned by the weight of earth, the taste of blood in his mouth, and slow suffocation setting in, he had seen the dying face of Hamish MacLeod. Eyes begging him for the coup de grace to stop the pain, a thread of a whisper that seemed to be burned in memory. Fiona MacDonald's name.. .

By the time the frantic rescue party had dug down to him, the damage had been done.

He could no longer endure a place from which there was no escape. A shut door, a small room, a crowded train carriage, a throng of people pushing against him. But he hadn't anticipated-he hadn't been prepared for the sense of walls around him here. Blinding snow and darkness and that nearly invisible presence above his head cutting him off from retreat.

“Aye, there's only one way in,” Hamish reminded him mercilessly. “Ye saw the map for yourself.”

The urge to turn around, to go away while he could, swept over him.

Rutledge swore. He didn't need Hamish to remind him that he was a serving policeman. That there was duty to be done. God knew he'd done it in France. At what cost to himself and to others…

“I can't change it,” he said aloud. “I can't build new roads.” Swallowing hard against the panic, he told himself, Tomorrow when the sun is out, it will be different. Please God, I can carry on until then And then the rough roadbed demanded all his attention, wiping out every other thought.

He drove on, tense, watchful.

The fingerpost offering directions at the next turning had been shifted by the wind, leaning at an odd angle and pointing skyward. But instinct told him he'd found the right place. The track rose and fell with the land, forged by centuries of traffic: hooves of countless flocks, cart wheels, shod feet. He prayed the sheep had been penned up before the storm. Or were hunkered down among the rocks where they could find shelter, out of the cruel wind. They were allowed to roam freely, sometimes clogging the roads, and tonight they would be nearly invisible until he had driven straight into their midst. Even a single animal on these icy tracks could spell disaster for a motorcar.

Herdwicks were a sturdy breed, well suited to the fells, and could survive without fodder all winter, scratching for their own sustenance. Since the time of Edward I, a thriving weaving business had made the North famous. The coarse, wiry fleece yielded a variety of cloth.

There was nothing in his headlamps but the snow-rutted road, the occasional low-lying hump of a stone farmhouse hugging a curve, or the silhouette of an upright box of a house sitting on the slope above. And always trees that somehow seemed determined to thrive in spite of the harshness of Nature.

Ordinarily Rutledge liked the darkness, the isolation, the silence. But now he was fighting fatigue. And keeping himself alert with the image of a lost child huddled in the lee of a wall or crouched in a shallow crevice, terrified and alone.

Urskdale couldn't be much farther…

The road narrowed again just as a heavier snow squall was passing over, obscuring everything.

Rutledge bit back his exasperation, concentrating on maintaining what speed he could, only to find himself defeated by the weather. Already the verge was hardly visible, and in the darkness to his right, there was a black void indicating a long drop and a nasty slide into grief.