A cold treachery - Charles Todd [8]
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?
He'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.”
CHAPTER FOUR
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,