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.”