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.