When he woke he felt ghastly. He was ill, no doubt of that. Although it was still dark, Christina must have had to get up. The lamp at the dressing table nearly blinded him when he looked to see her vague shadow moving as she dressed and brushed her hair. She must also have brought the wireless into the bedroom, because someone else was talking, a man. That would be the first news bulletin of the day.

He moved his head, and immediately felt sick. Alarmed he lay still, waiting for the qualm to subside. He became conscious that the bedclothes touching his head and hands were soaked with cold sweat, and tried to push them away. But he found that he couldn’t move. He puzzled over this for a few minutes before the explanation came on him. He was paralysed.

He opened his mouth to call Christina. Nothing happened. He couldn’t make a sound. His locked throat cracked with no effect. Then he realised to his despair that Christina had gone; worse, that she had never been there. He had imagined her. She didn’t know that he was lying ill and dumb and helpless. He was abandoned.

Suddenly he felt a splash on his cheek, and the wetness of it ran down his chin. Something hard was pushed against his mouth, something cold trickled between his lips. Instinctively, he swallowed. The cold turned burning hot. Brandy.

With a shock he woke up, groaning in relief. He had been, as so often, dreaming on the verge of nightmare. He was lying not in a fever sweat but in snow. He was not paralysed but bound. In slipping down the crevasse he must have struck his head and knocked himself unconscious. They were treacherous, these Bavarian Alps. Nor, of course, was he abandoned. Christina and Reinhard had gone to fetch help. Now it had come. That explained the brandy, which must have poured from a cask at the neck of a St. Bernard dog. He had been brought to himself by a dog, and like—like someone he’d heard about recently. And already the rescue party was at work. He was being hauled, strapped, to safety. There was the blinding searchlight, there the roaring engine of the helicopter—the helicopter—

The helicopter. Brett opened his eyes. The world spun as if he were perched on the spoke of a circus wheel. It settled. It seemed larger than was right. That, he realised, was due to the angle from which he was seeing it. He was lying on the ground. And he knew that he was at last truly awake. He knew where he was, what had been done to him, and what was happening. He was being dragged by the shoulders, bound, through a snowy clearing in a Kentish wood, having been hit on the head from behind his back—by the same hand as had hit Beddoes?—as he came along the path between the trees. He knew who had brought him to it. Stephanie.