The sense of being suffocated rose, flirting with her at first, although she knew if she didn’t succeed in controlling it, it would swamp her. The fight was mental, yet her hands fisted themselves in preparation for the fray. Memories assailed her, playing out in smell and sound and blackness. Invisible soil found her throat and closed it. She coughed, spitting out the imagined foe. Her fisted hands found the bark of the nearest tree and beat at it, as though it was her jailer.

And still she did not let herself scream.

The physical fight back seemed to reassert the rational in her brain. She wasn’t being buried alive, it told her. This episode will pass, like all the others before it. There was a sky up there, vast and endless, beyond the dense blanket of dark green.

Time, which had stretched out like an elastic band, sprang abruptly back into shape.

She registered where she was and that, thankfully, Alvis had yet to appear, so wouldn’t have seen her fight her way out of the recurrent nightmare that had haunted her since her last case in Glasgow. Feeling the warm trickle of blood on her hands, she noted the damage done to her knuckles.

Something that could be easily lied about, considering the terrain.

In the interim, Blaze, it appeared, had completely deserted her. Rhona was now besieged by the worrying thought that she might have lost Donald’s dog, something Chrissy would never forgive her for, never mind Donald.

‘Blaze,’ she shouted. ‘Here to me.’

An answering bark seemed to come from ahead and to her right, although in the thickness of the forest it was hard to tell.

Hearing Alvis’s approach, Rhona prepared herself, not wishing for another enquiry about her well-being. When he appeared from under a low-lying branch, she noted he too was bleeding.

‘What happened to your head?’

He reached up to where she’d pointed and wiped the blood away. ‘It’s like walking through a maze of sharpened knives,’ he said.

‘Tell me about it.’ Rhona showed him her own injuries.

‘What were you doing?’ he said, obviously taken aback by the state of her knuckles, which had begun to swell. ‘Punching the trees?’

She was saved further comment by a flurry of excited barking suggesting that Blaze might well have found something. This was quickly followed by a female voice indicating surprise at the dog’s arrival. Heading towards the sounds of their interchange, Rhona emerged into a clearing, housing a single-person tent and various bits of equipment, to find a young woman patting Blaze.

‘You came through the plantation?’ she said with a look of amazement.

‘It wasn’t easy,’ Rhona said. ‘Except for Blaze, that is.’