A Winter Grave

Chapter Eight

Brodie stood on the landing stage. Its raised helipad extended from Pacific Quay out into Cessnock Dock. In the last century they had built ships here, a forest of cranes lining each side of the river, breaking the skyline like dinosaurs. Both species now extinct.

From where he stood, the levees blocked his view of the north side of the Clyde. He huddled down under his parka hood, watching the rain drip from the brim of his baseball cap, a curtain of water obscuring his view of the flooding in Govan Road that extended all the way up to Ibrox Stadium.

He very nearly didn’t hear his water taxi coming, its rotors beating almost silently in the rain. Water taxi was something of a misnomer. It was a taxi, certainly, one of many that ferried passengers up and down the river between the city and the temporary airbase at Helensburgh. But they never touched the water. They were smaller versions of the eVTOL that Brodie knew would take him up to Loch Leven. Like grown-up incarnations of the drones he had played with as a kid. Eight rotors in a circle around a glass bubble that carried four passengers. They flew above the river at something like two hundred feet, keeping to the left of an invisible centre line, obeying the rules of the road as if the river itself was some kind of highway. Which, Brodie supposed, it was. They had a good range, around three hours flying time, and could recharge wirelessly in fifteen minutes on any compatible helipad.

It touched down lightly on the pad in front of him, its coloured navigation lights cut through by rain. A door detached itself from the bubble and slid back as the rotors ceased to turn, and Brodie ran, crouched, through the downpour. A photoelectric cell mounted in the door frame read the card he flashed at it, and Brodie could see his face and ID appear on the driver’s screen inside. The driver leaned towards him. ‘Alright, pal. Jump in so I can shut the fucking door.’

Brodie swung his backpack through the open doorway and pulled himself up into one of four seats that faced each other behind the driver. As soon as the sensor in the seat detected his weight, a soporific American-accented female voice prompted, Buckle up, buckle up, repeatedly until he did. The door slid shut.

‘How could they no’ get a Scottish wumman to say that? Fucking American cow. That’s all I get all day long, mate. Drives me round the fucking bend. Try not to drip all over the good leather, eh?’ The driver engaged the rotors, and the eVTOL jerked gently as it lifted away from the ramp and banked across the levee to the river. ‘Another beautiful day,’ he said, without a hint of irony. He hovered for a moment until another water taxi had passed, before swooping up and out over the water.

Brodie could never quite get used to the lack of engine noise. The cab was cocooned in a silence broken only by the sound of rain on glass. The Clyde lay like some long grey slug beneath them, vanishing into the misted distance. Glasgow itself sprawled away into the rainfall, north and south, sporadic areas of flooding catching and reflecting what little light there was in the sky, like a random patchwork of paddy fields.

‘Cop, eh?’ the driver said, half glancing back over his shoulder.

Brodie grunted.

‘Should be out catching crooks instead of swanning off down the Clyde coast.’ He grinned into a rear-view screen. ‘Holiday, is it?’

‘Aye, right.’

‘Seriously, though, crime in Glasgow’s beyond a fucking joke these days, know what I mean, mate? Break-ins, carjackings. The lot. You’re not even safe in an e-chopper noo. Don’t know what the hell the government’s playing at. Mind you, who are you gonna vote for? The fucking Ecologists? Gimme a break.’

Brodie was aware of him looking in the rear-view screen again, but pretended that his interest had been drawn by something way below them and off to the north. Why did taxi drivers always assume you were a kindred spirit?

‘I blame the immigrants, me. All those... what are we supposed to call them now? Asians. Flooding in. Scuse the pun. Hardly ever see a Scottish face these days.’

Brodie couldn’t stop himself. ‘And what does a Scottish face look like?’

‘Like yours, mate.’

‘White, you mean?’

‘Aye, well, pink in your case. What’s wrong with that?’

‘There are plenty of Scots who’re not white.’

‘I’m talking about real Scots, pal.’

‘So am I. Folk born here. Second, third generation. As Scottish as you and me.’

The hundreds of thousands of immigrants fleeing climate catastrophe in Africa and Asia had been welcomed in through the Scottish Government’s open-doors policy. A policy prompted by concern over falling birth rates and extended life expectancy — an economically unsustainable demographic. But a policy that had fed a growing sense of protectionism, blatantly manifesting itself now as racism. The closed-doors policy pursued by the government in England, on the other hand, had only served to increase clandestine immigration, leading to soaring crime rates there, and even worse discrimination.

The driver said, ‘Baw-locks! Just cos they sound Scottish doesn’t mean they are.’

‘Aye, and just because the words coming out of your mouth bear a passing resemblance to the English language doesn’t mean they make any sense.’

The driver cast an aggrieved glance towards the rear-view screen. ‘Who fucking rattled your cage?’

Brodie shook his head and averted his gaze to the landscape drifting by below. Mercifully the driver took the hint and sat in brooding silence for the remainder of the journey.

Large wipers worked overtime to keep the glass free of rain. But it was a losing battle. The world was visible only through sheets of water that constantly distorted it.

Away to the south-west, Brodie saw the inundation surrounding the towns of Renfrew and Paisley. Water that lay in dull reflective sheets shimmered off into more rain. In the early days, the flooding had quickly subsumed the low-lying ground at Abbotsinch, north of Paisley, an area once criss-crossed by the runways of Glasgow Airport. An international hub where hundreds of flights had come and gone each week was now little more than a haven for water birds and fishermen.

They flew over the Erskine Bridge, and as they headed further west, Brodie could just pick out the taller buildings and church spires rising above the floodwaters which had claimed the lower-lying areas of Port Glasgow, and Greenock and Gourock. On the north bank of the estuary, the peninsula of Ardmore was now an island, not much more than a pinnacle of rock. And as they banked to the right, he saw that the snow-peaked mountains to the north were lost in cloud. It was impossible to tell where the land ended and the sky began. Immediately below them, the entire seafront at Helensburgh was gone.

The water taxi swooped over the town and up to the fingers of green that extended across the hilltop. What had previously been the golf course was now a temporary airbase for civilian, and some military, traffic. The extent of its links to the rest of the British Isles was limited by the range of the eVTOLs that served it. International flights were out of the question, except in hops via England, or the recently reunited Ireland, to Europe. Transatlantic flights in and out of Scotland had ceased a long time ago.

The old-fashioned cream clubhouse above the town comprised a jumble of steeply sloped slate roofs, chimneys and dormers, expanding to lounges and a pro shop under several flat-roofed extensions. It stood surrounded by winter-dead trees stripped of their leaves by a series of ice storms the previous month. Taken over by both military and civilian air traffic controllers, it was a hub of airborne activity, with drones and eVTOLs coming and going in a daily traffic halted only by extremes of weather.

The main helipad occupied the former eighteenth green and was surrounded by smaller satellite pads that handled the incoming and outgoing flights of aircraft like the water taxi that had brought Brodie downriver.

The driver settled his e-chopper with a slight bump on the pad furthest from the clubhouse. A much larger eVTOL stood on the main pad awaiting Brodie’s arrival. The driver squinted at it through the water streaming across his windscreen. ‘That yours, do you think?’ It was the first time he’d spoken in about twenty minutes.

‘Looks like it.’ Brodie struggled into his still-wet backpack.

‘Where are you going in that, then?’

‘Out to Mull, then Loch Leven.’

The driver turned as the door slid open, and there was something malevolent in his half-smile. ‘Rather you than me, mate.’ He tapped his screen. ‘According to the weather reports, we’ve got a nasty ice storm incoming this afternoon. Get caught in that, and yon big bird’ll drop oot the sky before you can say “ice on the rotors”.’

Brodie pulled on his baseball cap. ‘Thank you.’

But his sarcasm only amused the driver further. ‘Yer welcome, pal.’

Brodie’s face was wet and stinging from the cold before he’d taken barely a dozen steps. Icy water seeped in around his neck and his cuffs as he dashed across the neatly manicured grass towards his waiting eVTOL. It stood dripping in the pewtery late morning light. Built more like a conventional aircraft with an extended fuselage, its rotors were mounted at the end of either wing, on forward extensions, and on a V-shaped tail at the rear. Six in total. The aircraft sat on three legs splaying out front and back, and the cabin, like his water taxi, was made almost entirely of smoked glass.

As he reached it, Brodie saw a figure clad in luminous yellow oilskins hurrying towards him from the clubhouse. Old-fashioned cotton cloth waterproofed with oil, he assumed, since plastics had been banned for years now. Brodie stood, dripping impatiently, on the pad. When the technician reached him, he pulled a contactless card reader from under his cape and held it out towards Brodie. ‘ID,’ he barked through the wet.

Brodie flashed his card at the reader and the technician satisfied himself that this was indeed the police officer whose arrival was expected.

‘Cool,’ he said, and waved an RFID card at the nearside door of the aircraft to open it, then held it out to Brodie. ‘Use this to secure the aircraft at destination.’

Brodie frowned. ‘Won’t the pilot do that?’

The technician laughed. ‘There is no pilot, pal. Well, there is.’ He jerked his thumb over his shoulder. ‘He’s in the clubhouse. This thing’ll fly itself. It’s been preprogrammed. Pilot’s got a watching brief in case anything goes wrong. We’ve not lost one yet.’

‘I’m not surprised if he’s always sitting in the clubhouse.’

Oilskins pulled a face. ‘Very funny.’ He reached past Brodie and pulled open a flap on the side of the fuselage. ‘Retractable charging cable’s in there. Two hundred metres of it, which should be more than enough. Get it charging as soon as you arrive. No wireless charging available on the football pitch, I’m afraid.’

‘Football pitch?’

‘Aye. That’s what we’ve been using as a temporary landing area at Kinlochleven. There’s a charging terminal installed at the changing pavilion. And your hotel’s right next door. The International.’ He nodded towards the interior. ‘You’d better get in out of the rain. Sit up front so you’ve got access to the computer screen.’

Brodie heaved his pack into the rear of the cabin and pulled himself in, sliding across into one of the two front seats. Oilskins climbed in beside him.

‘We took out the passenger seats in the back in case you’re returning with a body. And the pathologist’s usually got a fair amount of gear.’ He leaned forward and tapped the middle of the screen twice with his index and middle fingers. It immediately presented a welcome screen. A photograph of the eVTOL taken against a clear blue sky on a bright, sunny day. Brodie thought that it couldn’t have been taken here, or at any time recently. A soothing, English-accented female voice introduced herself. Welcome to your Grogan Industries Mark Five eVTOL air taxi.

Oilskins said, ‘Zebra-Alpha-Kilo-496. Eve, activate remote.’

The screen flickered and displayed an aerial topographical map with their projected route marked in red.

Remote activated, Zak.

Oilskins turned a wry smile towards Brodie and shook his head. ‘Even the damn machines call me that now. You been in one of these things before?’

‘Never.’

‘You’ll get the computer’s attention just by saying Eve. She’ll put you in direct communication with the pilot if you have any problems or questions. You can watch a movie if you want, or catch the news.’

Brodie couldn’t imagine that he would be doing anything except sitting on tenterhooks until Eve had put him safely on the ground again.

‘So, if you’ve got no questions, I’ll let you get on your way.’ Zak slipped off his seat to jump down to the pad.

Brodie said, ‘I’m told there’s an ice storm coming in.’ He cast eyes around him. ‘I hear these things don’t do too well in ice storms.’

Zak grinned. ‘No worries, mate. You should reach destination long before she arrives.’

‘She?’

‘Aye, she’s a named storm. Hilda, they’re calling her. A German name. Means battle, or war, or something.’ He grinned. ‘Let’s hope you and Eve don’t get into a fight with her.’ He laughed now. ‘Only joking. Eve’ll take care of you. They’ve programmed a bit of a detour, via Glencoe, just in case it gets a bit blowy before Hilda actually gets here. It’s more sheltered that way and you’ll be able to maintain max speed of about 200k. You’ll be fine.’ He pressed a button on the inside of the door frame and jumped down as the door slid shut.

Brodie felt himself encased again in silence, save for Eve urging him to buckle up. The sound of the rain retreated to a distant patter, although it still streamed down the windscreen. Zak vanished at a run towards the clubhouse and Brodie felt more than heard the rotors starting up. Through the sweep of smoked glass overhead, he could see them rapidly reach speed before Eve lifted gently off the pad, rising slowly into the rain. The rotors canted unexpectedly, angling themselves into a semi-vertical position to provide forward thrust, and the eVTOL shot off suddenly across the roofs of the clubhouse and the trees, lifting higher as it did. Still there was no sound, and Brodie, sitting alone in this strangely alien environment, felt oddly disconnected from the world, as if he had just surrendered his present and his future to some invisible guiding hand over which he had no control.

Eve flew low and fast above the sodden winter ground below. Over the Gare Loch and its long-abandoned nuclear submarine base at Faslane. Loch Long with its lost village of Arrochar, drowned by the storms and the accompanying rise in sea level, cutting off direct access to the West Highlands by road.

Most of the settlements along both shores of Loch Fyne were gone. Strachur, Auchnabreac, and much of Inveraray.

There was snow lying on higher ground now, and the mountain ranges to the north — when you could see them through the cloud — were mostly blanketed by it.

Of course, Brodie knew, Scotland had escaped relatively lightly. Large parts of eastern England had simply vanished under the North Sea. From Hull, as far inland as Goole and Selby. And to the south, Grimsby, Skegness, Boston, King’s Lynn. Great Yarmouth and Lowestoft had barely survived. On the west coast, the bright lights of Blackpool had been washed away. Lytham St Annes and Southport were gone.

Much of London was underwater, too. The authorities had moved too slowly in replacing the old Thames barrier, and had run into funding problems when building the levees that would have protected the estuary.

On the near continent, most of the Netherlands, including Amsterdam and Rotterdam, had been reclaimed by the sea. A good chunk of Belgium, the German seaports of Hamburg and Bremen, as well as large swathes of the western seaboard of Denmark had also succumbed to rising sea levels.

There was worse, much worse, elsewhere in the world. But there was a limit to how much you could absorb before you became waterlogged yourself by too much information. It was one of the reasons Brodie had simply stopped listening to the news, or reading the newspapers, or watching TV. It was depressing beyond words. Suicide rates, he knew, were soaring. Because above all, there was nothing you could do about it. Any of it. So, like many others, he had simply zoned out, limiting consciousness to his own little bubble of existence. The only place he had any say in how things played out.

Now they were flying over the mouth of Loch Linnhe towards the Inner Hebrides, leaving the mainland behind. White caps broke the surface of a turbulent sea below, and Brodie could feel the wind buffeting his eVTOL. Snow started to fall as they reached land again, and Eve banked north-west over the Isle of Mull. Brodie saw how the Atlantic Ocean had nibbled away at a rocky coastline that rose well above sea level in most places, keeping the bulk of the island intact. Tobermory at the north of the island, where his pathologist awaited, had fared less well. The dock and coast road were awash; the row of multicoloured seafront properties that featured on island postcards was semi-submerged. The rest of the town rose steeply up from the water, cowering among the trees. The coastline of Calve Island opposite had been completely reconfigured by the relentlessly rising ocean.

Eve lifted up over the town to the golf course that sprawled across the hill to the north of it. There was no helipad here. Brodie saw how they were manoeuvring to land on an almost perfect circle of manicured green. He could even see the hole. Someone had removed the flag, and a figure, huddled in waterproofs and hood, stood in a bunker at the edge of the putting surface with two large slate-grey Storm travel cases. He could barely see anything beyond the figure because of the snow that was driving in now from the west, though it was wet and not yet lying.

He opened the door and felt large wet snowflakes slap into his face. A woman’s voice called out from the bunker. ‘Well, come and give me a hand, then! I can’t carry these on my own.’

Brodie sighed and wondered how she’d got them here. There didn’t appear to be anyone else around. He pulled up his hood and braced himself to face the blast, jumping down on to the green and running at a tilt into the wind. There was little visible of the pathologist’s face, with her hood crimped tightly around it. Angry dark eyes flashed at him through the snow. ‘You’re late!’ As if somehow he had any control over departure and flying times. ‘Take my kit case, it’s heavier.’ She lifted the other one and ran for the eVTOL. Brodie gasped at the weight of the case containing her kit as he heaved it up out of the bunker and staggered across the green. She was waiting for him by the open door, and together they lifted the two cases to slide into the back of the cabin. He helped her then to climb in and quickly followed, closing the door behind them.

The howl of the wind was instantly extinguished, and a pall of damp silence hung in the air as Brodie slipped into the front seat beside her. She pulled away her hood to reveal jet-black, crinkly hair drawn back from her face and tied at the nape of her neck. Her complexion was a pale brown, her eyes almost as black as Mel’s. She had a small, dark brown mole on the right side of her upper lip. Her lips themselves were full and marginally darker than the skin of her face, but touched with red. A handsome woman. In her late thirties, perhaps, or early forties. She glared at Brodie. ‘I’ve been hanging about there in the wind and the snow for nearly half an hour. Ever since they dropped me and told me you’d be here in a few minutes.’

He protested. ‘I have no control whatsoever over the timing of this flight.’

But she wasn’t letting him off with anything. ‘You must have been late arriving for it, then.’

Irritatingly, Eve’s relentless voice was urging them to buckle up. He could barely think above it. ‘For Christ’s sake, do what she says and shut her up.’

They both engaged their seat belts and the voice ceased, leaving them once more in silence.

He glared at her, before nodding towards her cases in the back. ‘You’re welcome, by the way.’

She scowled back at him from beneath dark eyebrows. And then her face creased suddenly into the most disarming smile, and he saw the twinkle of mischief in her eyes. She thrust out her hand. ‘Sita Roy. Dr Sita Roy, actually. But you can call me Sita.’

He shook her hand and felt the power of the pathologist’s grip in muscles developed by the cutting of bone and the prising open of ribcages. ‘Cameron Brodie. Detective Inspector, actually, but you can call me mister.’

She laughed out loud. ‘Yes, sir.’ She half turned towards the computer screen below the windshield. ‘Eve, we’re ready to go.’

Eve responded immediately. Thank you, Dr Roy. Hold on tight. And the rotors above them sprang to life.

‘You two are acquainted, then,’ Brodie said.

She grinned. ‘Eve and I have made many a trip together. We’re old friends.’

The eVTOL lifted up from the green and wheeled away, back towards the town, rising as it headed south.

Sita said, ‘Eve, what’s our flight plan?’ And the topographical map displayed earlier reappeared, with the route to Kinlochleven outlined again in red. Sita frowned. ‘Eve, why are we taking such a circuitous route?’

Incoming ice storm, Dr Roy. It’s more sheltered if we approach via Glencoe.

Sita puffed up her cheeks and exhaled through puckered lips. ‘And I’d been hoping for a short flight, too. I never travel well in these things at the best of times.’