A Winter Grave

Chapter Nine

They reached the mainland again just north of Oban. Much of the port town was underwater, its roll-on, roll-off ferry services to the islands long since defunct. Inland then towards Tyndrum and banking north to Bridge of Orchy. The snow was still wet, but lying here; the ominous peaks that flanked the darkly sinister Glencoe with its history of betrayal and massacre reflected white where light tore through breaks in the cloud.

‘Where are you based?’ Brodie asked Sita.

‘Queen Elizabeth University Hospital in Glasgow. But they send me all over Scotland.’

‘Yeah, they said you were doing PMs on victims of the hotel fire in Tobermory. Is there some doubt about the origins of the fire?’

Sita nodded. ‘Your guys think it was an insurance job. If so, then technically the fatalities are murders.’ She sighed deeply, lips curled in distaste. ‘Two children among them. My American colleagues call burn victims crispy critters. I don’t share their sense of humour. There’s nothing worse in my book than performing autopsies on people who have died in a fire. You get used to the perfumes of the autopsy table, but it takes days to get the smell of burned human flesh out of your nostrils.’ She canted her head towards the computer screen. ‘Mind if I put on the news? I’ve been out of the loop for a few days.’

He shrugged his acquiescence.

‘Eve, play me the news headlines.’

A voice Brodie recognised as a newsreader at SBC said, ‘Good afternoon, listeners. Welcome to SBC Radio One. Here are the news headlines. The United Nations reports that the immigration wars raging across North Africa have reached a tipping point. Sheer weight of numbers is overpowering national defences across the continent, from Morocco to Egypt. Tens of thousands are already feared dead in the conflict. Estimates put populations on the move from equatorial Africa and Asia at around two billion, and South European countries are bracing for a fresh flood of migrant boats across the Mediterranean. The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, in a statement earlier today, described national immigration policies around the world as unsustainable.’

They played a thirty-second clip of an interview with the High Commissioner herself. She raged at political leaders in Europe and Africa, describing them as immoral and ostrich-like, accusing them of burying their heads in the sand. ‘The problem is simply not going to go away,’ she said. ‘We have to address it head-on and find solutions. Simply letting people die is no answer.’

‘Jesus!’ Brodie said. ‘Two billion people?’

Sita shrugged. ‘That’s at least how many people live in coastal settlements around the world, and in those equatorial and sub-Saharan African countries made uninhabitable by rising temperatures.’

He shook his head. It made no sense to him. People were dying from heat at the equator and here they were flying into an ice storm.

Sita looked at him quizzically. ‘Where have you been, Mr Brodie?’

‘I don’t listen to the news. It’s too depressing.’

‘Burying your head in the sand, then.’ She sounded unimpressed.

‘Ostrich-like.’ He echoed the High Commissioner for Refugees.

Sita spluttered her derision. ‘Well, of course, that’s just not true.’

‘What isn’t?’

‘Ostriches don’t bury their heads in the sand. At least, not to hide from reality. They bury their eggs in the sand and stoop to turn them over frequently. They don’t hide from danger, they run from it. At up to seventy kilometres an hour. And if forced to fight, they will. An ostrich can kick with a force of a hundred and forty kilos per square centimetre, enough to kill a lion with a single blow.’

Brodie looked at her in astonishment. ‘Wow. How do you know all that?’

She shrugged lightly. ‘It’s sort of a hobby. I’ve been teaching my kids all about the animals and birds and fish that’ll soon be extinct. It’s important they know about the world we’ve destroyed, don’t you think?’

‘And human beings? Where do they figure on your extinction list?’

‘Oh, pretty high up, the way things are going.’

The radio was still playing in the background. Brodie said, ‘I don’t want to listen to any more of this.’ He turned towards the screen. ‘Do you mind?’

She shrugged.

‘Eve, stop,’ he said, and the news broadcast came to an abrupt end. ‘Okay, so I’m not an ostrich. I’ve just got enough problems of my own to deal with.’ And he realised, with something of a shock, that for several hours now he hadn’t thought once about the death sentence his doctor had handed down to him just yesterday.

‘Don’t we all?’ She didn’t sound sympathetic.

He looked at her. ‘So are you one of the two billion, then?’

‘I would have been. Except I’ve been here for nearly twenty years. One of the allocation of so-called skilled immigrants allowed in by the Scottish Government. People were welcoming at first. There was already a well-integrated Asian population here anyway. Both my children were born here and consider themselves Scottish. But since the country’s been overrun by immigrants, legal and otherwise, hardly anyone sees us as Scottish any more. They just see brown faces and tell us to go home.’

‘Why don’t you?’ He’d asked it before he realised how it sounded.

She scoffed. ‘You’re no different, are you, Mr Brodie? This is my home. And for your information, where I grew up is gone. I guess that’s something else you didn’t hear on the news you don’t listen to. Kolkata, where I was born, where I trained as a doctor, is somewhere under the Bay of Bengal these days. Lift your head, look a little to the north, and you’ll see that Bangladesh is gone, too. A whole country. Just not there any more. A bit like Florida. And large tracts of the eastern seaboard of the US.’ Frustration escaped her lips in a hiss. ‘Just don’t get me started on how the world failed to meet its net-zero targets.’ She spoke quietly, but there was a dangerous anger seething behind her words.

Brodie said, ‘I thought India was one of the worst offenders.’

She flashed him a look that quickly turned to embarrassment. ‘It was. Along with China and the US.’

They were following the line of the road now as it wound its way through Glencoe. Jagged peaks on either side pushed themselves up into a broken sky, patches of watery late afternoon sunlight slanting through to land on snow in dazzling patches that came and went like random searchlights in a war zone. The snow had stopped falling, but the wind had risen, and they felt the eVTOL stabilising itself against the buffeting. Here and there, clutches of pine trees pushed themselves up above the snow on some of the lower slopes. The wind blew fresh snowfall off sheer rock ridges in fine clouds that caught sporadic glimpses of sunlight from the sunset beyond the mountains to the west. Tiny, unexpected rainbows appeared and vanished in the blink of an eye.

By the time they reached Glencoe village at the western end of the valley, the sky had darkened, the sun sliding down beyond the horizon, its light snuffed out by the sudden fall of night. The first hail carried on the edge of the wind crackled against the glass.

‘What the hell’s that?’ Sita said suddenly, peering forward into the gloom.

Ahead of them, on the far side of Loch Leven, a phalanx of lights reflecting in the black of the loch blazed around what looked almost like a small city.

‘Ballachulish A,’ Brodie said. ‘A fucking eyesore. Excuse my French.’

‘The nuclear power station?’

He nodded. ‘This was a beautiful, unspoiled part of the world before they built that monstrosity in the thirties. They generate 3500 gigawatts a year there. Enough to supply electricity to every household in Scotland, they said. I used to come climbing here a lot, and hillwalking. It ruined almost every view, from every hilltop and every mountain.’

‘But zero emissions,’ she said dryly.

‘Aye, zero fucking emissions.’

She leaned forward to get a better look as Eve banked to the north-east. ‘They built it right on the water’s edge. Isn’t it in danger of flooding?’

He shook his head. ‘They demolished the Ballachulish Bridge, just to the west there.’ He pointed towards a thin line of red lights spanning and reflecting in the loch. ‘Replaced it with a barrier to contain rising sea levels. Generates tidal electricity, too. And they ran a road across the top of it, so you don’t have to go round the loch to get to the other side.’

‘Ballachulish A,’ she said thoughtfully. ‘Does that mean they’re planning a Ballachulish B?’

He scoffed. ‘Probably.’

She said, ‘I can see the point of building a place like this somewhere out of the way, but how do they get the spent plutonium out? I can’t imagine that it would be very safe by road. Or sea.’

‘They don’t,’ Brodie said. ‘They drilled into the bedrock next to the plant. Half a kilometre down, something like that. Then excavated a network of tunnels. That’s where they put the waste. Buried for eternity, they say.’

‘Eternity, eh? That’s a long time. I wonder how they measure it against something that’s got a radioactive half-life of 24,000 years.’

Brodie smiled sadly in the dark. ‘Well, we’ll not be around to find out.’

And she said quietly, ‘I wonder if anyone will.’

Eve shook suddenly, as if something had slammed into her.

Involuntarily Sita reached forward to grab the dash. ‘What the hell was that?’

Brodie’s heart was pounding. ‘The wind, I guess.’

Rain turned increasingly to sleet and hail and slashed through the lights of their eVTOL as it followed the course of this Scottish fjord, mountains rising steeply in the dark on either side of a loch that was in reality a glaciated valley flooded by seawater. And all that Brodie could hear in his head were the words of his taxi driver earlier in the day, when he told him there was an incoming ice storm. Get caught in that, and yon big bird’ll drop oot the sky before you can say ‘ice on the rotors’.

Almost as if she had read his mind, Eve reduced her height. Dropping fifty feet or more in a matter of seconds. Sita cried out, ‘Woah!’ She grabbed Brodie’s arm.

They felt the storm snapping at their heels, the eVTOL’s stabilisers working overtime. To their right, at Caolasnacon, they saw the lights of houses lining the water’s edge and extending back into the trees.

Sita said, ‘Is that Kinlochleven?’

Brodie shook his head. ‘Nah. These were homes built for workers at the nuclear plant. All 3D printed. Ugly things.’

He saw Sita turning to look at him in the reflected light of the computer screen. ‘They’re printing houses this far north now?’

He shrugged. ‘Apparently.’

In the distance, at the head of the loch, they saw the lights of Kinlochleven for the first time. They seemed feeble somehow, almost smothered by the dark. Arcs of street lamps delineated rows of houses built around the curve of the valley and dissected by the dark passage of the River Leven as it tumbled down from the mountains above, cutting a swathe of fresh icy water into the warmer, salinated seawater that washed up on the shore.

‘Tell me that’s the village,’ Sita said, a hint of quiet desperation in her voice.

‘It is,’ Brodie said, with his own sense of relief. In just a few minutes they would be on the ground, and the storm could do its worst.

Then all the lights went out, and it was as if they had been sucked into a black hole. There was no light anywhere, except for the reflected glow of the computer screen in the eVTOL, and a couple of spots directed by Eve on to the water below. Water that seemed perilously close now and rushing past at speed.

Sita let out a tiny scream. ‘What’s happened?’

‘Must be a power cut.’

‘Power cut?’ She almost shouted it. ‘You just told me they’re generating three and a half thousand gigawatts of electricity at the other end of the loch. How can there be a power cut?’

‘I don’t know. The storm must have brought down power lines.’

‘Well, how are we going to land in the dark?’

‘I have no idea!’ He turned towards the screen. ‘Eve, how are we going to land in the dark?’

Eve sounded unruffled. I am preprogrammed for landing, Detective Inspector Brodie. I do not require light.

Sita was still grasping his forearm, her pathologist’s grip almost cutting off the blood supply to his hand. Below, by the light of the eVTOL, they saw a shoreline exposed by low tide, white-topped surges washing over it, forced up loch by the wind that scoured the valley, winter-bare trees now bucking and bending among a scattering of houses. The River Leven in spate, white water generated by its power, almost glowing as it fought against the storm surge to feed itself into the loch.

Then they banked against the force of the wind, frozen rain hammering on the glass, and Brodie just prayed that the rotors wouldn’t ice up before they landed. A perfectly delineated rectangle of unbroken snow swung crazily into their field of vision. The football pitch. And both of them held their breath as Eve dropped from the air to settle with a bump in the snow, light from her spots spilling out around them in a wide circle that faded into the darkness beyond. The rotors powered down and Brodie felt Sita’s grip on his arm relax as they both drew deep breaths.

‘Well, that was fun,’ she said.

‘Not.’

She turned towards him and laughed with relief. ‘Nothing like a near-death experience for bringing folk together. Thanks for the use of your arm. You might need witch hazel for the bruising.’

And his heart leapt. A thousand memories of Mel flashing through his mind in a moment. He rubbed his arm to get the circulation back in his hand. ‘With a grip like that, it might need to be set in plaster.’

She laughed again. ‘Plaster? You’re giving away your age now, Mr Brodie. They haven’t used plaster to splint broken bones since the Dark Ages.’

They were interrupted by Eve, whose oleaginous tones seemed to coat the interior glass of the eVTOL. Her lack of panic in the landing had been reassuring somehow, although they both knew that panic was not programmed into her software. Warning. Low battery. Low battery.

‘Jesus,’ Brodie said. ‘Now she tells us!’

Extinguishing lights to save power. Please connect me to a power source as soon as possible.

Her lights went out, and the computer screen powered down, leaving them in a darkness so thick it felt almost tangible.

‘Fuck!’ It was Sita’s voice that reverberated around the cabin. ‘What do we do now?’ She heard Brodie swinging himself out of his seat to clamber into the space behind them, and cursing as he stumbled over one of her Storm cases. A moment later, light filled the interior.

‘I always keep an LED headlight in my pack,’ he said, and she turned to see him stretching the elasticated band around his head so that the tiny lamp projected from his forehead to light the way in front of him.

‘Very practical,’ she said. ‘Can you teleport us to our hotel now?’

‘If only I knew where it was.’

‘Huh! And just when I was starting to like you.’

‘The technician at Helensburgh said it was right beside the football pitch. So it can’t be far.’

‘Well, I’ll let you go and find it. And when you do, you can come back and give me a hand with my stuff.’

‘Yes, miss. Whatever you say, miss.’ Brodie raised a hand to tug an imaginary forelock.

She grinned. ‘Well, it doesn’t make sense for both of us to go stumbling about in the dark. And you’re the one with the light.’

Brodie pulled a face. ‘So I am.’

He pushed the button to open the door, unprepared for the blast of wind and sleet that nearly took him off his feet. He zipped his parka up to the neck and pulled the hood over his head, bracing himself with a hand either side of the door frame before jumping down into the snow. Sita reached over to shut the door quickly behind him.

He turned in a quick arc, but the light from his headlamp didn’t penetrate far through the freezing rain that drove into his face. He had a sense that since the wind was coming from the west, that was the direction he should take. So he staggered into it, semi-blind, until he reached a perimeter fence. It stood around two-and-a-half metres high. His face was stinging, almost numb now. There had to be a gate somewhere. He worked his way along the fence. He could see there were trees on the far side of it, and beyond them, a strangely eerie glow that seemed to flicker through branches that creaked and swayed in the wind. And, finally, a gate. It opened on to an area that felt firmer underfoot beneath the snow. Tarmac, perhaps. He leaned forward into the wind and pushed himself up a short slope, where a path appeared, cutting a way through the trees. And there, conveniently planted in the ground, was a white arrow sign. International Hotel, it read.

He found his way back to the eVTOL by following his own footsteps, accelerated on his return by the wind behind him. He banged on the glass with the flat of his hand until Sita opened the door. She jumped down into the storm, a tiny circle of wide-eyed face peering out from her hood.

‘You found it?’ She had to shout above the roar of the wind.

‘Yes. But we’ll never be able to carry both your cases.’ He reached in for his pack and swung it over his shoulders. ‘You can get your kit in the morning. You won’t be doing any post-mortems tonight.’

‘What about recharging Eve?’

‘Even if there was any electricity, I haven’t the first fucking idea where the charging hub is.’ He felt the wind whipping the words from his mouth as he shouted them into the night. ‘Nobody’s going to steal her tonight.’

She nodded, and reached in to pull her personal Storm case from the hold. ‘We can take an end each.’

Brodie grimaced into the rain. ‘Of course we can.’

She grinned. ‘I always knew a policeman would come in handy someday.’

Brodie smiled, and realised that for someone close to death, he hadn’t felt this alive in years. He leaned in to hit the close button and pulled back as the door slid shut.

‘I hope you know how to get back into that thing.’

He patted his pocket. ‘Got the keycard right here.’

A smile twinkled in her black eyes.

They stooped to take a handle each and lifted her trunk, and set off by the light of his headlamp to follow his footsteps back to the gate.

By the time they had cleared the trees beyond the fence, the International Hotel came in range of their light, a sprawling, cream-painted building on two storeys with a faux tower and pointed dormers. All its windows simmered in darkness, but beyond the glass around the entrance porch at the foot of the tower, a faint flickering light offered the hope that they weren’t the only humans still alive in this storm.

They struggled up the half-dozen steps to the entrance, the wind catching and swinging Sita’s Storm case between them, and pushed gratefully through the door into a long, tartan-carpeted entrance hall. Candles burned in a reception hatch below a set of antlers, and on a table opposite. The door swung shut behind them, and the storm receded into the night, leaving flames flickering in the hallway to send their shadows dancing around the walls.

Brodie and Sita set her case down and stood dripping on the carpet. There was a residual warmth in here, but it still felt chilly, the air laced by a faint smell of damp. Brodie stepped up to the reception hatch. Glass windows were slid shut and it was impenetrably dark beyond them. A bell sat on the counter and he banged it several times with the palm of his hand. Its shrill ring resounded around the emptiness of the place. ‘Hello,’ he called into the silence that followed. ‘Anyone home?’

Sita said, ‘I feel like I’ve just walked on to the set of The Shining.’

‘Don’t say that,’ Brodie said. ‘I’ve never been able to watch that movie beyond the twins in the corridor.’

‘Big brave man like you?’

He grunted. ‘We all have our demons.’

A door at the far end of the hall swung open, startling them, and the silhouette of a large man approached in the gloom. A candle set in a holder in his left hand cut an oblique penumbra on a bearded face, the larger shadow cast by his bald head and shoulders increasing in size on the wall behind him as he drew nearer.

He broke into a grin. ‘Welcome, welcome. You made it, then?’ And he laughed. ‘Well, of course you did. You’re here. To be honest, I wasn’t really expecting you, with the storm and all. And there’s no telephone, no internet, so how could anyone let me know?’ He stopped for a breath and held out a bony hand. ‘Mr Brodie? Mike Brannan. I own the place, for my sins.’

Brodie shook it reluctantly, and resisted the temptation to wipe his palm on the seat of his trousers. Brannan turned to Sita.

‘And Dr Roy, I presume.’

Brodie stifled amusement at the brief flicker of pain that registered in Brannan’s face as the pathologist shook his hand.

‘Can’t feed you, I’m afraid. No power. Kitchen’s out of action.’

Brodie said, ‘Alcohol will do.’ He glanced at Sita for affirmation. She nodded.

‘Yes, please.’

‘That can be arranged.’ He waved a hand towards the entrance to the Bothy Bar. ‘You’ll have the place to yourselves. There’s not another soul in the hotel. I’ll light a fire, if you like. It’s a wood burner, so carbon-neutral.’ He smiled, as if waiting for a round of applause. When none came, he said, ‘I’ll show you to your rooms.’

They followed him up the staircase to a long, carpeted hallway with rooms along each side. Brodie had extinguished his headlight to save the battery, and the place felt oddly disconnected from reality.

Brannan half turned a salacious smile towards them. ‘Not sharing, I take it?’

‘No,’ Sita said firmly.

‘Thought not.’ He opened a door. ‘You’re in here.’

Brodie and Sita struggled in with her Storm case and heaved it on to a luggage stand. The cream room had purple carpet and curtains, and fresh towels folded on the bed.

‘And you’re right next door,’ he told Brodie. He began lighting candles on the dresser. Clearly power cuts were not an uncommon phenomenon.

Brodie slipped his pack from his back. ‘What happened to Charles Younger’s car?’ He’d spent some of the flight to Mull reading over the notes that Maclaren had given him. There had been no mention of a car.

Brannan seemed perplexed. ‘I don’t understand.’

‘Younger’s car. He must have parked it here at the hotel.’

‘Oh, I’ve no idea. We don’t reserve parking places for guests. We were busy last August, so he’d have had to take pot luck. If he had a car at all, that is.’

‘How else would he have got here?’

‘Haven’t the foggiest.’

‘But his personal belongings were still in his room?’

‘Yes, but they couldn’t stay there after he’d gone missing. The room was booked by someone else. So Robbie came to bag it all up and take it away.’

‘Robbie?’ Sita said.

‘Yes, the local bobby.’ He chuckled. ‘Robbie the bobby. Robert Sinclair.’

Brodie said, ‘I used to come here years ago, climbing and hillwalking. There was no local bobby then. The old police station was an Airbnb.’

‘Ah, yes,’ Brannan said. ‘But there was a mini population explosion in the thirties while they were building the power plant, and apparently it was decided to reinstate the local policeman. The old police station was for sale at the time, so they reacquired it and Robbie’s your bobby.’ He handed Brodie a keycard. ‘Here’s your key. I’ll light some candles in your room and go down to get the fire going.’ He paused in the doorway, turning, as if struck by an afterthought. ‘Do you want to see the body?’

After a moment’s shocked silence, Sita said, ‘It’s here? In the hotel?’

Brannan shrugged philosophically. ‘Well, they’d nowhere else to put him. And I had a big cold cabinet for cakes and desserts lying empty in the kitchen.’

The kitchen was at the back of the hotel, pots and pans and cooking utensils hanging from a metal rack above a central stainless steel worktop. The place smelled of stale oil, taking Brodie back to pub meals in Highland villages and scampi in a basket. The shadows from Brannan’s candle cavorted among the appliances and the big overhead extractor units. ‘Through here,’ he said, and Sita and Brodie followed him into an anteroom that might have served as a pantry. The air was heavy with the astringent stench of detergent.

The cake cabinet stood on castors and was pushed up against one wall. Its glass top was misted so that it was impossible to see inside. Brannan handed his candle to Brodie.

‘Here, take this.’ And he lifted the lid.

Charles Younger was a man in his forties, big built. Thinning fair hair lay slicked across his forehead. He was still fully dressed, just as he had been found. Vomit-green parka, black ski pants, cheap walking boots. His woolly hat had been recovered separately and lay beside him. He was folded, knees drawn up, to fit into the cabinet. His eyes were open, his mouth gaping, his face bruised and grazed. Those parts of his skin that were visible had taken on a pink-reddish hue.

Brodie was struck by the ice-blue of eyes that seemed to match the colour of his lips. There hadn’t been much about him in Maclaren’s dossier. A single man. No relatives apart from a very elderly mother who was living in a care home in Livingston. He’d been with the Herald since graduating from Edinburgh University. Won numerous awards, and struck the fear of God into any politician who learned that he was digging into their history. Brodie had never read a word he’d written.

‘Looks fresh,’ was all he said. ‘For someone who’s been dead for three months.’

‘Being frozen in ice most of that time will have preserved him pretty well,’ Sita said. ‘And this cabinet’s what? Three, four degrees?’

Brannan said, ‘Usually around four or five.’

‘Which means he probably hasn’t completely defrosted on the inside yet. Though this power cut is going to accelerate decomposition. Even so, I’m going to have cold hands when I go pawing about his interior tomorrow.’

Brannan lowered the lid on the sightless body inside. ‘What I want to know is who’s going to pay for a new chiller. I mean, is it an insurance job, or do the cops cough up? Cos, let’s face it, no one’s going to want a slice of chocolate cream gateau from this one now.’