A Winter Grave

Chapter Ten

The bay windows in the bar rose from a wooden floor to a stucco ceiling and opened, in summer, on to a terrace with unrestricted views back down the loch. There was no view now, though. Just black beyond glass that ran with rain, distorting their reflections. Despite the double glazing, the flames of their candles ducked and dived in the draught, and Brodie watched the glass bend with the force of the wind. He shivered, despite the comparative warmth that came from the fire that Brannan had lit.

A pool table lurked in the darkness of one corner, the balls of a half-finished game casting shadows on the baize. In a flicker of candlelight at the bar, Brannan placed a bottle, a jug of water and two glasses on a tray, threw on a couple of packs of crisps, and crossed to the window. He set the tray down on their table and straightened up, running a large hand back over the shining baldness of his head.

‘Shame you can’t see the view. It’s one of the big selling points of this place. But never mind, you’ll see it tomorrow. The forecast’s quite good, and you’ll no doubt want a drink after...’ he hesitated and rephrased, ‘before you leave.’ His smile was unctuous. ‘As for tonight, just help yourself to the bottle. I’ll put it on your room, shall I, Mr Brodie? No doubt Police Scotland will be paying for it.’

‘No doubt.’ Brodie grunted and leaned forward to break the seal and uncork a bottle of Balvenie DoubleWood, pouring generous measures of its pale amber into each of the glasses. ‘Thank you, Mr Brannan.’ It was clear, he thought, that he and Sita wanted some privacy, but Brannan wasn’t taking the hint. Or maybe he was just lonely.

‘Ironic, isn’t it?’ he said. ‘A nuclear power plant at one end of the loch, and a hydroelectric power station at the other, and all we seem to get all winter these days is power cuts.’

‘And why’s that?’ Sita asked him.

‘Because the power still leaves here on pylons. They never invested in underground cabling. So the overhead cables are exposed to the full force of the weather. All these storms. Ice forms on them and the weight of it brings them down. Bloody short-sighted, if you ask me.’

Nobody was, Brodie thought. But kept his own counsel.

‘You know, they’ve had hydro power here since the first decade of the twentieth century. Way ahead of its time. They built it to power an aluminium smelter across the river there. That’s long gone now, mind you, but Kinlochleven was the first village in the world to have electricity in every home. The electric village, they called it.’ He chuckled to himself. ‘When I bought this place six months ago, it was called the MacDonald Hotel. I toyed with the idea of changing it to the Electric Hotel. But people thought that was a bit shocking.’ He laughed. And when neither Brodie nor Sita joined him, he added lamely, ‘So I settled for the International instead.’

Brodie took a long pull at his whisky and closed his eyes, trying to shut out the voice, hoping that it might be drowned by the wind. A forlorn hope.

‘Wish I’d bought it back in the thirties when they were building Ballachulish A. There was an influx of thousands of workers then, a lot of foreign experts among them. They all needed accommodation. So the International, or the MacDonald as it was then, and every other hotel and B & B for miles around was full. The bars and restaurants were stowed out, summer and winter, for more than five years. Even when they finished work, the plant itself employed nearly two thousand folk, and until they built the 3D homes across the loch, they all needed accommodation.’ A long, sad sigh escaped his lips. ‘Different story now, though. Business has dropped right off. We still do well in the summer, but the winter’s dead. Just dead.’

‘Like Mr Younger,’ Brodie said.

Brannan leaned in a little, and his voice became softly suffused with a sense of confidentiality. ‘You won’t be advertising the fact that he was staying here, will you? It wouldn’t be good for business.’

Brodie opened his eyes and felt a wave of fatigue wash over him, as if he had just endured a long, sleepless night. ‘I’m afraid I can’t say what the press will or won’t report in relation to the case, Mr Brannan. I suspect that if his death was the result of natural causes, or an accident, they won’t pay it very much attention at all.’

‘Well, what else would it be?’ Brannan seemed surprised.

‘Until Dr Roy has conducted her post-mortem, nothing can be ruled out, including foul play.’

The hotel proprietor frowned. ‘Murder, you mean?’

Brodie shrugged. He had assumed that this was self-evident.

‘But who would want to murder him?’

‘We don’t know that anyone did. But if he was, then it’ll be my job to find out who killed him and why.’

Brannan stood staring forlornly at his reflection in the window. ‘Never even thought of that. Let’s just hope he fell, or had a heart attack or something. Can’t afford to lose any more business.’ He folded his arms across his chest.

Sita said, ‘With all the snow you get here, you’d think it would be good for winter skiing.’

‘Oh, we have the snow, but not the infrastructure. And too much snow, if the experts are to be believed. Ballachulish A might have brought a lot of business, but it also buried us in bloody snowfall.’

Brodie frowned. ‘How’s that?’

‘So, to cool the reactor they use water from the loch, which then goes back in to recirculate. That raises the overall temperature of the loch, making it warmer in winter than the air. So winter precipitation almost always falls as snow. Kind of like the lake-effect snow they get in North America. The stuff just dumps on us. Metres of it at a time.’ That thought seemed to draw the curtain on his desire to talk to them any further. He said, ‘I’m afraid it’ll be a cold breakfast, unless the power comes back on again overnight.’ He made a tiny bow. ‘Sleep well.’ And he retreated into the dark of the hotel from which he had emerged half an hour earlier.

Brodie let out a long sigh of relief. ‘I thought he’d never go.’

‘Interesting, though,’ Sita said, ‘that it never occurred to him that Mr Younger might have been murdered.’

Brodie took a thoughtful sip of his DoubleWood. ‘Well, in truth, it does seem unlikely. I mean, if someone had killed him, they would hardly drag him halfway up a mountain to get rid of the body.’

‘Maybe they killed him up there.’

‘Well, there is that. But, then, you’d have to figure it would have been easier to kill the man before he went up.’

Sita emptied her glass and poured herself another. ‘You?’ She waved the bottle in his direction, and when he nodded, refilled his glass. ‘What was he doing up the mountain anyway?’

‘Hillwalking, apparently.’

‘Ah. A passion, was it?’

‘That’s the odd thing. He was supposed to be on a hillwalking holiday, but from all accounts he’d never been hillwalking in his life.’

‘How did he manage to climb a mountain, then?’

Brodie sucked in more whisky. ‘Binnein Mòr’s not a difficult climb. Anyone could walk it, really. Take the long way round, in good weather, and in August, and you wouldn’t need much experience to reach the summit.’ He paused and ran the rim of his glass thoughtfully back and forth along his lower lip. ‘But the body was found in a north-facing corrie. Coire an dà Loch.’

‘Which means?’

‘Corrie of the Two Lochans. And you wouldn’t venture up that way unless you had considerable experience.’

They became aware for the first time that the wind outside seemed to have dropped. The rain was no longer hammering against the window. Brodie used a hand to shade his view through the glass from his own reflection and peered out into the dark.

‘It’s snowing,’ he said. ‘Quite heavily.’

‘Will that make it more difficult for you tomorrow, then, if you’re going to go up there to take a look at where the body was found?’

He nodded. ‘It will. But I came equipped for it.’ He grinned at her. ‘And my kit doesn’t weigh nearly as much as yours.’

She shrugged. ‘Tools of the trade. You don’t cut open another human being without the right equipment.’ She drained her second glass and refilled it, before pushing the bottle towards Brodie.

He grasped it to pour another. ‘And what drew you to doing that?’ he said.

‘Oh, it was never my ambition to become a pathologist. I wanted to be a doctor, Mr Brodie.’

‘Cameron,’ he corrected her. But she just smiled.

‘I trained at the Medical College and Hospital in Kolkata for five years to get my MBBS.’

‘Which is what?’

‘Bachelor of Medicine, Bachelor of Surgery. We had a guest lecturer in my fifth year, a visiting American pathologist, and when he took us step by step through an autopsy, I was intrigued by just how much you could tell about a person from their dead body. How they had lived. How they had died. And I was struck by something he said. He told us that when he performed an autopsy on the body of a murdered person, he felt like their last remaining representative on this earth. The only one able to tell their story, explain how they had died, even catch their killer.’ She smiled. ‘And that’s when I decided I wanted to be a pathologist.’ She issued a self-deprecating little laugh. ‘Maybe I’d have thought differently about it at the time if I’d realised it would involve another four years of specialty training.’

Brodie was amazed. ‘Nine years’ training to cut open dead bodies. But just five to make folk well again?’

She laughed. ‘Yes. Seems like it should be the other way round, doesn’t it? But I enjoyed my time there. The Kolkata Medical College was the second oldest in Asia to teach Western medicine. And the first to teach it in the English language.’ She raised a hand to pre-empt his comment. ‘And before you say anything, I know my English is good. In my opinion, I speak it better than most Scots.’

He chuckled. ‘That wouldn’t be difficult.’

She was getting through her Balvenie DoubleWood at a good lick, and there was a glassy quality now in her eyes. ‘So what else should I know about Mr Younger before I go cutting him up tomorrow?’

Brodie shrugged. ‘I don’t know that much myself. An investigative journalist with the Scottish Herald. Single. Not a hillwalker, despite the reason he gave people for being here. It was Brannan...’ he nodded vaguely towards the interior of the hotel, ‘who reported him missing when he didn’t return to check out and pick up his belongings. There was no real search for him, because nobody knew where he had gone, where to look.’ He swirled some whisky pensively around his mouth. ‘One thing, though. There’s about a minute or so of CCTV footage of him on the day he disappeared. Talking to someone in the village. A man, apparently, who has never been identified.’

‘You’ve seen it?’

He shook his head. ‘No. But I should be able to view it at the local police station. They record all the feeds there from around the village.’ He lifted the bottle and held it up against the candlelight. They were about two-thirds of the way through it. He raised an eyebrow in admiration. ‘You can drink,’ he said.

She raised her glass. ‘So can you.’

He laughed. ‘Goes with the territory, I guess. Folk like you and me, we see things that most people never do. When I was a traffic cop, I lost count of the number of times I attended road accidents where we had to cut people out of their cars in pieces. Or as a detective investigating a murder where the victim had been hacked to bits. Most murders aren’t pat and clever constructs like they write about in books. They’re just brutal and bloody.’ He paused. ‘Well, you’d know all about that.’

She nodded. And it was his turn to refill her glass before topping up his own.

‘So... you mentioned kids earlier. You’re married, I take it?’

‘Was.’

‘Oh. Divorced?’

‘Widowed.’

And for the first time he saw a sadness behind her eyes, and realised it had always been there. He just hadn’t noticed before.

She took a gulp of whisky and held it in her mouth for a long time before finally swallowing it. ‘Viraj. We were at school together. A lovely boy. Fell head over heels the first time I ever set eyes on him. He had such big eyes, and luscious curls that fell about his forehead. I could only have been about eight.’ She smiled sadly, replaying some fond memory behind the increasing opacity of her eyes. ‘I went to medical school, he trained as a computer programmer. We were sort of an item off and on for years. Then, when I came to Scotland, he followed me here. Got a job in what they laughingly called Silicon Glen, and told me he wasn’t about to let me escape that easily.’ She laughed. ‘What’s a girl to do? When a man demonstrates his love like that, and gets down on one knee to propose...’

She stared into her glass now, as if the amber in it provided some window to the past.

‘We had two beautiful children together. Palash. Two years older than his little sister, Deepa. They’re nine and eleven now.’ She looked up over her glass at Brodie. ‘My whole world.’ And he wondered how much of this she would be telling him if it wasn’t for the whisky.

‘What happened?’ And he knew it was the whisky that emboldened him to ask. But he did want to know.

‘I was working one night at the mortuary at the Queen Elizabeth Hospital. I’d just called home, expecting him to pick up. I left a message, then called his mobile, but there was no answer. I knew he’d been out earlier, and the kids were overnighting with school friends. I just wanted to say I was going to be late that night. They’d just wheeled in a body. Victim of a street attack, and I had to do the PM.’ The deep breath she drew had a tremble in it as she tried to control her emotions. ‘I went to the autopsy room to open up the body bag. And there was Viraj, lying there staring back at me from the slab. My beautiful boy with his big brown eyes, and those gorgeous curls falling over his forehead. Sticky with blood now. His face all swollen and broken. Missing teeth. Beautiful white, even teeth he’d had. Lips all split and bloody. Lips that had kissed me so many times. A random attack, they said. Kids whipped up into a racist fury by anti-immigration politicians. Killed for the colour of his skin.’ Her voice cracked. ‘Dead because he followed me here.’

A silent tear tracked its way from her eye to the corner of her mouth.

Brodie was shocked to his core. ‘I can’t imagine.’ His voice was the merest whisper in the dark.

‘No, you can’t,’ she said, as if daring him to even try.

He had no idea what to do, or say. And they sat in silence for the longest time. Until finally she drew a long, quivering breath and wiped away the tear. She took a sip of whisky and cleared her throat, a determined effort to change the direction of their conversation.

‘So what about you?’

‘What about me?’

‘Married?’

His eyes dropped to the glass he clutched in both hands. ‘Widowed,’ he said, and he felt her eyes on him in the dark.

There was another long silence before she said, quietly, ‘Do you want to tell me?’

He closed his eyes and thought that probably he didn’t. He had spent most of the last ten years trying to forget. Images burned into his retinas, scorched into his memory. Pain that had never left him in all that time. And yet, hadn’t Sita just bared her soul to him? The whisky speaking, for certain. But she had told him things she had quite possibly never revealed to anyone. Opened up her own little box of horrors to public view. How could he refuse to reveal his to her? A grown-up version of ‘you show me yours and I’ll show you mine’.

As if she could read his mind, she said, ‘It’s okay, you don’t have to.’

But he wanted to now. As if some invisible constraint had suddenly been removed. He needed to share it with her. Things he had never spoken about to anyone. And with the sense of his own death little more than a breath away, he felt the urge almost to shout it from the rooftops.

‘I was on the night shift,’ he said. Then looked up. ‘Why is it these things always seem to happen at night?’ He remembered it had been a warm, humid Glasgow night. He’d had a fish supper earlier, liberally sprinkled with salt and vinegar. And he still recalled the taste of it in his mouth when he threw it up just a few hours later. ‘I was a detective constable then. Working out of Pacific Quay. I got a message that the DS wanted to see me. I thought he was behaving kind of strange. Told me that he was taking me off shift. That I was needed at home. Said he didn’t have any further information. But I could tell that he did, and I knew that something awful must have happened.’

His recollection of it was painfully vivid. The frantic drive across the city. Turning into the road where he lived. The two police cars, and an ambulance, sitting outside his home. Neighbours standing at gates, gazing from windows, an intermittent blue cast on inquisitive faces.

‘I ran up the steps to the door. There was a cop in uniform barring the way. He raised a hand and asked where I thought I was going.’

He heard himself shouting. It’s my fucking house!

‘Someone was crying inside. My daughter. Just crying and crying. Throaty, like she had cried herself hoarse. Which she had.’

Sita sat perfectly still. ‘What age was she?’

‘She’d have been seventeen then. Just started at Glasgow Uni. Everyone was upstairs. A cop on the half landing, and a couple of ambulance men a few steps above him. Addie was sitting on the bed in our room, a policewoman with an arm around her. She was inconsolable. There was a medic. A woman. She was standing in the open door to the bathroom. I still remember her turning towards me, eyes wide with shock, face the colour of chalk. And she must have seen things in her time.’

He paused to draw breath. Closing his eyes and replaying it all in the dark.

When he opened them again, he said, ‘She advised me that it would be better to remain on the landing. Like there was a chance in hell I was going to stand out there. I glanced into the bedroom and Addie was staring back at me. The look on her face... I... I’ve seen it every night since, when I’m trying to sleep. The accusation in it. The naked hatred. I felt, right there and then, like my life was over, whatever it was that lay beyond the bathroom door. But still I had to look.’

He turned his head slowly towards the window, as if it might offer a reflective insight into the moment. Wet snow slapped the black pane and ran down it in slow rivulets, like tears.

‘I pushed past the medic and stepped into the bathroom. The overheadlight seemed unnaturally bright, reflecting back at me off every tiled surface. Like some overexposed film.’ He shook his head. ‘Of course, I realise now it was just my pupils that were so dilated with the shock.’ A series of short, rapid breaths tugged at his chest. ‘Mel was lying naked in the bath. Her eyes were shut, and there was this strange, sad smile on her lips. First time I’d seen her smiling in months.’ He turned away suddenly from the window, as if he could no longer bear the vision it was offering him. ‘The water was crimson with her blood. Marbled darker by it in places. The woman I’d loved since the first time I ever set eyes on her was dead.’

He turned now towards Sita.

‘Took her own life. It was Addie who found her. Came home from a night at the student union, and...’ He couldn’t bring himself to finish. ‘I’d give anything to be able to erase that moment from her life. It’s when she stopped being my little girl. It’s when she started hating me.’

Sita’s brows crinkled into a frown. ‘Why would she do that?’

‘Because she blamed me. Mel left a note, you see.’ He gave a sad little chuckle that nearly choked him. ‘She wasn’t the most... literate person in the world. Articulate in every way, except on paper. I suppose she’d been trying to explain why she’d done it. But they were her last confused thoughts, and they were all jumbled up, difficult to interpret.’ He shut his eyes again and shook his head. ‘She couldn’t take the deceit any more, she said, knowing that she no longer loved me. Even if I had been the love of her life. The affair had somehow destroyed all her feelings.’ He paused. ‘As if it was me who’d had the affair.’ He opened his eyes to gaze off into the darkness. ‘That’s what everyone thought. Including Addie.’ He turned his gaze towards Sita. ‘Blamed me for cheating on her mother. Driving her to suicide.’

‘But there was no affair?’

‘There was. Only, it wasn’t me who had it.’ He raised his glass to empty it and found that he already had. He leaned forward to grasp the bottle by the neck and refill the glass before raising it, trembling, to his lips. But the whisky seemed to have lost its malted flavour now. It tasted harsh and burned his mouth. ‘Though it didn’t look like that at the time. I was partnered with a female detective in those days. Jenny. We were colleagues, mates, but that was all. Jenny came to the funeral with me for moral support, and Addie thought she was my lover. How dare I bring my girlfriend to her mother’s funeral!’

He could still feel the sting of her slap, delivered with all the power of pure loathing when everyone had left the house after the wake. Words hurled at him in a fury, barely heard in the moment, and lost now in time. But the shrill tone of anger and accusation still lived with him in every moment of every day. As it would, he knew, till he died.

‘She packed all her stuff in a case and left that night to stay with a friend. I haven’t seen her or spoken to her since.’

Sita reached through the candlelight in the dark to place a hand over his and gently squeezed it.

He was overwhelmingly touched, feeling his eyes fill, and fought to prevent the tears from spilling. Big, macho Scottish men didn’t show their emotions, after all. He raised his glass to his mouth and emptied it in a single draught. And the sound of a glass smashing broke the soft, simmering silence of the hotel.

They were both startled by it. Sita half turned towards the barroom door. ‘What was that?’

Brodie blinked away his emotion. ‘Must have been Brannan. I’ll go and see.’ He was almost glad of the excuse to break the moment. He lifted a candle from the table and carried it to the door.

Shadows moved around the walls of the hall as he crossed it to the open door of the dining room. Empty tables stood in rows, draped with white cloth, chairs tipped up, a forest of legs at angles disappearing into darkness. It felt much colder in here, draughty, and the flame of his candle danced dangerously close to extinction. He saw shards of glass on the floor catch its flickering light. Freshly knocked from a table of wine glasses by someone no longer in evidence.

‘Hello?’ His voice sounded dully in the dark. ‘Brannan?’ No response.

An icy gust blew out the candle, plunging him into total darkness. He groped for a tabletop to lay it down and searched through the pockets of his open parka for the headlight he had stuffed into one of them earlier. His fingers found the elastic headband and he pulled it out. A loud bang somewhere on the other side of the dining room startled him. He fumbled for the switch on his torch, and bright white light pierced the gloom. He slipped the elastic over his head to free both hands and turned his head to rake torchlight across the dining room. One half of a pair of French windows opening on to an outside terrace lay open, swinging in the wind. As he hurried towards it, Brodie saw wet footprints on the wooden floor. They came fresh from the open door, and returned to it more faintly. Someone had come in from the outside and beat a hasty retreat when Brodie entered with the candle.

Brodie followed the fresh prints from the open door, back across the dining room and into the hall, where they vanished in the carpet. Had someone been eavesdropping on him and Sita in the bar? If so, why? Retreating into the dining room, the intruder had knocked over a glass, smashing it on the floor.

Brodie crunched his way through the broken glass now, heading back to the open door, and stepping out into the snow that lay ten centimetres thick on the wooden terrace. There, the footprints that came and went were crisply imprinted in the fresh fall, and he followed them down the steps and on to the driveway, zipping up his jacket. Snowflakes fell through the beam of his torch as he followed the footsteps through the darkness towards the trees and the football field beyond.

He could feel his heart pounding distantly beneath fleece and waterproof layers, cold wet snow settling on his bristled head. Up ahead, he saw a shadow darting between the trees. He shouted, ‘Stop!’ but only succeeded in sending the intruder off at a run. Brodie ran several metres himself into the trees, but quickly realised he would never catch their eavesdropper. There had been far too much whisky consumed. He stopped, breathing heavily for several moments, before turning reluctantly back to the hotel.

Sita turned in her seat as he came into the bar, surprised to see the snow on his jacket. He stamped his feet and shook it off in front of the fire. She said, ‘Who was it?’

‘No idea. But someone was out there in the hall listening to us talking in here. I don’t know how much they could hear, or why they would want to, but they ran off through the snow when I went after them with my torch.’

She stood up, a little unsteadily. ‘How did they get in?’

‘Through French windows in the dining room.’

‘Broke in, you mean?’

Brodie shook his head. ‘There didn’t appear to be any damage. It couldn’t have been locked.’ He pursed his lips thoughtfully. ‘But we’d better lock ourselves into our rooms tonight. Don’t want to offer open invites to any unwanted guests.’

She lifted her bag and crossed to the fire. ‘You think we’re in danger?’

He shook his head. ‘No. I mean, why would we be?’

She shivered, in spite of standing in front of the flames. ‘I don’t like this place,’ she said. ‘I’ve spent half my life with corpses. But the thought of that dead man folded into the cake cabinet in the kitchen gives me the willies.’

Brodie lay on his bed in the dark, fully dressed. He didn’t think he would sleep much tonight, and every time he closed his eyes, the room seemed to spin around him. So he stared, unseeing, at the ceiling.

He had never, in all the years since, told anyone about the events of that night when he came home to find Mel dead in the bath. Not even Tiny. He had locked them away tight in a dark place that only he visited. Scared to let the memories escape into the light where, somehow, he felt they would only do him even more harm. He knew exactly why he had not wanted to confront Addie with the truth at the time. She wouldn’t have believed him. Wouldn’t have wanted to hear it. The man who had betrayed the trust of his wife and daughter just trying to make excuses.

And in bottling it up, he had only made it worse, burying it and damaging himself in the process. Until they had passed the tipping point, he and Addie. That crossroads beyond which there was no return. A time when healing might still have been possible, if only they had made the effort. It wasn’t until now, with his own death imminent, that he had been moved, finally, to drag all the skeletons from his closet and lay them out to be judged. Whatever that judgement might be.

He thought of Sita, lying on her own in the next room, cold probably, and a little scared, guarding her private grief behind a bold façade that she had let slip tonight. Unintentionally. To a stranger. And maybe that was easier.

Harder, he thought, to face someone you love with the truth that you’ve been hiding from them for years.