A Winter Grave

Chapter Eleven

Brodie awoke to daylight and a hangover, still fully dressed and surprised to find that he had slept at all. He had not even thought to draw the curtains the night before. Now the reflected light of a white world beyond the glass washed across the ceiling, and he blinked with the pain of it, his head still fuzzy from the whisky.

Slowly, he swung his legs to the floor and stood up, stretching all the stiffness out of his limbs. Outside, sunlight touched the tops of snow-capped peaks as far down the loch as he could see. Garbh Bheinn, Mam na Gualainn, and others. The valley itself languished in the permanent shadow cast at this time of year by the mountains that ringed it, and Brodie saw wisps of mist curl gently upwards from the coruscating surface of the loch.

He recalled Brannan talking of lake-effect snow the night before, and wondered just how much the waters of the loch were warmed by the process of cooling a nuclear reactor. He doubted that it would feel particularly warm if he were to plunge himself naked into it.

An unbroken blue sky lay mirrored in the water. As did the mountains themselves, reflections shimmering in the gentle breeze that breathed through the fjord and ruffled its surface. It seemed very still out there. The only sign of life was the occasional thread of blue smoke rising from the odd village chimney. There would be few folk left burning wood these days, he thought. Most had converted to geothermal or air source heat pumps. But wood burned from managed forests was thought to equal carbon-neutral. So...

He tried the light above the bathroom sink. Nothing. Still no electricity. He slunged his face in cold water and cleaned his teeth with a few perfunctory strokes of his brush, then realised he had forgotten to remove the earbuds of his iCom. Without power, there would be no signal, but he decided to leave them in anyway. He regarded the day’s silvered growth on his face and decided, too, not to shave. He would get done what needed done today. The stuff said that needed said. And, power cuts permitting, he would be gone by tonight.

He knocked softly on Sita’s door, and when there was no reply, tried the handle. It wasn’t locked and he pushed the door open. Like him, she had not slept in the bed, but on it. An impression of her body in the duvet was clearly visible, the shape of her head pressed into the pillow.

He went downstairs and heard voices coming from the dining room. Sita and a young man were sitting at a table set for two. She turned as he came in, her eyes clear and bright, and showing no signs of last night’s session with the bottle of Balvenie DoubleWood. ‘Oh, I thought for a minute you might be Mr Brannan,’ she said. ‘He laid out breakfast, such as it is. Some cold meat and a few slices of cheese. But there’s no sign of him.’

The young man rose quickly to his feet and Brodie saw that he was in uniform beneath his reflective waterproof jacket. His peaked, chequered cap lay on the table, and he seemed uncertain for a moment as to whether or not he should put it on.

‘Constable Robert Sinclair, sir,’ he said, extending a hand.

They shook, and Brodie saw that he was a handsome young man. Blue eyes in a fresh, clean-shaven face. A fine, well-defined jawline and an easy smile. Built, too. A good two to three inches taller than Brodie. So this was the man his girl had married. He cast critical eyes over him and said, ‘I’m told you’re known by everyone as Robbie.’

Robbie seemed momentarily discomposed, a flush of embarrassment on his cheek. ‘That’s what folk call me, yes, sir. We’re very informal here.’

‘Good. Most folk call me Cammie.’

‘Yes, sir,’ Robbie said, without a moment’s hesitation. And it was clear that sir was the only form of address he would be likely to use. He waved a hand towards the table. ‘I brought a flask of hot coffee. We’ve got an ancient wee camping gas stove at home, and a little gas left in the bottle. I knew they were all electric up here and you would probably be wanting something hot to drink.’

We, Brodie thought, was Robbie and Addie. But all he said was, ‘That’s very thoughtful, Robbie, thank you.’ He pulled up a chair and sat down to pour himself a cup from the flask, and Robbie took that as a signal he could resume his seat.

Sita looked at Brodie. ‘Are you not going to eat anything?’

He glanced at the cold meat and the slices of processed cheese curling around the edges. ‘Not hungry,’ he said.

She grinned. ‘Don’t blame you.’

Robbie said, ‘We’ve set up one of the surgeries down at the health centre for the PM. Still no power, though.’

Brodie looked at Sita. ‘Do you need power for the autopsy?’

‘Just a healthy dose of daylight and the power of my elbow,’ she said.

‘Good. The sooner we get this underway, the better.’ Brodie drained his cup and stood up. ‘You got a body bag?’

‘With my kit.’

‘We’d better go get it, then, and move the body to the health centre.’ He turned to Robbie. ‘We got transport?’

‘We’ve got my SUV, sir.’

‘Let’s do it, then.’

They drove to the football field in Robbie’s SUV. The eVTOL stood mid-pitch where they had left it, heaped with a covering of snow. At the gate, Brodie said suddenly, ‘Stop!’ Robbie brought the vehicle to a slithering halt.

‘What is it?’ Sita was alarmed.

‘Footprints. Someone’s been having a good look at Eve. Wait here.’ He jumped down into the snow. A single set of footprints approached the gate from among the trees and tracked off in a determinedly straight line towards the e-chopper. Brodie followed them and saw that whoever had come to take a look at the flying machine had circled it a couple of times, stopping at the doors on each side, perhaps trying to get in. Then they tracked away again towards the far side of the field, and he saw there was a pedestrian gate leading out to a path that headed down towards the river.

He turned and waved to Robbie, and the SUV approached slowly across the pitch. When it reached the eVTOL, the other two jumped out into the snow.

‘Was it our intruder from last night, do you think?’ Sita said.

Robbie frowned. ‘Intruder? What intruder?’

‘We had an unannounced visitor at the hotel last night,’ Brodie said. ‘Came in through the dining room. We were in the bar, and I think he probably stood in the hall listening to us. But he broke a glass on the way out, and that’s what alerted us. I followed his footprints as far as the trees but lost him there.’

Robbie was still frowning. ‘I don’t understand. Why would anyone want to listen to you talking?’

‘Good question,’ Brodie said. He turned to Sita. ‘And in answer to yours, yes, I think it probably was our intruder, coming to give Eve the once-over.’

Sita said, ‘Should we get her charging?’

Brodie smiled. ‘No power, Sita, remember?’

She tutted and raised her eyes to the heavens. ‘Too much bloody whisky last night.’ And there was, perhaps, just a moment between them when each remembered the things that the other had confided in vino veritas. ‘Let’s get my kit.’

They returned to the hotel, taking a black body bag from Sita’s Storm case into the kitchen. There still wasn’t any sign of Brannan. Brodie called up the stairs but got no reply. Private quarters at the back of the hotel were not locked, but Brannan was not there either.

Robbie said, ‘There were tyre tracks on the drive when I arrived. Must have been Brannan’s four-by-four. Maybe he’s gone into the village for provisions.’

Brodie shrugged. ‘Then we’ll just have to do what we have to do without his permission.’

They wheeled the cake cabinet from the anteroom into the kitchen and laid out the open body bag on the stainless steel island beneath all the pots and pans and cooking utensils. Brodie lifted the glass lid of the cabinet and glanced at Robbie. ‘You okay to do this?’

Robbie nodded, and between them they lifted the dead weight from the cold cabinet to lay along the length of the body bag. The colour of the corpse had changed, even since last night, when it had looked pink and almost fresh. The cake chiller had kept the body frozen to an extent, but in just twelve hours without power it had begun to decompose, skin colour morphing from red-grey to grey-green.

Sita said, ‘For some reason, bodies that have been frozen, then thawed, decompose faster than if they’d never been frozen at all.’

‘If he’d never been frozen at all, there wouldn’t have been much of him left after three months,’ Brodie said. He had seen many dead people over the years, but the tiny smile of serenity on Mel’s face was the memory that obliterated all the rest. As if she had somehow found peace in death. Conversely, the look on Younger’s face suggested fear, or pain, in the moment of dying. The open eyes, the gaping mouth. The skin of his face was broken and contused. If he had been wearing gloves on the climb, they were nowhere in evidence, and the skin of his hands was marbling, as if the blood were leaking from every vein and spreading out beneath the epidermis.

‘It was a helluva job getting him into the cabinet when we brought him down off the mountain,’ Robbie said. ‘I thought it was rigor mortis, but I guess he was just frozen.’

Sita said, ‘Rigor only lasts for around three days. You’re right, he’d have been frozen solid, stiff as a board, entombed like that in the ice for three months.’ She zipped up the body bag and Younger vanished into his now accustomed darkness.

Brodie turned to Robbie. ‘You were with the group that brought him down?’

‘Yeah, I’m a member of the mountain rescue team. There were a dozen of us went up to get him. Had to chip him out of the ice with our axes. Wasn’t easy, lying on your back hacking away at ice just above your head in limited space, being careful not to damage a corpse. Worse, because there’s a dead guy staring down at you the whole time. We took it in turns. Then strapped him to a litter and lowered him on ropes, little by little, till it was possible to carry him.’

Brodie nodded. He could imagine just how difficult, and stressful, that must have been. It would be easier getting him into the back of the SUV. ‘Let’s get him down to the surgery.’

The Kinlochleven Medical Practice stood in a jumble of buildings in Kearan Road, on the far side of the street from the police station, and a prayer away from St Paul’s Episcopal Church at the end of the road. The original building had been expanded several times over the last fifty years.

The streets around it were empty, only a handful of tyre tracks in evidence, but Brodie was aware of curtains twitching, and eyes on them as they carried the body bag into the room that had been prepared for them at the back of the building. There was a strange still in the air, thick snow all around absorbing every sound, smothering it in tenebrous silence. A sense here of being shut out from the rest of the world, long mountain shadows casting their gloom on the water, while revealing tantalising glimpses of the world beyond in the ring of sunlight that illuminated the peaks and set them sharp and clear against the blue of the sky.

Brodie was sweating by the time they laid the body on the examination table and unzipped the body bag.

‘Just leave him in the bag,’ Sita said. ‘It’ll contain the fluids. Don’t want to make a mess on the floor if we can help it.’

She had opened up her Storm case on a table pushed against the far wall, and was slipping into green scrubs. She donned a heavy apron and pushed her dark, wiry hair into what looked for all the world like a plastic shower cap.

Brodie glanced into her case and saw scalpels, a 35-centimetres chef’s knife, forceps, scissors, a ladle, needles, syringes, and a selection of Vacutainers and sealable plastic bags. There were jars of formalin, and paper and plastic evidence bags. Twine and needle. For sewing up the body afterwards, Brodie assumed. He was not looking forward to the flight back to Glasgow, sharing the tiny cabin of the eVTOL with a decaying corpse.

‘What else do you have in there?’ he said.

‘Oh, a veritable Aladdin’s cave of goodies. A camera.’ She lifted it out. ‘You’ll be handling that.’ And she took out a torch. ‘Could have done with this last night. I’ll use it to light whatever we need to photograph.’ She thrust it at Brodie. ‘Also have a handheld X-ray machine. It can do arms and legs and heads. Not big enough for the torso, though.’ She pulled on plastic shoe covers and snapped her hands into latex gloves.

‘You come well equipped. No wonder this thing was heavy.’

‘Got to think of everything.’ She grinned as she lifted out a surgical handsaw. ‘In the absence of electricity, we’re going to have to open up the skull the old-fashioned way.’ She turned towards Robbie, who was standing by the door looking pale. ‘I’m going to cut him out of his clothes first, and you two can lay them out on the table over there. There’s a roll of paper in my case that you can spread out on it.’

‘Me?’ Robbie seemed shocked.

‘You are staying for the PM, aren’t you?’

‘Well, I... I hadn’t really thought...’

Brodie said, ‘First one, son?’

Robbie’s eyes darted self-consciously in his direction and he nodded.

Sita laughed and said, ‘Well, it probably won’t be your last. Got to start somewhere.’ She stopped and thought for a moment. ‘Something useful you can do. Go home and bring me a plastic bucket for the excess fluids. And a stainless steel bowl if you have such a thing. I need something to put the organs into before I dissect them. Oh, and if you’ve any gas left in that old stove of yours, you could heat me up some water. I’m going to need to thaw out my hands from time to time.’ She turned towards the body. ‘This fella’s still going to be pretty damned cold inside.’

Brodie caught Robbie’s arm as he turned to go. ‘I believe it was your wife who found the body,’ he said. Robbie nodded. ‘I’m going to need to talk to her. And I’m going to need somebody to take me up to the snow patch where it was found.’

‘Oh, Addie’ll do that. She’s scheduled to go up again anyway for a routine maintenance check on the weather station after the storm. I’ll speak to her when I go over to the house. She can come across when the post-mortem’s finished.’

Brodie nodded, and felt his heart rate rise.

Younger’s clothes, all laid out now on the table, were torn in places, badly abraded in others. An anorak over a fleece. Ski pants. His leather boots were badly lacerated, the uppers on one of them ripped completely free of the sole. Sita held the torch as Brodie photographed them.

She packed towels around the body, and got Brodie to photograph it as well. She was particularly interested in the face. ‘Look at these,’ she said, running a latexed finger over irregular-shaped random contusions and abrasions. Most were broad brush-type abrasions, several of them appearing over the prominences of the face, around the eye sockets and high parts of the cheeks. Similar injuries were in evidence, too, around the rest of his body, but less severe where he had been protected by his clothes.

Brodie nodded. ‘Injuries from a fall?’

‘Looks like it.’

‘An accident, then?’

‘Not so fast. Look closer.’ As Brodie leaned in to examine Younger’s face, she said, ‘See? There are multiple blunt force injuries, different from the others. Look at the left cheek. There are seven sets of patterned injuries consisting of four short, parallel abraded contusions, about 3.8 centimetres in length and 0.4 millimetres apart. And check out the single faint linear contusion running perpendicular to the groups.’

Brodie could see that the injuries she was describing formed some kind of a pattern. ‘What do they mean? How did he get those?’

She looked up and smiled from behind her mask. ‘Someone hit him, Mr Brodie. Punched him. Someone wearing a very distinctive pair of gloves. Gloves with some kind of protective reinforcement along the backs of the fingers, notched with four horizontal niches at each knuckle to allow the fingers to flex, and a raised ledge running along the length of each finger.’ She moved her fingertips to Younger’s forehead. ‘Two more here as well. And another along the right jawline.’

‘Is that what killed him?’

‘I doubt it. Enough to knock him off his feet, though. Cause him to fall, which would be consistent with his other injuries.’

Robbie came in with a basin of steaming hot water. ‘This’ll be too hot to put your hands in just yet.’

‘Put it on the table over there. I won’t need it till I cut him open.’ She lifted one of Younger’s hands and examined it closely, turning it this way and that, then fetched a tiny scalpel and a piece of paper torn from a notebook, before gently scraping residue from beneath the fingernails of the right hand to collect on the paper. ‘I think,’ she said, ‘we’ll find that this is skin. Almost certainly harvested from his attacker’s face or neck. I’d say our man put up a bit of a fight. He’ll have left his mark.’ She let the scrapings slide from the paper into a plastic sample bag and sealed it.

Brodie said, ‘You’ll get DNA from that?’

‘We will.’

‘How soon?’

‘As soon as we get power. The wonders of technology. We have a very smart little piece of kit these days that can do on-site DNA analysis. And assuming we have power, then we’ll also have internet access, and I can run it through the database.’

‘And cause of death?’

‘You know as well as I do, Detective Inspector, that no pathologist worth her salt is going to speculate on that until the autopsy is complete.’ She turned towards Robbie. ‘Do you have that bucket and stainless steel dish?’

‘I’ll just dash back across the road and get them.’ He hurried to the door and paused there. ‘My wife will be over in about an hour, sir, if that suits.’

He nodded. ‘Sure.’ And he turned away quickly to focus on Sita’s scalpel as she made her Y-incision in the body, cutting from each shoulder to the breastbone and then all the way down to the pubis. Although he was losing the hair on his head, Younger had plenty of it on his body, a tangle of wiry fair pubic hair on his chest and belly and back, and the fluids of his autopsy ran freely through it.

It took Sita the best part of three-quarters of an hour to open him up and remove his organs one by one, transferring them to the stainless steel bowl that Robbie had brought to an adjoining table, where she carefully bread-loafed each one. After Robbie returned, he had stood at the far side of the room watching at a distance, white face tinged now with green.

Sita asked the two men to leave the room while she cut around the skull with her handsaw. ‘We don’t want to be breathing in any particulates, now, do we?’ she said, double-layering her own surgical mask and slipping on a pair of goggles.

Brodie and the young constable stood outside for some time, stamping their feet to keep warm. ‘Do you want to come across to the station for a coffee?’ Robbie asked him eventually.

Brodie shook his head. ‘Better stay around in case I’m needed.’

Robbie nodded and they stood in awkward silence for some more minutes.

Then Brodie said, ‘How long have you been here?’

‘Since I was twenty-three. So about seven years, I guess. I was at Inverness before. Then this posting came up, and I thought, why the hell not? I grew up myself in a village near Fort William. I like the informality of village life.’ He shrugged. ‘Lifestyle’s much more important to me than career. I mean, I guess I might have thought about moving on, climbing the ladder, but then I met Addie.’ He allowed himself a fond laugh. ‘And, well, here I still am. Got a young kid now, too, so that makes a difference. You got family?’

Brodie couldn’t meet his eye. He just nodded, and breathed out slowly. ‘Yeah.’

Robbie waited for Brodie to tell him more, but when no further elucidation was forthcoming, they fell into an awkward silence, and Brodie was relieved ten minutes later to hear Sita calling from the surgery. They went back in.

She was peeling off her latex gloves and freeing her hair from its plastic protection, shaking it free to tumble over her shoulders. On the table behind her stood an array of jars and plastic bags with all the samples she would take back with her for laboratory analysis. The body was all sewn up, the skull cap replaced, and Younger looked as if he had just been carried off the set of the latest Frankenstein movie.

Finally she broke the silence she had maintained throughout most of the post-mortem. Ready to pronounce on cause of death. ‘Disarticulated vertebrae in the neck,’ she said. ‘Cut the spinal cord clean through. That would certainly have killed him, even if the multiple fractures of his skull hadn’t. Both forearms broken, right tibia. It was quite a fall, I think.’

‘As a result of the blows struck by his attacker?’ Brodie said.

‘Well, we can speculate on that. But all I can say for certain is that he was in a heck of a fight before the fall.’ She started to remove her apron, then paused. ‘There’s some other stuff, though. Weird stuff that I can’t quite explain.’

‘Weird in what way?’

‘It might not even be related.’ She thought about it some more. ‘There was sloughing off of the gut mucosa. With a fair bit of inflammation. In the lungs, too. I mean, with a big fall like he had, pulmonary contusion would be possible.’ She paused to explain. ‘Lung bruising. But because he died pretty quickly, there wouldn’t have been any accompanying inflammation. I sampled some random areas of the lung for microscopic examination. And there was plenty of haemorrhaging and inflammation, which I really wouldn’t have expected to see. It doesn’t fit with trauma, or being frozen.’ She shrugged and smiled. ‘Can’t know everything. But I’ll get some detailed analysis done on the samples.’

A tentative knock at the door brought colour to Brodie’s face, and his heart beat faster.

A young woman’s voice called, ‘Are you finished in there?’

Robbie turned towards the open body bag. ‘Can we...?’

‘Of course,’ Sita said, and zipped it up to conceal Younger from innocent eyes.

Robbie crossed the room to open the door and Addie stepped in. She seemed hesitant. Her smile was uncertain. She said, ‘Hi.’

Addie had barely changed in all the years since Brodie had last set eyes on her. A little older. The faintest evidence of crow’s feet at the corners of her eyes. She was carrying a little more weight. But then, she’d had a baby. She still looked fit, though. All that climbing up and down Binnein Mòr, and the other mountains in the Mamores where she had installed her weather stations. Her hair was the same silky chestnut brown falling to fine, square shoulders. Her eyes and mouth were still Mel’s. He had always seen more of her mother in her than himself. If she had inherited anything of him, it was his temper.

She looked around the room, nodding acknowledgement to Sita, and then her eyes fell on her father. He saw the momentary confusion in them as she processed disbelief, which morphed to realisation, and then to anger. It didn’t take long.

‘What the fuck...?’ An almost involuntary exclamation under her breath. Then the explosion. ‘What the hell are you doing here?’

Robbie was startled. ‘Addie!’

But like a terrier following a scent and deaf to its owner’s calls, she ignored him, focused entirely on her father. She was shaking her head. ‘This can’t be a coincidence. You must have known. You planned this, didn’t you?’

Brodie was surprised by the calm he heard in his own voice. ‘Nobody plans for murder, Addie.’

Robbie cut in, perplexed. ‘Wait a minute. You two know each other?’

Addie still wasn’t listening, but was deflected by the word murder. She flashed a look at Sita. ‘Murder? That man I found was murdered?’

Sita was startled by this unexpected turn of events, and nodded mutely.

Addie was stopped momentarily in her tracks. But it didn’t last. She freed herself of the thought and turned blazing eyes back on her father. ‘Why? Why now, after all these years? What did you think? That I was going to throw my arms around your neck, and say, Daddy, everything’s forgiven?’

Robbie dragged his gaze away from his wife and turned it towards Brodie with incredulity. ‘You’re her father?’

Brodie was embarrassed. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘I should have told you.’

But nothing was going to stop Addie. ‘Oh, yes, sorry! That’s you all over, isn’t it? Always sorry.’

Robbie stepped in firmly, embarrassment giving way to anger. ‘Addie, stop it!’ He took her by the shoulders, but pulled up short of shaking them. ‘I don’t know what’s going on between you two.’ He drew a sharp breath. ‘Because, let’s face it, you’ve always told me that both your parents were dead.’

She tore her eyes away from Brodie, and a fleeting moment of guilt diluted the anger in them.

Robbie said, ‘This is a murder investigation, for Christ’s sake. You’re a material witness. And like it or not, you’re going to have to take your father up the mountain to show him where you found the body. Now, I suggest you get a hold of yourself, go home and get changed for the climb.’

She glared at him with naked hostility. ‘Whose side are you on?’

‘I’m on the side of the law, Addie.’ He made a determined effort to lower the pitch of his voice. ‘Now go and get changed.’ He let go of her shoulders.

She stood trembling with anger and humiliation. Then turned her eyes beyond her husband to settle again on her father. ‘See?’ she said. ‘All these years I’ve been happy without you. You’re back in my life for two minutes and causing conflict already.’

As she turned to the door, one of the gloves she’d been clutching and twisting in her hands fell to the floor. But she wasn’t about to ruin her exit, and ignored it as she stomped off through the snow. Robbie was too embarrassed to notice. He half turned towards Brodie, barely able to meet his eye. ‘I’m sorry about that,’ he said. ‘I’ll speak to her.’ And he hurried out into the chill of the morning in pursuit of his inexplicably hostile wife.

Brodie stepped to the door and stooped to pick up the glove. Soft, hand-sewn lambskin, turned over at the wrist. It was still warm, and for a moment it felt like holding her hand. He raised it to his face and breathed in her scent deeply before closing the door. Then he turned to find Sita staring at him. Concern was etched deeply in the lines around her mouth, and reflected in the light that diffused the darkness of her eyes. ‘Your daughter? Really?’ She hesitated. ‘Of course, you knew?’

He nodded and she closed her eyes.

‘For God’s sake, Brodie. I mean, she’s right. What on earth did you hope to achieve?’

He hadn’t achieved it yet, and he wasn’t about to tell her.

‘Do they know? In Glasgow, I mean. Your bosses?’

He shook his head. ‘No.’

She sighed in frustration. ‘They would never have sent you if they had. And you should never have volunteered, if that’s what you did. Your daughter found the body. She’s a potential suspect.’

‘Addie didn’t kill anybody.’

‘You don’t know that. No one knows that.’

‘You think she’s big enough and strong enough to punch a man the size of Younger off the top of a mountain?’

‘No, of course not. But that’s not the point.’

‘What is?’

‘That you should not be involved with this investigation in any way. You have to declare a family interest. They’ll send someone else.’

‘We have no power, remember. No comms. No way to contact HQ. So I’m just going to have to make the best of it.’

She stared at him for a long time, the slightest shaking of her head. ‘Why did you come?’

‘There are matters I need to settle before...’ His voice tailed away. ‘Just things I need to settle.’

The slightest cant of her head, the faintest narrowing of her eyes, posed a question that she didn’t frame in words. Perhaps suspecting that there would be no answer forthcoming.

Brodie looked at Addie’s glove in his hands and said, ‘I’ve heard that sometimes gloves can be a good source of DNA. A tear in the cuticle, a spot of blood dried into the lining.’ He looked up. ‘Is that right?’

She frowned. ‘It’s been known.’

He took a step towards her and held out the glove. ‘Any chance you could look for a sample in this?’

Now she was incredulous. She took the glove. ‘You just told me there’s no way you think she’s involved in Younger’s murder.’

He scoffed. ‘Of course she’s not.’ He crossed the room to where he had draped his parka over the back of a chair, and turned the hood inside out. There were quite a number of hairs trapped in the fleece from a time before his razor cut, when his hair had been longer. He teased some of it free and held it out to her. ‘If you find some, maybe you could check it against mine. See if there’s a familial match.’

‘You think there might not be?’

‘I’d just be grateful if you could do that for me.’ He paused. ‘Can you?’

She took the hair and slipped it into a resealable evidence bag. ‘You sure you want to know?’

He pursed his lips, and she saw the sadness in his eyes as he nodded, almost imperceptibly.