A Winter Grave

Chapter Twelve

Brodie walked back to the hotel, following the tyre tracks on the B863. He crossed the bridge spanning the stream they called Allt Coire na Bà, where it ran in spate down from Grey Mare’s Waterfall before joining the River Leven as it debouched into the loch. Across the valley, the windows of the school simmered darkly. Absent of the sound of children’s voices. There were no footprints breaking the surface of the freshly fallen snow on the school playing field. No power, so no school. Frustrated schoolkids no doubt sitting at home staring at blank TV screens, unable even to fire up games on their PlayStation Fifteens. No evidence, either, of them playing outside. Perhaps they had forgotten how.

Robbie had told him he would bring Sita and the body, and all her kit and samples, back to the hotel once she had cleaned up. Brodie wanted to get up on to the mountain before the light began to fade.

Brannan’s four-by-four was nowhere in evidence when Brodie reached the International. He pushed open the main door, kicked the snow off his boots, and walked into the hallway. It was silent as the grave in there. Gloomy without any direct sunlight spilling through windows. He called out, but there was no response. He was hungry, but there was no time to go foraging for food. Instead, he climbed the stairs and went into his room to prepare for the mountain.

He pulled on elasticated stretch pants over his long johns, and a microfleece top over a synthetic base layer. The weather was dry, with no imminent risk of further snow, so he would wear his down-filled North Face parka on top of that.

He sat on the bed to pull on a pair of stiff-soled B2-rated mountaineering boots, and attach the snow gaiters that would keep his lower legs dry. His articulated C2 crampons lay on the duvet. He would put them in his pack and attach them to his boots when they emerged from the woods to begin the climb up through the snow.

His gloves, which extended to cover his forearms, were a halfway house between a glove and a mitten, with separate sheaths for thumb and forefinger. He stuffed them in his pack, and before pulling on his woollen hat to cover his ears, caught sight of himself in the mirror above the sink. Unshaven, complexion like putty, salt-and-pepper silver stubbled hair. The face with which he had greeted his daughter for the first time in ten years. And he thought how old he looked, and weary. And in that brief encounter had felt how much she hated him still.

Robbie had promised that Addie would meet him at the Grey Mare’s car park. He half expected she wouldn’t be there, and half hoped he might be right. He was, he realised, dreading the climb with her. He had no idea what he was going to say. Had rehearsed nothing. Taken the decision to come on the spur of the moment, and like a marriage made in haste, was regretting it at leisure. But he also had a job to do. A man had been murdered. Outside help was not an option, since he had no way of contacting Glasgow. So he was on his own. In more ways than one.

He was in the downstairs hall when the power came back on. Lights flickered to life in the dining room, and he heard the refrigeration units in the kitchen kick in. He checked the time. It was approaching midday. He swithered briefly about whether or not to check in with Glasgow and report Sita’s findings. Instinctively, he touched his breast pocket to check that his iCom glasses in their protective case were still there. He decided against making the call. It would only delay him. And complicate things. He needed the time with Addie that the climb would give him, and would call when he got back.

He left the hotel and made his way through the trees to the football field. Now that the power was back on, he could get the eVTOL charging for the return journey. As he walked through the gate on to the pitch, he stopped. There were more tracks now than previously. Robbie’s tyre tracks had obliterated the initial single set of footprints leading out to the e-chopper that they had spotted earlier. He could see where the three of them had got out of the vehicle to recover Sita’s Storm case. And the original set of prints that had circled Eve before heading off to the smaller gate on the far side of the field. Now a second set of prints came from that same gate and circled the chopper before disappearing among the tyre tracks towards the pavilion outside the main gate. Perfectly possible, of course, that it was just some curious local, though Brodie reflected he had seen precious few folk out and about on this morning after the storm. He circled the eVTOL himself to check for damage, or any sign of forced entry. But there was nothing.

He sighed and opened the hatch to access the charging cable, and tracked off with it across the field towards the pavilion. There he found the charging hub and plugged it in. It seemed like an archaic process, but he figured it was probably just as efficient as wireless charging. Lights on the reader attached to the plug unit flashed green, which satisfied him that Eve was taking a charge. And piercing unbroken snow with the point of his walker’s ice axe, he set off with nervous trepidation for the rendezvous with his daughter.

Addie was waiting impatiently in the car park, stamping her feet to keep warm. She was wearing blue ski pants and a bright yellow parka and woolly hat, hair spilling out from beneath it, almost red in the early afternoon light. Her daypack looked like it wouldn’t have much more in it than her crampons, and maybe a flask of something hot. Her ice axe dangled by a strap from her wrist, and from the black look on her face as she saw him coming, Brodie thought that she was probably fighting the urge to bury it in his chest.

But she was accompanied by a group of men in climbing gear clustering around a minibus, laughing and stamping their feet also, breath billowing around their heads in the icy air. Too many witnesses for murder, he thought wryly. They turned to look with interest as Brodie approached. He nodded. ‘Gentlemen.’ They murmured uncertain greetings in response. He turned to Addie. ‘We’re all going up?’

‘No,’ she said quickly. ‘I get an allowance from the SMO to pay locals to check on the other weather stations along the Mamores when I can’t do them all. And we have a very narrow weather window today.’

‘So this is your dad, then?’ An older man with a leathery, wind-burned face looked at Brodie with curiosity, and Brodie thought how fast word travelled in a small community.

‘Yes, Archie, it is.’ Addie looked as if each word was leaving a bad taste in her mouth. Then she turned to Brodie. ‘Archie leads the mountain rescue team.’

Brodie leaned forward to shake his hand. ‘So, Mr...?’

‘McKay.’

‘You were in the group that brought Mr Younger’s body down from the mountain?’

‘I was that,’ Archie said. ‘Most of us here were. Fucking idiot. Took the hard way up when I clearly told him it was not a route for beginners.’

Brodie frowned. ‘I understood no one knew where he had gone.’

Archie looked uncomfortable. ‘Well, I didn’t know that’s where he’d gone the day he went missing. I spoke to him the day before. It was Mike Brannan up at the International who sent him to me for advice. Not that he was inclined to take it.’

‘So how do you know which way he went up?’

He coloured a little. ‘Well, I don’t. But he told me the easy way would take too long. If he went up at all.’ He paused. ‘It’s no wonder he fell.’

Brodie said, ‘He didn’t fall, Mr McKay. Someone punched his lights out and pushed him off the summit. It’s a murder I’m investigating here.’

An almost audible sense of shock rippled through the small group of climbers.

‘Who do you think did it?’ another of the men asked.

‘That’s what I hope to find out. But we have a sample of the killer’s DNA. So it probably won’t be too long before we do.’

Archie said, ‘How does that help? I mean, what if the killer’s not on a database somewhere.’

Brodie raised an eyebrow. ‘You seem to know a lot about it, Mr McKay.’

Archie shrugged. ‘I read detective books like everyone else, Mr Brodie.’

‘Then you’ll know that if he’s not on the database, we’ll have to DNA test every male in the village.’

One of the younger men said, ‘And if someone doesn’t agree to that?’

Brodie looked at him. ‘And you are?’

‘He’s my boy,’ Archie said defensively.

‘And presumably he has a name. And a tongue in his head to answer for himself.’

Archie swallowed his annoyance.

‘Tam,’ the boy said.

‘Well, then, in answer to your question, Tam, he’ll be arrested for obstruction.’

Addie intervened for the first time. ‘How do you know it wasn’t a woman?’

Brodie turned towards his daughter. ‘I don’t. But Younger wasn’t a small man, and his killer gave him a bit of a hiding before he fell into the corrie. It would need to be a pretty powerful woman.’

The group of climbers shuffled uncertainly in the sunshine until Archie said gruffly, ‘We’d better be going if we want this done before sunset.’ He turned towards Addie, ignoring her father. ‘See you later, lass.’

And Brodie had the impression that all of them were glad to escape the moment, clambering into their minibus before heading off to climb their allocated peaks in the Mamores. He watched thoughtfully as the vehicle set off along the B863, but when he turned back towards Addie, found her glaring at him with unconcealed loathing. She’d had time to process his arrival. Time to let her anger build. He braced himself for the storm.

‘You selfish fucker! What on earth did you think you could achieve by coming here like this? I’m sure they didn’t send you. Not if they’d known. They wouldn’t. You must have volunteered.’

Brodie tried to maintain a semblance of calm. ‘Addie...’

But she cut him off. ‘Don’t use my fucking name. Don’t you dare. Did you think for one minute how I would feel? Did you? Why I haven’t spoken to you in all this time? Of course not. Because the only person you ever think about is you. And you never were good on consequences, were you? Mum would still have been here otherwise.’ She paused to draw a quivering breath. ‘You make me sick!’

And she turned to stride off up the path and into the woods. At a pace he knew he was going to have trouble matching.

They passed signposts for Spean Bridge and Corrour station, and she turned left where the path split at a T-junction, then forked right on to a rougher path up steps. The snow was sparser here beneath the trees, and slippy underfoot.

The path climbed steeply through the woods and she kept up an unrelenting pace, not looking back once. She forked left across a burn and pushed on up through more deciduous woodland. She had an easy, loping stride, and he saw her breath condensing in the sunlight ahead of him.

He paused to catch his own breath, hearing it rasp in his chest, and looked back the way they had come. Already they had achieved a considerable elevation, and a spectacular view of the village and the loch lay spread out below them, blue water zigzagging off between snow-covered peaks towards a sea lost somewhere in the misted distance.

Addie’s voice rang out in the cold from up ahead. ‘What’s wrong, old man? Can’t hack it any more?’

He turned to see her glaring down at him through the trees and he sighed, and started off again, following in her footsteps. She stood watching him for a few moments.

‘You need to keep up if we’re going to beat the light,’ she said. ‘When the sun starts to go down, it goes down fast.’

Again, she didn’t wait for him, turning to push on through the trees along some old stalker’s path. It wasn’t long before they left the woods behind, and undulating moorland opened up before them. Brodie stopped again, this time to attach his crampons for better grip in the snow, and when he looked for her up ahead saw that she had done the same, her eyes hidden now behind dark glasses. He took off his gloves to fumble in his pocket for the case that held his iCom glasses, and slipped them on. ‘iCom, shade my lenses,’ he said, and felt foolish, as if talking to himself. But the lenses immediately cut the glare of the snow. ‘Darker,’ he said, and now he could see without screwing up his eyes. He pulled on his gloves and set off after her once more.

They crossed a stream, Addie still a good fifty yards ahead of him, then turned up the far bank before climbing around the southern flank of Sgùrr Èilde Beag. Away to their right, sunlight reflected in diamond clusters on the dark waters of Loch Èilde Mòr. It wasn’t long before he realised that he was starting to gain on her, as if the pace that she had set to defeat him was too much for her. And he was getting his second wind.

They were cutting diagonally across the steep slope of the hill, the odd copse of fir trees breaking the monotony of the snowy wastes. And finally he was at her side, matching her stride for stride. He heard her laboured breathing, though whether it was from exertion or anger he couldn’t tell.

He swung his gaze around what was an almost featureless landscape and said, ‘How do you know where we’re going?’

She took a moment or two to respond. ‘I’ve walked this so many times in all seasons, following the same stalker’s trails. I know every feature of this land by heart.’ Then, as if annoyed with herself for even speaking to him, she stopped abruptly, turning in anger. ‘Why are you here? Really? And don’t tell me it’s your fucking job.’ He almost smiled at her propensity for cursing, just like his own. ‘I mean, what can you possibly hope to achieve?’

‘We need to talk, Addie.’

‘No, we don’t! I haven’t needed to talk to you for ten years, and I’ve no intention of starting now.’

‘Please, just hear me out.’

‘No! And don’t you dare tell me that somehow I owe it to you. I owe you nothing. Betrayal doesn’t deserve forgiveness. Because that’s what you did, you know. Betrayed us. Both of us. With that...’ She searched for a word that would give full force to her contempt and loathing, but came up short. ‘How could you bring her to the funeral, how could you?’

‘Addie, it wasn’t like that. She was my partner at work. She was only there for moral support.’

‘And you’re going to tell me that you didn’t have a relationship with her?’

He let his head fall. ‘Only afterwards. And that was a mistake.’

Addie was scathing. ‘Oh, so you didn’t live happily ever after, then?’

He looked up to meet her eyes, but they were hidden behind the lenses of her sunglasses. ‘No, we didn’t. Jenny wanted it, but I couldn’t. She moved in, but it didn’t last six months. When she left, she said there was no way she could compete with a dead woman.’

For a moment Addie was at a loss for words.

‘I could never be free of Mel. Or my guilt.’

And his daughter’s defiance returned. She removed her sunglasses to glare at him. ‘So if you weren’t having an affair, what did you have to feel guilty about? I mean, what are you saying? That my mother’s last words were a lie?’

It was almost painful to look at her. As if it was Mel standing there on the side of a mountain railing at him. Her eyes, her mouth. His temper. He wanted so much to take her in his arms and tell her he was sorry. But sorry, he knew, wouldn’t cut it with Addie, so he kept it to himself. And she turned abruptly, replacing her sunglasses and pressing on up the slope. She was the one who had the second wind now.

As the slope grew steeper, they began to zigzag until they reached a ridge just short of the first minor peak of Sgùrr Èilde Beag. Brodie stopped to catch his breath and take in the view. Already it felt like they were approaching the roof of the world. The land around them rose and fell in snow-covered splendour as far as the eye could see. Directly across from them, Sgùrr Èilde Mòr rose to its majestic summit, and sunlight glanced off the deep blue of the loch far below.

Addie paused, too. Though she must have seen them many times, he saw the wonder in her gaze as she cast it across the mountaintops. ‘Always takes my breath away,’ she said, forgetting for a moment that she was talking to him. And then, self-consciously, she turned to press on along the line of the ridge.

Steep, snow-covered slopes dropped away left and right now, the ridge itself still rising and running out to Binnein Mòr. In the distance stood Ben Nevis, and they saw the shadows that cast themselves in deep, dark blue to the east and north of the Grey Corries.

The land dipped away slightly to a bealach, a mountain pass, before rising again along the narrowest of ridges that curved around to the peak, the gradients on either side of them falling almost sheer away. Brodie was glad of the crampons that bit into the crusted surface of the snow, and he allowed himself to tip a little of his weight on to his walker’s ice axe to keep his balance and fight off the temptations of vertigo.

He loved the mountains for their sense of solitude, and the context they gave to the problems of his life, which seemed so much smaller up here than when he returned to the turmoil of life below. But he was unaccustomed to having company, and for the first time, it felt like he had brought those problems with him, and somehow the presence of his daughter was magnifying that.

A strong breeze blew in their faces now. The icy breath of the Arctic. His eyes watered and his face grew stiff from the cold. He was glad when finally they reached the weather station and he could stop to regain some equilibrium in his breathing and let his legs recover a little. Right now they felt like jelly, and he wondered how they were going to carry him back down the nearly four thousand feet of this highest mountain in the Mamores range.

He was surprised how small the installation was — a flimsy tripod bolted to the rock, sprouting sensors and solar panels and aerials. He watched her remove her sunglasses, then kneel down to clear away the snow and check its components carefully. ‘How in God’s name does that survive up here?’

‘It’s based on the one they built for Everest. So Binnein Mòr’s a doddle.’

‘And you were up here checking on it the day you found the body?’

‘That’s right.’

‘And there’s another four or five of them that you check on across the range? The ones your helpers are doing today?’

She kept her focus on what she was doing. ‘Six in total. Did you read that in your briefing notes?’

He squatted down on his haunches. ‘You’d be surprised how much I know about you.’

Her fingers froze for a moment on the lid of the box she had opened to check on the battery, and she cast him a sideways glance. ‘Oh?’ She closed the lid. ‘Like what?’

‘I know you quit Glasgow University after six months. A sudden change of mind. Went to Edinburgh instead. Did an honours degree in meteorology. Then got a job at the Scottish Met Office.’

She turned to look at him directly now. If anything, it seemed that the hostility in her gaze had intensified. He was almost discomposed by it, but pressed on.

‘You came up here, leading a team to install these weather stations along the Mamores. Which is when you met Robbie. The local cop. And fell for him.’ And he added wryly, ‘Not, I’m quite sure, as the result of any kind of father fixation.’

She stared at him in silence for what felt like a very long time. ‘So you’ve been spying on me. Like some kind of stalker.’

‘Is it wrong for a father to take an interest in his own daughter? Especially when she’s never going to tell him anything about her life herself? A daughter who never invited him to her wedding. Didn’t even tell him she was getting married.’

‘But you knew anyway.’

He nodded, and returned the intensity of her gaze. ‘What I didn’t know was that you’d given up full-time work to have a kid.’ And he saw anger flare in her eyes.

‘So that’s why you’re here?’

He shook his head. ‘No.’

But she didn’t want to hear it and was back on her feet in an instant. ‘You have no claim on my son. I don’t want you anywhere near him. He doesn’t even know he has a maternal grandfather.’

The hurt must have shown on his face, for there was a fleeting moment of regret in hers. To cover it, she swung her pack off her back and delved inside for a flask and two tin cups. She pushed the cups into the snow to stop them from blowing away and poured hot, milky coffee into each. Without a word, she held one out towards him.

He took it gratefully and felt the hot liquid warming his insides. He stood up to stop his legs from cramping and nodded towards another installation perhaps fifty metres further along the ridge. ‘Another one of yours?’

She turned to look. It was smaller than her weather station. Anchored in a similar way, with some kind of sensor on top of a tall pole to which there were two large solar panels attached above a battery box and reader. ‘No. That’s a GDN field installation.’

He shrugged, none the wiser. ‘Which is what?’

‘GDN. Gamma Detection Network. There’s a ring of about sixteen of these things set up in a ten- to fifteen-mile radius of the power plant at Ballachulish A. They monitor radiation levels. Nothing to do with me. Someone’s probably already been up from the plant to check on it after the storm.’ She drained her coffee and stuffed the cup back in her pack, and held out her hand for his. He finished the last of his coffee and passed it to her. She said, ‘It’s time we went down into the corrie.’

They stood on the lip of the drop into the Corrie of the Two Lochans and felt how the wind had picked up. Brodie planted his legs well apart to keep his balance.

Addie braced herself too, but shook her head as she gazed down into the deep hollowed cavity on the north side of the mountain. ‘There’s been so much snow in the last few days,’ she said. ‘I can’t even see the ice tunnel now. I don’t know if I’ll be able to find it again.’

There were two ridges flanking the corrie, and they took the one on the west side. It was steep, very nearly sheer in places, and their descent was slow and careful, leaning towards the perpendicular using their crampons for grip and their ice axes for balance.

As they descended into the shadow on the north side of the mountain, they felt the temperature drop, and Brodie paused, bracing himself against the angle, to remove his iCom glasses and slip them back into their protective case. When he looked up again, he saw Addie watching him.

She turned away quickly and they slithered down the side of the ridge and into the corrie itself, to traverse the snow that had gathered thickly in the hollow. Breathlessly, Addie said, ‘It was somewhere over here. Right in the deepest part.’ She stopped to scan the contour of the slope. ‘You know, thirty years ago, snow hunters used to scour the mountains for snow patches that survived throughout the year.’

‘Why would they do that?’

She shrugged. ‘Who knows? To note and monitor them for posterity, I guess. The thing is, there were precious few of them around back then. And as global temperatures rose, they vanished altogether. Gone by the late spring. Now there’s hundreds of them all over the mountains, lying in deep corries just like this one all year round.’

Brodie squatted in the snow, using his ice axe to keep his balance. Her change towards him was small, and subtle, but hadn’t gone unnoticed. At least she was talking to him. ‘That’s something I’ve never really understood,’ he said. ‘How it got cold here and hotter nearly everywhere else.’

Her look was scathing. ‘Probably because, like everyone else, you just weren’t paying attention.’ He felt the sting of her rebuke. But she wasn’t finished. ‘Bet you didn’t even care to know. Certainly didn’t care enough to do anything about it.’

‘Maybe you’d like to explain it to me, then. Since you’re the one with the degree.’

She detected and reacted to his sarcasm. ‘It’s perfectly simple. Simple enough even for you to understand. You’ve heard of the Gulf Stream, I suppose.’

‘Of course.’

‘Yeah, well, it pretty much doesn’t exist any more. It brought warm water from the Gulf of Mexico north-east across the Atlantic. The whole of western Europe was warmer as a result. Particularly Scotland. I mean, if you look at other countries on the same latitude as Scotland, you’d see that snow and ice are the norm. Basically we line up with the whole of the Alaskan panhandle.’

She exhaled through pursed lips, and Brodie saw that there was an anger simmering deep inside her.

‘When the Greenland ice sheet started melting, all that freezing meltwater plunged south and basically stopped the Gulf Stream in its tracks.’ She paused. ‘It got colder. And then there’s the jet stream. I suppose you know what that is, too?’

‘I’ve heard of it.’

‘A stream of air circling the northern hemisphere. Caused by warm air rising from the equator, meeting cold air dropping from the Arctic. It used to be that if the jet stream sat higher than usual, we would have a good summer. Lower, and it would be crap. But when global temperatures started rising, the air from the equator got hotter and disrupted the flow of it. Deforming it into peaks and troughs. The peaks drew up even hotter air, and the troughs pulled cold air down from the Arctic, from a circulation up there called the Arctic vortex. Put everything together, and suddenly Scotland’s got the climate of northern Norway, and the equator’s so fucking hot, no one can live there any more.’

She took a deep breath as if to try and calm the passion that was the cause of her agitation. And she turned further recrimination towards her father.

‘That’s what happens when you don’t fucking listen. That’s the legacy your generation left mine.’

Brodie stood up as he felt anger spike through him. The temper that he had passed on to his daughter. ‘Oh, I was listening. Like everyone else. It was practically all you ever fucking heard about. Climate change. Global warming. How we all had to do our bit. And a lot of us did. But the big boys didn’t, did they? China, India, Russia, America. The economic imperative or something, they called it. The need to keep on sucking fossil fuels from the ground and burning the fucking stuff, because too many people were making too much money doing just that.’ He waved his ice axe towards the heavens. ‘And what could ordinary folk like me or you do about it? Fuck all. It’s like when they tell us we’re going to war. Or they’re going to spent billions on nuclear weapons. Or refuse entry to starving immigrants. Whether we agree with any of it or not.’

‘You could have taken to the streets.’

He breathed his scorn into the wind. ‘Oh, yeah, that works. Disrupt the flow of daily life and people get pissed off with you. Protest in sufficient numbers and the authorities send in the riot police. You get one chance to change things, Addie. Once every four years. You put the other lot in, and it turns out they’re just the same.’ He rammed the point of his ice axe into the snow. ‘In the end, that’s why I stopped listening. Stopped caring. And it doesn’t matter what generation you belong to, nothing changes. It’s the same people abusing the same power, and making the same money.’

He found that he was breathing hard now, shocked by a passion he didn’t know he possessed. She was staring at him. But it wasn’t hate he saw there. She was startled. He grew suddenly self-conscious and tried a smile that didn’t quite work.

‘Don’t know where that came from.’

She stood staring at him for a moment longer, then turned away suddenly. ‘I’ll see if I can find that ice tunnel.’

It was a depression at the bottom end of it that gave away its location. Buried under fresh snowfall, it still presented a slightly raised profile at the upper end, which fell away sharply where the entrance to the tunnel had caused the wind to eddy and scoop out a hollow in the snow.

‘This has got to be it.’ Addie started dragging snow away with her gloved hands, and Brodie crouched down to join her, scraping the top layer away until the snow above them slid off the mound, and suddenly the entrance to the ice tunnel was revealed.

Brodie fished out the headlight from his pack and shone it through the hole into the tunnel. He was amazed by the almost perfect arch it presented, evenly dimpled as if by some intelligent design. The area hewn out of it by the mountain rescue team to recover the body was clearly visible. Shards of broken ice lay in piles all around. Charles Younger’s last but one resting place.

‘I’m going in,’ he told her.

‘Be careful,’ Addie said, before she realised she wasn’t supposed to care. Then added lamely, ‘The weight of all that snow on it. It might collapse.’

He scraped away more snow and divested himself of his backpack before stretching the elastic of his headlight around his woollen hat. Addie took his ice axe as he lay on his back and slid himself slowly up into the tunnel. Light from the LED in his torch reflected back at him off every dimpled surface, almost blinding him. He heard more than felt the ice chippings grinding beneath him as he dug in his heels to push himself further inside.

Now he was on a level with the area above him where Younger had been hacked out of the ice. A large concave excavation corresponding very roughly to the shape of a man. Only now did Brodie fully appreciate what a difficult task it must have been to free the corpse from its upside-down grave. He turned his head, directing his light as far as he could above and below, looking for anything that the mountain rescue team might have missed. After all, theirs had been a mission of recovery, not the investigation of a crime scene. And he doubted very much that Robbie’s experience would have extended to the latter.

Nothing caught his attention, and he lay still for several minutes, breathing hard, trying to think how Younger’s body might have come to be entombed in the ice like this. ‘Can you hear me?’ he called, and he heard Addie’s voice come distantly from the outside.

‘Just.’

‘What happened here, do you think? I mean, how did he get into the ice?’

‘You’re the cop.’

‘Thank you, that’s helpful.’

Several long moments of silence followed, and he wasn’t sure if she was thinking or just ignoring him. Then her voice came again. ‘What did the pathologist say happened to him?’

‘Someone attacked him, probably on the peak directly above here, and he fell. Broke his neck, fractured his skull and several limbs.’

‘Okay,’ she said. ‘So it was August. No snow on the mountain, except for long-lying patches in the east- and north-facing corries, like this one. Lots of walkers and climbers at that time of year. The body would have been found pretty quickly.’

‘So he had to hide it.’

‘He must have climbed down and hollowed out a rough grave on the top of the snow patch. Then covered over the body with whatever he’d dug out and more snow from around it. Even in August, temperatures can get down below freezing overnight, but it’s warm enough during the day to melt the snow patch just a little. Enough, anyway, for the body to sink down into it, then freeze over again at night. In time, these snow patches become as hard as ice.’

Brodie closed his eyes and saw just how that could happen. A process that would repeat again and again, until the body was subsumed and permanently locked into the ice. But whoever killed him hadn’t reckoned on an autumn thaw that would send meltwater running beneath the snow patch, carving out a snow tunnel over the course of several weeks, exposing the body from below.

Almost as if he had spoken his thoughts aloud, she said, ‘Then the meltwater exposed him from underneath. Which is when I found him.’ And he felt a surging moment of pride in the child he had fathered. There was more of him in her than he had ever realised.

He was about to push himself back out of the tunnel, when the light of his torch caught a fleeting shadow in the ice above him. He stopped and turned his head, raking torchlight among the shattered dimples until he found it again. Something black, the size of a credit card, locked in the ice above his head. He reached an arm towards the tunnel entrance and called, ‘Addie, pass me my axe.’ And he felt the haft of it pushed into his open hand. He grasped it and pulled it in, lifting it up so that the adze was level with his head. There was very little room to manoeuvre, and it took nearly five minutes of short, repeated hacking movements, ice splintering all around his head, eyes screwed almost shut, to reach the elusive object. He removed his gloves, and with warm fingers melting ice, eventually managed to prise it free. He held it up to the light of his torch, and stared at it, puzzled, for several long moments. It was exactly like a credit card. Black, and completely blank. There was no chip or magnetic strip or engraving of any kind. He frowned, and then it dawned on him what it was.

He thrust his axe back towards Addie and shouted, ‘I’m coming out.’

He wriggled his way back out of the tunnel with difficulty, then sat up in the snow piled all around him at the entrance. He held up the card between his thumb and forefinger and Addie looked at it quizzically.

‘A credit card?’

‘No. It’s a keycard with an RFID chip in it.’

‘RFID?’

‘Radio frequency identification. For opening his car door, maybe. They gave me one just like it for locking and unlocking the eVTOL.’

Addie frowned. ‘I don’t remember Robbie saying anything about a car.’

‘That’s because they never found one. But he must have had a vehicle to get here.’

‘So where is it?’

He closed his fingers around the card. ‘Good question.’ He unzipped a pocket in his North Face and slipped it safely inside before getting stiffly back to his feet. He wasn’t finished yet with this crime scene and looked up at the steep snow-covered slope of the corrie above him. The fall from the summit must have been a hundred and fifty to two hundred feet. Not a sheer drop, but enough to have inflicted the damage that Sita had found during her autopsy. The top end of the ice tunnel was lost under the recent snowfall, but he wanted to see if he could find it and make his way down through the tunnel from the top end. It would be easier than trying to slide up backwards from below.

He pocketed his headlight and said, ‘Wait here. I’m going to try and come through from the top.’ And with the help of his ice axe, he began the steep ascent up the corrie. He had covered maybe twelve or thirteen metres before he realized he had lost the profile of the old snow patch. It took several minutes of scouring the slope with trained eyes before he finally resigned himself to the fact that it was probably going to remain buried forever. Or at least until next summer.

He sunk his axe into the snow to begin the process of backing down the way he had come. There was the strangest cracking sound that echoed all around the mountain, and he watched a line from the head of his axe extend left and right across maybe two hundred metres. A vast slab of snow beneath his feet began to slide, and he instantly lost his balance, falling backwards as a sound like the roar of a jet engine filled his ears. Almost the last thing he heard above it, before being submerged by the snow, was Addie screaming.

Now his sense of orientation was gone as once soft snow battered and pummelled him like blocks of concrete, carrying him tumbling down the slope. Without any idea why, he found himself trying to swim through the chaos, arms and legs kicking, as if fighting against the force of giant waves. It seemed to last an eternity. An eternity in which he was strangely conscious of every little thing happening around him. Losing his axe, his gloves, his hat, ragged chunks of ice tearing at his parka, smashing into his face.

And still his instincts were pushing him to swim against the tide of it. Gasping for breath, hearing the grunt of his own voice as the weight of snow forced the air from his lungs. Fragments of blue sky flashed through his field of vision before being lost again in the maelstrom.

Then, almost as quickly as it had begun, it came to an end. He felt himself being dragged down, like a drowning man, and he curled up into a ball, raising both arms in front of his face in the hope of creating an air pocket. Enough oxygen at least to fuel his attempt to get back to the surface.

Silence returned, although his ears were still ringing from the jet-engine roar, and he found himself on his back, one leg apparently clear of the snow above him, the other folded painfully into his chest. His mouth was full of snow, and his teeth hurt from the cold of it. But there was space around his head. He coughed and spat and gasped for air, and heard Addie’s muffled voice coming from somewhere distantly above him.

‘Dad! Dad!’

Then, unexpected light almost blinded him, and her voice came loud and clear.

‘Are you okay?’

And he wondered what primal instincts had been at work that caused him to fight for his life. After all, he was a dead man walking, wasn’t he? Wouldn’t it have been easier just to surrender and let the avalanche take his life? That would have been an end to it.

But he hadn’t wanted to go. Not yet. Not like this. There was stuff that needed to be said first.

He felt Addie’s hand grasp his and pull, and he fought to disengage himself from the great chunks of frozen snow that had carried him almost two hundred feet down the corrie. And finally he was free of it, lying on his back, ice-cold air tearing at his lungs, staring up into the sky he had never expected to see again. Everything still seemed to work. He could move both arms, both legs.

Addie was crouched over him, her face etched with concern. ‘Fuck,’ she said.

He smiled. ‘Yeah, fuck!’

And for the first time in more than ten years, he saw her laugh. Something he thought he would never witness again. And he laughed too. And when they stopped laughing, neither of them knew what to say. Each overcome by their own sense of self-consciousness.

Finally she said, ‘I thought you were gone.’

He wondered why she would care. But all he said was, ‘An avalanche? In November?’

She shrugged. ‘Changed days. It was a slab avalanche. Happens when a south-westerly wind blows snow over the summits and into the north-facing slopes. It builds up but doesn’t consolidate. Then, if the temperature drops between falls and the snow freezes, like it did late yesterday during the ice storm, the next snowfall will land on the frozen surface and be very unstable.’

He found himself impressed that his little girl even knew such things. He said, ‘How come you’re okay?’

She smiled. ‘I sheltered in the ice tunnel. I really thought it was going to collapse on me. Thankfully it didn’t.’

She turned her face to the west. ‘Sun’s going down. We’d better get off the mountain.’

Without gloves or hat, he felt himself growing colder as Addie helped him down to the foot of the corrie. He remembered that he had left his pack by the entrance to the ice tunnel. A favourite old pack, lost forever. But the keycard for Younger’s car was still safe in his pocket, as were his iCom glasses. He put icy fingers to his ears and felt that the iCom earbuds were still there too. A minor miracle.

As they headed west-south-west, down a steep gradient liberally strewn with boulders half-buried in the snow, they were presented with the most stunning of sunset views along the length of the loch below. Snowy peaks glowing pink, flanking a fjord that looked as if it was on fire. Without a word passing between them, they stopped to take it in. Deep, flowing currents and eddies in the waters of the loch burned orange through scarlet, and the last glimpse of the sun slid from view beyond the far mountaintops.

Although the sky was still blue, the first stars were appearing overhead and Brodie thought this is what he would miss the most. That, and knowing that the aching beauty of the country which had nurtured him would still be here long after he had gone. As if his short, unhappy existence in this world had made not one jot of difference. Which, of course, he knew it had not. Addie was his parting gift. The only piece of him that would remain. The only part of him that was any good.

He turned and saw the light of the dying day in her eyes and remembered that she too had a gift to leave the world. He said, ‘What’s he called? Your boy.’

And he watched the light in her eyes die too. Her jaw clenched. ‘That’s really none of your business.’

They walked the rest of the way in silence, skirting a deer fence before passing the now derelict and slightly sinister faux-Gothic Mamore Lodge, and down a path that led to a footbridge near the Grey Mare’s Tail.

When they got to the village, they stopped at the top of Kearan Road, lights twinkling in the houses around them, but not a soul stirring in the fading evening light. Brodie saw lights on, too, in the medical centre and wondered if Sita might still be there.

He turned to his daughter. ‘Thank you,’ he said, and meant it.

She inclined her head a little, without meeting his eye, but had nothing to say.

‘Well... see you, then.’

‘Unlikely,’ she said, and turned up the path to the door of the police station. Slabs of yellow light fell from several windows, extending across the snow that lay thickly in the garden. There was something warm and welcoming about it. A family. A home. A life. Something he hadn’t known for years. He turned wearily to cross the road to the medical centre.

The duty doctor there seemed surprised to see him. ‘Dr Roy left some hours ago with the body,’ he said. ‘Robbie drove them round to the hotel. I saw him coming back a little later.’ He frowned at the bruises and grazing on Brodie’s face. ‘Are you alright?’ he asked, and Brodie raised cold fingers to his face, realising that his battered features must reflect the ravages of his brush with death.

‘I’m okay,’ he said. ‘Had a bit of a fall up on the mountain.’

It felt like a long hike back round the road to the International, with heavy legs and a head that seemed likely to split itself open at any moment. Apart from a couple of coffees, he’d had nothing to eat all day. His stomach was growling and he felt almost faint from hunger.

As he walked up through the trees, he saw that there were no lights on in the hotel, its sprawling silhouette standing dark against a starry sky. It was all he could do to drag himself up the front steps and into the hall. He stood for a moment, letting his eyes accustom themselves to the dark, though there was almost no light here to see by, and he fumbled along the wall searching for switches. When eventually he found them, a bleak yellow light filled the hall. At least it was warm in here.

He pushed open the door to the Bothy Bar, but it was empty, brooding in darkness. He turned back into the hall and called out, ‘Hello? Anyone at home?’, only to receive a resounding silence in response.

Wearily he climbed the stairs to the bedrooms, thinking that perhaps Sita had gone for a lie-down, and irritated by the apparently perpetual absence of the hotel’s owner. He knocked on her door, and when there was no response, tried the handle. It opened into darkness. He found a switch and blinked in the sudden light. Her personal Storm case sat open on the bed, a handful of clothes laid out on the duvet. But there was no sign of her kit, just her torch lying on the bed next to her case. He breathed his annoyance into the empty room. Where the hell was she? And where was all her stuff? Maybe she and Robbie had already loaded her kit on to the eVTOL. He lifted the torch and headed back down the stairs.

He was halfway to the football field when he remembered that Eve was locked, and that he had the only key. But he decided to check on the aircraft anyway. From what he could see by the light of Sita’s torch, there were more fresh footprints in the snow, but it wasn’t clear whose they were or from which direction they had come.

The eVTOL sat squarely in the middle of the snowy playing field, where she had landed. And was locked, as he had expected. Brodie fished out his RFID card and opened the right-hand door. It was icy inside, and there was nothing of Sita’s in evidence. He decided to check the battery level.

‘Eve, what is your current state of charge?’

Eve remained stubbornly mute.

‘Eve?’

Nothing. Brodie frowned and slipped back out into the snow, closing the door behind him. He crossed to the pavilion to check that the eVTOL was still plugged in. It was, but there were no green lights flashing now on the reader attached to the plug unit. He glanced around. Through the trees, he could see that street lights were still burning in the village, lights twinkling in the windows of dozens of homes huddled around the head of the loch. So there was no power cut.

It was only as he made his way back to the eVTOL that he noticed another sets of prints in the snow. They came from the pavilion, stopping halfway, then turned to make the return trip. There was quite a mess in the snow where they had made that turn. Brodie crouched to shine the light of his torch on the disturbance, and saw that the charging cable had been neatly severed.