A Winter Grave

Chapter Thirteen

An icy wind advanced up the loch now, leading a legion of thick black clouds to scrape mountaintops and banish what little light had earlier been offered by the stars. Brodie’s parka was zipped up to his throat, its hood pulled around his head, hands thrust deep in his pockets for warmth as he stumbled back around the road to the village.

The cutting of the cable feeding power to the eVTOL was no random act of vandalism. More like a deliberate attempt to stop them from leaving. And he had a dark sense of foreboding about Sita. If she wasn’t at the hotel, where was she?

Every muscle in his body was stiffening up from the cold, and from the pummelling he had taken in the avalanche. His eyes felt gritty, his mouth dry, and he could barely swallow.

He hesitated for a long time at the garden gate of the police station. The same warm light as earlier spilled from the same windows. On the walk round, he had tried, unsuccessfully, to make a call to police HQ in Glasgow, but his iCom had been unresponsive, and he was starting to think that it had been damaged in the violence of the avalanche after all. There was nowhere else he could go for help.

The gate creaked as he pushed it open and walked up to the annexe adjoining the house. A blue police sign above the door glowed in the dark. A notice on the door itself read Knock and Enter. He did as instructed and the door opened into the warm light of a tiny police office with a public counter and a small waiting area that boasted a couple of scuffed plastic chairs. Robbie sat in a pool of light from an angled desk lamp at a desk on the other side of the counter. A computer screen reflected blue on his face. The clack of his fingers on the keyboard filled the tiny space. He turned, surprised, as the door opened, and the beginnings of a smile vanished quickly, to be replaced by concern. ‘What the hell happened to your face? Sir.’ The sir came almost as an afterthought.

‘Didn’t Addie tell you?’

He frowned. ‘I haven’t had a chance to speak to her since she got back. What happened?’

‘We got caught in an avalanche.’

‘Jesus!’ He stood up. ‘Is she alright?’

‘She’s fine. It was me that took the brunt of it.’

Robbie ran a hand back through thick, dark hair. ‘I’m sorry I wasn’t around when you got back. You probably know already, but all the comms are down. Mobile phones, the police 15G network, the internet. I’ve been talking to Ballachulish A on short-wave. Old technology, I know, but still good in an emergency. They figure last night’s power cut sent a surge down the line that blew the transmitters and the telephone exchange. It’s happened before. They’ll have sent teams out to get them online again, but who knows how long that’ll take.’ He pulled a face. ‘And there’s more snow forecast.’ He paused. ‘You find anything up there?’

Brodie fumbled in his breast pocket to retrieve the black RFID card and held it up.

Robbie squinted at it. ‘What is it?’

‘Younger’s car key, I figure.’

Robbie was puzzled. ‘What car? Brannan didn’t think he had one, and there certainly wasn’t one in the car park.’

‘Then how did he get here?’

Robbie shrugged and made a face. ‘There is a bus.’ But he didn’t sound convinced.

Brodie shook his head. ‘We can talk about it later. Right now I’m more concerned about Sita.’

A frown furrowed Robbie’s brows. ‘What about her?’

‘I can’t find her.’

Robbie advanced to the counter and placed his hands flat on top of it. ‘Isn’t she at the hotel?’

‘No, she’s not. Her personal stuff’s in her room, but there’s no sign of the Storm trunk with her kit and all her samples.’

Robbie extended his hands to either side, perplexed. ‘I dropped her off at the hotel this afternoon, along with her kit and everything else. We put Younger in his body bag back in the cold cabinet until you were ready to leave.’

Brodie said, ‘Was Brannan there when you dropped her off?’

‘No, he wasn’t. Why?’

‘He hasn’t been around all day. And wherever he went, he’s still not back.’

Robbie scratched his head. ‘Well, he can’t have gone far. The road at Glencoe was impassable this morning — though I guess the snow ploughs will have cleared it by now. They’ve got to keep access to the nuclear plant open at all times.’

Brodie pushed back his hood and opened up his parka at the neck. Now he was too warm, his fingers tingling as they transitioned from ice-cold to blood temperature. ‘Something else,’ he said. ‘Someone cut the cable between the eVTOL and the charging hub at the pavilion. Eve has zero charge.’

‘You’re kidding!’ Robbie’s face creased with incomprehension. ‘Why would anyone do that?’

‘To stop us leaving?’

‘But who? And why?’

Brodie shrugged. ‘Younger’s killer, perhaps. Maybe something he thought Sita would find during the PM. Or maybe he was afraid of something I might discover up on the mountain.’ He sighed. ‘To be honest, I have no fucking idea.’

Robbie laughed. ‘You know what? It was probably some kid who thought it would be a laugh. I know, misplaced sense of humour. But you know what kids are like. And Dr Roy probably walked into the village to get something to eat. There’s a couple of pubs that serve food. If Brannan’s been gone all day, she wouldn’t have got anything at the hotel.’

He snatched his parka and cap from a coat stand and rounded the counter. ‘Listen, I know a guy who can repair or replace your cable first thing tomorrow. But right now, let’s go and find Dr Roy. If she’s not back at the hotel, we’ll do a round of the pubs.’

Brodie felt strangely comforted by the fact that Robbie was taking charge, even though he was very much the junior officer. Brodie was fatigued to the point of exhaustion, and probably not thinking straight. Robbie’s suggested explanations for the severed cable and the missing pathologist seemed reasonable, and Brodie was suffused with a welcome sense of relief.

Robbie was reaching for the door handle to go out when the door from the house swung open, and the smell of cooking wafted in. A young boy stood framed in the doorway, a look of consternation writ large all over his face. ‘Dad, why can I not get my PlayStation to work?’

‘Because the internet’s still off, son. Nothing I can do about that.’

But the boy had already lost interest in his non-functioning PlayStation, distracted by the stranger standing by the door with his father. He stared at Brodie with unabashed curiosity. ‘Who’s this?’

‘A police officer from Glasgow, Cameron. Mr Brodie. He’s here to help your dad sort out a few problems.’

Brodie was stunned. The skin prickled all over his scalp. The boy had Mel’s elfin face, her eyes and nose and mouth. And it was Mel’s straight, silky, mouse-brown hair that fell carelessly over his forehead. He had, it seemed, nothing of his grandfather about him, except his name. And that was a shock. Brodie flicked an awkward glance at the boy’s father. ‘Cameron?’

Robbie seemed embarrassed. ‘His mother’s choice.’

‘What problems?’ Cameron said.

‘Police problems,’ Robbie told him.

‘You mean the body Mum found on the hill?’

Robbie was apologetic. He half smiled at the man he now had to reconsider as his father-in-law. ‘Village life. Can’t keep secrets in a place this size.’

Addie appeared slowly out of the gloom in the hallway behind the boy and slid protective hands over his shoulders, pulling him against her legs. Her eyes were fixed on her father. The silence between them lasted no more than a second or two, but felt like a lifetime to Brodie. He said, ‘You called him Cameron.’

And the colour rose almost imperceptibly on her cheeks. ‘I always liked the name.’

Brodie attempted a smile. ‘It means “crooked nose”, apparently. From the Gaelic. Doesn’t apply to this handsome lad, though.’

‘He gets his good looks from his grandmother.’

Cameron lifted his face towards his mother in surprise. ‘I have a granny? Where is she?’

Addie took a moment to compose herself. ‘She’s in heaven, Cam.’

‘And a grampa?’

Addie’s eyes never left Brodie’s. ‘Yes.’

‘Where is he?’

‘The other place,’ she said.

Robbie intervened to break the moment by opening the outside door to let in a gust of ice-cold air and a scattering of snowflakes. ‘We’d better be going,’ he said. And to Addie, ‘I shouldn’t be too long.’

Cameron still had fascinated eyes fixed on the man he didn’t know was his grandfather. ‘What happened to your face?’

Brodie raised self-conscious fingers to his cheek. ‘I had a fall.’

‘Will you be eating with us tonight?’

Brodie lifted his eyes to meet Addie’s. ‘I doubt if there’ll be time for that, Cameron.’ Almost willing her to contradict him.

‘No,’ Addie said. ‘There won’t.’

By the time they were on the road back round to the International, the snow had begun to fall in earnest, flying into Robbie’s headlights like warp speed in an old Star Trek movie. It was wet snow, slapping against the windscreen and gathering in drifts where it was swept aside by the wipers.

Tyre tracks in the hotel drive from earlier in the day had been reduced to mere impressions by the newly falling snow, so Brannan had not yet returned. The only light spilling into the dark came from the hallway beyond the front door. Lights that Brodie had turned on himself just half an hour earlier.

He saw that there were no fresh footprints on the stairs as they climbed them. In the hall, Robbie called out, ‘Dr Roy? Hello, Dr Roy? You back?’ He opened the door to the bar, then looked into the dining room, turning on lights as he went. And Brodie remembered Sita’s words when they first arrived — was it really only twenty-four hours ago? — I feel like I’ve just walked on to the set of The Shining.

Everything about the place felt just very slightly off. Nothing that Brodie could put his finger on. The brightness of the lights. The smell of damp that lingered on warm air. The worn tartan of the carpet. The flock wallpaper on the stairs. The invasive silence. And perhaps, above all, Brannan himself. His very absence lending him an odd presence. Brodie said, ‘She’s not here.’

Robbie was scowling. ‘I’ll check her room.’ And he took the stairs to the first floor two at a time. Brodie stood impotently in the hall, melting snow dripping on the carpet. His earlier foreboding had returned. He looked up when Robbie came down again, but the young constable just shook his head. ‘I see her stuff still on the bed,’ he said. ‘We left the big trunk in the room off the kitchen, next to the chill cabinet. Let’s just make sure it’s still there.’

Brodie followed him into the kitchen. Shadows lurked among the pots and pans dangling above the stainless steel where just that morning they had laid Charles Younger out in a black body bag. Robbie found the light switch, but the disquiet that simmered in the dark was not dispelled by the sudden light reflecting back at them from every shining surface. He pushed open the door into the anteroom and stopped in the door frame, his shadow thrown across the floor and the far wall by the light behind him. ‘Jesus.’ Brodie barely heard his whispered oath. ‘It’s not here.’

He reached for a light switch and they both screwed up their eyes against the glare of it.

‘We left her case right there next to the cold cabinet. She put her samples in a bag next to the body to keep them cool.’ He lifted the misted glass top, and both men found themselves caught in the sightless stare of Sita’s dark, dead eyes gazing up at them from the ice-cold interior of the cake cabinet.