A Winter Grave

Chapter Twenty

Addie climbed now in silence, her face as white as the snow in which she left traces, just a little colour rising in patches high on her cheeks. She had listened to her father in silence as they stood on the incline beneath the pines, before turning without comment to continue the climb towards the old military road somewhere up ahead.

Brodie felt hollowed out, as if letting go of everything he had kept to himself all this time had left a gaping hole inside him. Nothing rushed in to fill the void. Not even regret. And he wondered how something as full of nothing as emptiness could weigh so heavily.

Wearily he started off after her and they climbed in silence for another fifteen minutes or more, before emerging finally from the trees and on to the unbroken snow-covered military road that cut its way around the side of the hill. It was exposed here, and they could see all the way back down into the valley. The mountains that rose steeply from the banks of the loch pierced a troubled sky, and the clouds which had earlier obscured them seemed anxious now to pass them by, blown east on the first breath of the coming storm. Brodie felt it, too, in his face. Like an icy hand brushing cold flesh.

‘Not far now.’

He heard Addie’s voice, and turned to see her striding off along the road towards the corrie they had passed through yesterday on their way down from Binnein Mòr. He hadn’t known what to expect from her. Some reaction, at least. Not just silence. It was as if his words had run off her like water on wax. He had no idea whether she was in denial, or simply processing. But her lack of response left him feeling, if anything, emptier than before.

They walked for a good ten minutes in further silence, Brodie trailing twenty yards behind. Until they reached an area of unbroken snow that lay to their right. A turning or passing area, perhaps, on this single-track road. She stopped and waited for him to catch up.

‘This would be the last place he could leave his car without blocking the road,’ she said.

Looking ahead, Brodie could see the road meandering up the hill towards a hairpin that turned across the Allt Coire na Bà, or one of the streams that fed it. Beyond this open area on the right, the tree-covered hillside fell away steeply, and they could hear the sound of running water from far below. Wet snow creaked under his feet as he crossed towards the drop, and a couple of startled ptarmigan with their pure white mass of winter plumage clattered noisily away into the forest.

Addie joined him on the edge as he gazed down into the trees that sparsely covered the top part of the slope. ‘If he had left it here, they’d have found it very quickly,’ she said.

He held out a hand towards her. ‘Help me down.’

She took it almost without thinking, and braced as he stepped cautiously down on to the slope, to drop her hand and wrap an arm around a gnarled pine to stop himself slithering off towards the stream.

‘What are you doing?’ she called after him as he slid then from one tree trunk to the next.

‘Looking for Younger’s car,’ he called back.

He stopped, crouching down beside the nearest trunk, and ran a hand lightly over the bark near where the roots had spread themselves out to gain a foothold on the hillside. He turned his face back up the slope towards her.

‘White paint,’ he shouted, and heard his voice echo around the ravine below. He stood up, supporting himself against the trunk, and peered off into the gloom. ‘Looks like someone might have driven it, or pushed it off down here.’ He sat down abruptly in the snow, and braced and bent his legs in turn to lower himself down the incline on his backside.

The noise of running water grew louder as he neared the foot of the drop, and he saw the hulk of a white vehicle, half-buried in snow. Its nose was sunk into the bed of the stream, breaking the flow of water and sending it in white spate around either side of it.

He turned, hearing Addie arrive behind him. She had negotiated the slope much more quickly than he, and stood breathing hard, supporting herself against the nearest trunk. She gazed in wonder at Younger’s car, lying as it was at a crazy angle, its rear wheels and axle completely clear of the ground and backfilled by the snow drifting up around it.

Brodie said, ‘No one was ever likely to find it down here, even in August. And now it’s perfectly camouflaged by the snow.’ He moved down to place one foot in the stream. ‘Give me a hand to clear the snow away and we’ll see if we can get into it.’

They worked slowly, careful not to dislodge the vehicle from its final resting place in case it fell on them. Finally, Brodie was satisfied that the door would open clear of the snow. He unzipped the breast pocket of his North Face and took out the keycard he had chipped free from the ice on the mountain.

Addie said, ‘Surely there won’t be any charge left in the battery?’

‘Enough, hopefully, to read the card,’ he said. ‘If not, we’ll have to smash the window.’ He laid the card against the sensor in the column between the front and back doors, and heard an audible click above the rush of water. He tried the handle and the door swung open, suddenly, almost knocking him off his feet. He recovered himself quickly to scramble away in case the car dislodged itself. But it didn’t move. He breathed a sigh of relief. ‘It must be wedged solid.’

He pulled himself up with one hand on the roof, and swung himself into the driver’s seat, tipped forward against the steering wheel. Addie slithered down to peer in beside him. It was ice-cold and dark inside. But there was enough light to see that a jacket tossed carelessly into the back seat had fallen on to the floor. The mats in the front were littered with chewing gum wrappers. A green scent diffuser in the shape of a Christmas tree dangled at an odd angle from the rear-view mirror, but it had long since lost its perfume. Strangely, there was a very human smell in the car. The faint fragrance of body odour and aftershave. The last traces that Charles Younger had left on this earth.

Brodie tried the glovebox, but it was locked electronically, and he thought there probably wasn’t enough charge left in the car to boot up its computer to open it.

‘Here.’ Addie handed him a large hunting knife that she took from her daypack. The look he gave her brought a smile to her face. ‘I should have been in the Boy Scouts,’ she said.

But he couldn’t find a smile in return. He took her knife, unsheathed it, and forced open the glove compartment with a splintering of moulded fibre. Inside were maps, and some notebooks with pages of scribbled shorthand. Brodie flipped through a few, but the strange markings made no sense to him. Then, beneath the car’s leather-bound instruction manual, he found something that looked like the kind of mobile phone that people had used around the turn of the century. Chunky, yellow, and with a grey liquid-crystal display screen. He took off his gloves to examine it, turning it this way and that. ‘What the hell?’ He turned towards his daughter. ‘Any idea what it is?’

She nodded. ‘It’s a Geiger counter.’

He frowned. ‘For measuring radioactivity?’

‘Yes.’ She paused. ‘Dad, what would he want with a Geiger counter?’

The fact that once again she had called him Dad without thinking stilled his heart and he couldn’t meet her eye. But his only response was to shrug. ‘No idea, Addie.’

He unvelcroed his parka to access an inside pocket, and zipped the Geiger counter and the notebooks safely away, then heaved himself out.

‘Let’s try the boot.’

It took some minutes to force the lock, and when finally they lifted the lid, they found only a spare wheel and a bag of tools.

Brodie said, ‘There’s probably storage space under the bonnet. But we’ll not get access to that until we can get this thing winched out of here.’ He sat down in the snow and rubbed his face, breathing frustration into his hands.

Addie squatted beside him. ‘So what does any of this tell you?’

‘It tells me that whoever killed him up on the mountain came down to get rid of his car before anyone spotted it.’

‘But how? I mean, he didn’t have a key, because that was still up there in the ice. And if the car was in park, then he couldn’t have pushed it over.’

Brodie stood up suddenly. ‘I wonder if Younger left it in sentry mode.’

‘What’s that?’

‘Some cars have got a security system, Addie, that uses the self-drive cameras. There’s usually about eight of them around the vehicle. If you leave them on sentry mode, they’ll record anyone or anything that moves around it.’

‘And there’ll still be a record of that?’

‘Let’s find out.’ He swung himself back into the car and leaned across the passenger seat so that he could reach into the back of the glovebox. Using his fingers as eyes, he felt around until they settled on a raised area at the left rear corner. With finger and thumb, he grasped the hard edge and tugged it free. He brought out his hand and held the object he had removed up to the light.

‘What is it?’ Addie peered through the gloom.

‘An SD card. If Younger’s car had sentry mode, and it was activated, whoever shoved it over the edge should be caught on video. And it’ll be on this card.’ It was a long shot, and he wouldn’t know if there was anything on it until he got back to the hotel to slot it into his laptop, but it was time he had a break. Nothing else had gone to plan so far. He secured the card in another pocket and said, ‘Let’s get out of here.’

It was harder getting out of the gully than it had been getting in, and it was nearly ten minutes before they were standing in the parking area off the old military road, breathing heavily and perspiring in the cold air. The wind was getting up now, and Brodie felt it filling his mouth as he fought to recover his breath.

‘We’d better get back to the village,’ he said, and they started off back along the road until reaching the point where they had climbed up to it from below. Overhead, the clouds had morphed from ominous to threatening, and you could smell the coming storm on the leading edge of the wind.

It wasn’t until they had climbed down through the trees to where the ground levelled off and the going got easier, that Addie formed words to express the thoughts that had been eating away at her all this time.

‘So it was Mum who had the affair. Not you.’ She wasn’t asking, so he assumed that she had been processing it and was voicing it now as a statement of fact.

‘Yes.’

‘And that’s what you wanted to tell me? That’s what was so important that you deceived your bosses to get yourself sent up here?’

Brodie drew a deep breath. ‘It’s important enough, Addie. But it’s still not the whole story.’

She looked at him. ‘I didn’t think it could be. Mum didn’t kill herself just because she’d had an affair, did she?’

He shook his head. ‘No.’

‘So, are you going to tell me?’

‘I will, Addie.’ He hesitated. ‘But there are things I need to do first. I need more time with you than we have right now.’

‘Time for what?’

‘To explain.’

‘How you drove Mum to suicide, you mean?’

He glanced at her, expecting to see the hatred she’d harboured for him all this time still reflected in her face. But her expression was blank. Eyes cold, emotionless, and assiduously avoiding his.

‘Yes,’ he said.

They stood there for a long time listening to the wind, and Brodie thought how his story was just like that wind. Cold and unforgiving, and gone in the blink of an eye. Like his life. They walked then the rest of the way in silence until they reached the Grey Mare’s car park. And stopped at the parting of the ways.

‘So,’ she said. ‘What now?’

‘I need to get to my laptop to see what, if anything, there is on this card. And if the phone or internet is back up, then I need to check in with HQ in Glasgow. We need a team up here. There’s two people dead and a killer still on the loose.’ He closed his eyes as he felt the pressure of it all weighing down on him. ‘I’ll have to come back to the police station sometime this afternoon. I need to take a look at that CCTV footage of Younger and the unidentified individual he was talking to in the village the day he disappeared.’ He paused. ‘Maybe we could talk then.’

‘I’m not sure I want to hear what it is you have to say. Whatever it is, maybe it’s better if it dies with you.’

She turned abruptly and walked away in the direction of the police station.