A Winter Grave

Chapter Twenty-Two

Lights blazed in most of the windows of the police house, shining into the gloom of the dwindling afternoon. Brodie had not seen a soul on his trudge round to the village from the hotel, apart from the occasional vehicle passing on the road. Where cars had travelled and people had walked, wet snow had turned to ice in the plummeting temperatures, and was treacherous underfoot.

He pushed open the gate and walked up to the door of the annexe with a sense of trepidation. If Addie was determined not to listen, then how could he tell her anything? And certainly not in the presence of her husband or her son. He closed his eyes and drew a deep breath. There were other things that took precedence. He needed to focus.

He opened the door into the warmth of the little police office and saw that it was empty. The computer screen was illuminated by a screen saver, and an anglepoise lay a circle of light on the desk. He closed the door behind him, shutting out the howl of the wind, and immediately heard raised voices coming from the house.

A man’s voice, which must have been Robbie’s. And Addie. Shrill and accusatory. He couldn’t make out what they were saying, or anything that might provide a clue to the cause of the argument. The plaintive wailing of young Cameron, distressed by the raising of his parents’ voices, made it difficult to hear them clearly.

He stood for a little while, wondering what to do, before opening the door to the house and calling, ‘Hello?’ The voices of the adults immediately subsided, but Cameron’s wailing provided the continuity of the argument in its aftermath. After a furious exchange of stage whispers, Robbie emerged into the darkness of the hall from a lit room behind him, and hurried through to the police station. He was flushed with embarrassment as he came in, quickly closing the door behind him. And the sound of Addie comforting her son was reduced to a distant murmur.

‘Sorry, Mr Brodie,’ Robbie said, attempting a smile that didn’t quite come off. ‘Domestic bliss.’ And he could only have been too acutely aware of the irony in his addressing this to the father of the woman he’d been fighting with.

Brodie said, ‘Tell me about it.’ Then, ‘I want to have a look at that CCTV footage.’

‘Oh, yeah, of course.’ Robbie rounded the counter and sat down at the computer. A swipe of his mouse banished the screen saver, and he accessed the hard drive to search for the archive footage.

Brodie came around to stand behind him. He said, ‘I have a meeting tonight with a guy from Ballachulish A who seems to have been some kind of contact of Younger’s.’

Robbie swivelled round in his seat. ‘A contact?’

Brodie shrugged. ‘Brannan seems to think the guy might have been a whistle-blower of some sort.’

Robbie looked nonplussed. ‘Blowing the whistle on what?’

‘Hopefully that’s what I’ll find out tonight.’ He paused. ‘But it might explain why Younger had a Geiger counter in his car.’

‘Yeah, Addie told me you’d found the car. How the hell did it get down there?’

‘Someone shunted it over the edge. The whole thing was captured on video by the car’s sentry mode.’

Robbie raised hopeful eyebrows. ‘So you saw who did it, then?’

Brodie shook his head. ‘He was wearing a mask when he first examined the vehicle. He came back with an SUV or a pickup truck to push it down into the gully, but by then it was too dark to really see much.’

‘Fuck!’ Robbie said. And was immediately self-conscious. ‘Sorry, sir.’

Brodie managed half a smile. ‘I think I’ve heard grown men swear before, Robbie.’ He nodded towards the screen. ‘What have we got here?’

Robbie turned back to the computer. ‘It’s only about thirty seconds or so.’ He brought the video up on-screen and hit the play arrow. The image flickered, then cleared to reveal Younger in full 6K detail standing in the street, somewhere near the Co-op, talking to another man. It was a bright summer’s day and the light was good. The conversation was animated, and ended with a laugh and a wave before each man exited the frame in different directions.

‘And you’ve no idea who the other man is?’

Robbie shook his head. ‘Never set eyes on him before.’

One thing was clear to Brodie: if Brannan’s description was to be trusted, it wasn’t Jackson. This man was shorter than Younger and had a full head of light brown hair. Younger himself looked almost grey, his complexion pasty and pale. And although he joined the other man in perfunctory laughter, it was clearly forced. He looked to Brodie like a man with a lot on his mind.

It occurred to him that they might send the video to a lip-reader to learn what they had been talking about, but that thought was quickly superseded by another. He said, ‘Play it again when I tell you,’ and slipped on his iCom glasses.

Robbie looked at him curiously. ‘What’s this, new tech?’

Brodie nodded. ‘Play it,’ he said. Then, ‘iCom, scan the video.’ And he focused on the computer screen, ignoring the green heads-up display that his glasses scrolled across his vision. Until thirty seconds later, when it red-flagged the video as fake.

This time Robbie watched him, rather than the screen. ‘What does it tell you?’

‘That this video is not genuine.’

Robbie scowled. ‘Well, I don’t see how that’s possible. It’s what was recorded by the CCTV camera.’

Brodie ignored him and said, ‘iCom, connect to the local server and upload the video.’

iCom told him in his earbuds that it was searching, then uploading. It took less than a minute.

This time Brodie instructed it to strip back the AI neural generator to reveal the original scan carried out by the discriminator. The process was almost instantaneous, and the video reran itself, visible only to Brodie in his glasses. ‘Jesus!’ The oath escaped his lips in a whisper.

‘What is it?’ Robbie was searching the reflections in Brodie’s glasses as if he might be able to catch sight of the video in them.

‘I’ll show you.’ And Brodie instructed his iCom to download the stripped-back video to the computer.

The file appeared on Robbie’s screen and he clicked to play it. The video seemed unchanged, except that Younger was no longer talking to a man with a full head of light brown hair. He was in animated conversation with the man who that morning had repaired the charging cable of the eVTOL on the football field. Calum McLeish.

Robbie sat in stunned silence. His whispered oath was barely audible above the sound of the wind outside. ‘Fuck!’ He turned towards Brodie. ‘I don’t understand, sir. How is that even possible?’

Brodie said, ‘Advanced GAN software. Makes it easy to substitute one face for another. It’s probably not even a real person. More likely an artificially generated face.

Robbie was bewildered. ‘But who the hell could have done that?’

Brodie said, ‘Did McLeish ever have access to this video?’

‘No.’ Then he paused. ‘Although he does have access to the system. He has a contract with Police Scotland to service the CCTV in the village. Cameras and computer. So I suppose he could have.’

Brodie was remembering the dark blue pickup truck that McLeish was driving when he came to the hotel. He said, ‘Tell me where he lives. I think it’s time Mr McLeish and I had a wee conversation.’

Brodie had covered about two hundred yards, heading south on Riverside Road, parka zipped up to the neck, hood yanked on over his baseball cap. He could hear nothing for the roar of the wind in his ears, and was startled when Addie fell into step beside him. He stopped in his tracks and turned to take in the troubled set of her pale face. She had obviously pulled on her ski jacket in a hurry, and hadn’t even zipped it up. Her hair blew wildly around her head in the wind.

‘I’m sorry you had to hear that,’ she said, raising her voice to make it heard above the wind. ‘I don’t know how much of it you actually made out, but—’

‘Darling, I heard nothing but raised voices. Husbands and wives fight. It sounded pretty heated, but I’ve no idea what you were arguing about.’

She seemed almost relieved.

‘But if I were to guess,’ he added, ‘I’d think it might have had something to do with what you said earlier today.’

She frowned. ‘What? What did I say?’

‘Something about another addictive personality?’

Her mouth gaped slightly. ‘If you didn’t hear what we were arguing about, how could you possibly know that?’

He sighed. ‘Many years as a student of the human condition.’ He hesitated. ‘It’s not drink, is it?’ The idea of history repeating itself in that way would have struck just too close to home.

She shook her head and averted her eyes. ‘He’s a gambler.’

Brodie’s heart sank. He’d seen only too often over the years how a gambling addiction could destroy a life, wreck a marriage. He took her by the shoulders. ‘He doesn’t... he’s not violent, is he?’

‘No. No, never. Robbie’s not like that.’

Brodie sighed his relief into the wind. That would have been one irony too many.

‘He’s just... well, hopelessly addicted. He’s put almost everything in hock to feed his habit. Online. Always online. It’s so fucking easy. I think they rig it. A small win here, a small win there, just to keep you at it. Then they suck you dry.’ She paused to catch her breath. ‘It’s been a nightmare for me and Robbie. He’s totally out of hand. We’re overdue on most of our bills. If the house didn’t come with the job, he’d have mortgaged that, too, just so he could feed the habit.’

‘You know there’s counselling available.’

She shook her head despondently. ‘You can’t get help until you admit there’s a problem. I’ve tried, Dad, believe me. But he won’t listen. Refuses to accept that he has an addiction. At least, not to me. But he must know it in himself. I think he’s desperate.’

She almost staggered as the wind gusted upriver from the loch, and he drew her into the lee of a building.

And now it all came pouring out of her. Everything that she must have been bottling up for weeks and months. With no one to tell. Too humiliating, perhaps, to admit to friends. Maybe even more humiliating to admit to the father she hadn’t spoken to in ten years. And yet, here she was baring her soul. Seeing him, maybe, as the last and only hope of salvation.

She said, ‘I’ve done a lot of online research, looking for answers. But it all seems pretty hopeless. Ever since the British government legalised online betting with their Gambling Act in 2005, it’s just got out of control. Yeah, sure, it’s raised billions in taxes over the years, and earned billions more for the gambling industry itself. But it’s created millions of addicts. Annual suicide rates run to hundreds. That’s thousands of people who’ve killed themselves since then, just so the treasury can raise money in easy taxation. Legislation introduced by self-professed Christians.’ She paused and almost spat her contempt into the wind. ‘Fuckers! And what’s the phrase they use in all that TV advertising? Remember to gamble responsibly. Fuck! Dad! That’s like telling an alcoholic to drink responsibly. Fucking, fucking hypocrites.’ And the tears came bubbling out of her eyes as he drew her into his arms and held her close. He could feel the sobs juddering through her body, and he remembered holding a sobbing Mel in his arms, too.

They stood for a long time holding each other, buffeted by the wind, her tears soaking into his North Face, until finally she drew away and looked at him with desperation in her eyes. ‘It’s not really Robbie’s fault. He’s a victim. It’s an illness.’ And then came the hesitation. But it didn’t last long. ‘Will you speak to him?’

Brodie felt himself almost physically withdrawing. He’d have done anything to help her. But a third party intervening between husband and wife never, in his experience, turned out well. ‘It’s not my place, darling,’ he said. And saw her face harden.

‘You’re a senior officer.’

‘I have no jurisdiction over Robbie.’

‘Then as the father of his wife.’ And that came like a blow to his solar plexus.

‘Addie...’ He didn’t have to give voice to his doubts. It was in his eyes, his whole body language.

She took a step away, gazing at him with all the hatred he remembered from way back. Hostility filled her eyes along with the tears and humiliation. She didn’t even wait for him to reason with her. ‘Well, fuck you, then.’

She turned and strode off, back along Riverside Road, her hair and her open jacket billowing out behind her. He had let her down. Again. He sighed deeply and screwed up his eyes, knowing, too, that any intervention by him, professionally or personally, was not going to fix the problem. Would almost certainly make it worse. And yet hers had been a heartfelt cry for help. How could he refuse her? He opened his eyes, lifting them to the heavens, and knew that somehow he was going to have to speak to Robbie.