A Winter Grave

Chapter Twenty-Three

McLeish’s house backed on to the community fire station, a bungalow with a double garage attached. The footpath from the gate had been meticulously cleared of snow, and Brodie crunched over granite chippings to the front door. To the right of it, a light shone out from the living room window into the gathering darkness of the late afternoon. He was about to knock when he noticed that there was also light spilling from the open doors of the double garage off to the left, and he walked around the front of the house to look inside.

An old petrol-engined Porsche, a classic car from the 1970s or eighties, lay in pieces on the floor, the body of it jacked up for access underneath. A scarred wooden bench that ran along the back of the garage was strewn with tools and cans of oil and dirty rags. The wall behind it was hung with power tools and cables and saws. To the left of the Porsche lay the vacant space where McLeish clearly parked his pickup, a charging point and cable fixed to the wall next to it. It was conspicuous by its absence.

Brodie stepped over an open toolbox, careful not to stand on contents which were scattered across the floor — spanners, screwdrivers, wrenches. He walked to the bench at the rear of the garage. His eye had been drawn by the brown and tan of a pair of well-worn work gloves lying next to the vice. The fingers of each glove were curled in towards the palm, almost as if there were still hands in them trying to grasp something unseen. He lifted up the right-hand glove and read the maker’s name on the back of it. M-Pact Mechanix. And there were the four slashes in the finger reinforcements at each knuckle joint to allow for flexing. Forming the same pattern that Sita had found imprinted on Younger’s face by his attacker.

‘Can I help you?’ The woman’s voice was sharp but wary, and startled him.

He turned to find a middle-aged woman in jeans and sweatshirt standing in the frame of the open garage door. Once dark hair was streaked with grey and drawn back into a knot behind her head. He put her somewhere in her middle fifties.

He lay the glove back on the bench. ‘I was looking for Calum McLeish.’

She eyed him suspiciously. ‘And what exactly is it you would be wanting with him?’

Brodie stepped towards her. ‘I’m sorry. Mrs McLeish, is it?’

‘It is.’

He fumbled for his warrant card in an inside pocket and held it towards her. ‘Detective Inspector Brodie. Your husband helped me out with the repair of a charging cable earlier today.’

She seemed relieved. ‘Oh. Yes. He told me. He’s gone up to the hydro plant, Mr Brodie. He’s got some more tools in his workshop up there. Something he needs to put this mess back together.’ She waved a hand towards the deconstructed Porsche. ‘He wanted to get there and back again before the storm broke.’

Brodie walked back up to Lochaber Road and crossed the bridge over the Leven to the south side of the village. Most of the services were on this side of the river. The post office, the Co-op, the boat club, several hotels and guest houses, the local housing authority. But nobody was venturing out into the coming storm. Brodie reckoned most folk would be cooried down at home, bracing themselves for Idriss. It was only fools like him who were out and about at a time like this.

He turned left on to one of the many old military roads that circled the village, past the National Ice Climbing Centre in the remains of the former smelting plant, a brewery, the Salvation Army church. On the bridge over the tailrace, he stopped and gazed up the three-hundred-metre length of it as it curved away towards the hydro plant. The rush of spent water was almost deafening as it made its way along this narrow canal from the turbines it had turned to generate power. Behind him the water turned white as it spewed into the River Leven. A good three metres beneath the bridge, it passed in spate, black-streaked and unforgiving, high stone walls rising on either side. Water that had been carried by gravity through pipes all the way down from the Blackwater dam in the hills above.

Brodie followed the tyre tracks in the road that ran alongside the tailrace, past an old stone-built hostel and a row of multicoloured lodges. Beyond the fence that topped the walls of the tailrace itself, unbroken snow lay across a large tract of land where the bulk of the aluminium factory once stood. On the hill above it, a dilapidated building of square white cubes, which at one time housed workers from the smelter, nestled in stark abandonment among the winter-bare trees. A brief incarnation as a military training centre had been cut short by the Scottish Government after independence. Empty and decaying, it stood now as a monument to a golden industrial age long since passed into history.

The hydro plant stood proud on the rise above the tailrace, tall windows in a long, narrow stone building rising up the gable end to the pitch of its slate roof. A large, bright blue roller door to the left of the windows allowed access for heavy machinery. It was shut. But a small door beneath the windows stood ajar, and light fell out from the glass above it to lie in elongated squares across the snow.

McLeish’s dark blue pickup was parked outside. Brodie walked carefully around the vehicle to see what he hadn’t noticed earlier in the day: the black-painted bull bars at the front of it. He crouched down, and in the light of the windows, saw that they were scraped and scuffed, with tiny streaks of white paint still ingrained in the front edges of the top and bottom bars.

He stood up with a grim sense of foreboding. Here was a man, he had no doubt now, who had killed twice. He had everything to gain and nothing to lose from killing again. Brodie approached the open door with caution. This was an emergency door that opened out, a push bar on the inside of it. He pulled it fully open and stepped into the plant. It stretched off into darkness, where three ten-megawatt generators powered by water from the dam produced as much noise as electricity. At the near, lit end, a pickup truck and Land Rover were parked on maroon tiles, and a green-painted walkway led past them towards a row of the original one- and two-megawatt generators, which had been preserved for posterity. Overhead, a large yellow crane that ran along steel beams set high on the walls hung silent.

To the right of the vehicles, lights shone in a Portakabin that Brodie assumed was an office or workshop. He leaned in through the open door. ‘Mr McLeish?’ His voice was greeted with silence. There was nobody here. He stepped out again on to the tiles and peered up into the darkness at the far end. McLeish had to be somewhere up there.

Now he raised his voice above the roar of the generators to call into the dark, ‘Mr McLeish!’ But even if he was there, Brodie realised, he wouldn’t hear him over the thunder of the machines, and Brodie began to make his way carefully along the length of the building. The old, redundant Pelton turbines seemed almost to mock him with their silence. Ahead, great blue pipes like giant worms emerged from the working generators to burrow down below the building and feed water away to the tailrace.

He had almost reached the far end when the lights went out. Brodie froze where he stood, enveloped by sudden and absolute darkness, before what little daylight remained outside seeped in through the rows of skylights overhead to bring dark form to the shapes around him. He spun around, sensing that there was someone there, someone he wouldn’t hear above the racket of the generators. But there was no one. Just the ghost of his own insecurity, insubstantial and lost in darkness. He started back towards the door, moving as quickly as he dared in the dark.

He felt more than saw the shadow of a man emerge from among the disused turbines, and turned to raise his arm just in time to stop a monkey wrench from splitting his skull. He felt pain, like red-hot needles, shoot up his left forearm and staggered backwards, crashing against some immutable piece of machinery that jarred through his entire body. His attacker came at him again, the monkey wrench raising sparks from the stone wall behind his head as he ducked to one side and it missed him by a hair. More in hope than expectation, he swung a fist into darkness and felt it connect with flesh and bone. He heard the man’s grunt of pain, and capitalised on the moment to lunge forward, his shoulder connecting with his attacker’s chest. The momentum carried them both backwards until they lost their footing and crashed to the floor.

Brodie heard the wrench clattering away across the tiles and went for the other man’s eyes, but found instead only the smooth merino wool of a ski mask. A knee in his diaphragm took all his breath away, and he rolled over, gasping and choking back the bile rising in his throat. He heard the other man scrambling away across the tiles in search of his wrench, and with a huge effort of will, Brodie got to his feet and started running. Back the way he had come, towards the open door.

But after just a few paces, he could hear his attacker right behind him, breath rasping above the rumble of the turbines. There was no way he could outrun him, and as he staggered through the door into the cold outside air, he turned to face him. For a moment, in the dying light of the day, he saw murder in the other man’s eyes. And this time it was his attacker who had the momentum. His shoulder powered into Brodie’s chest, and both men fell backwards, locked in mortal embrace.

They crashed hard against the fence, tipping sideways over it, to fall together between iron cross-beams into the thrashing waters of the tailrace as it powered its way out of the building. The cold hit him like a physical blow, and both he and his attacker immediately released their grip on each other.

Now it was the water that held him and had all the momentum. Brodie was powerless to resist it, smashed from side to side against one stone wall then the other, swallowing huge quantities of water, choking and gasping for air. The speed with which it carried him away towards the river was relentless. His instinct, as it had been when caught in the avalanche, was to try to swim, even though the feeble thrashing of his arms and legs was worse than useless against the powerful currents of the tailrace.

His forehead struck the wall, and his head filled with light. He had lost his man, and knew he was losing his fight against the water. But this was no way for his life to end, with so much left undone, so much left unsaid. And yet the attraction of just closing his eyes and letting the cold and the water carry him off was almost irresistible.

He saw the bridge where he had stood only minutes earlier flash by overhead, and now the water turned white as its path broadened through a drop in the tree-lined riverbank and swept him into the swollen, snow-melt turbulence of the River Leven as it surged towards the head of the loch.

Suddenly he felt the depth of the water beneath him, and the unforgiving nature of its power as it swept him irresistibly towards his death. Yet still he fought for life, without understanding why, thrashing through the water as if his ebbing strength was in any way a match for it. He was numb now. All pain vanquished. He felt swollen and weighed down by his clothes, and completely at the mercy of the currents and eddies that tossed him freely this way and that. Now the water sucked him under, and for a brief moment, he believed he had drawn his last breath, the angry roar of the river still thundering in his ears. And then he broke the surface, chest heaving as he tried to get air in his lungs, and saw that the course of the river had swept him towards the far bank, where the leafless branches of trees hung down almost to the water’s edge.

He lunged towards them, his right arm thrown out beyond his head, hand grasping fresh air in a desperate last bid to catch hold of something. Anything. And he felt the rough bark of a low-hanging bough shred his palm. He closed numbed fingers around it, unaware that he had actually caught it until his shoulder was very nearly yanked from its socket. Unable to stop his forward momentum, the branch dipped and bowed as it fought against the flow of the river, and threw him sideways to smash hard into the slope of the riverbank. He let go and clutched at clumps of grass and rock embedded in the embankment. He was out of the water and trying desperately not to slide back in. His legs were like lead weights as he tried to crawl further from the torrent snapping at his heels. Until finally he felt secure enough to roll on to his back and bark at the sky, lungs desperate to fill and refill and feed oxygen to his body. He pulled himself up on to one elbow and looked back across the river. There was no sign of the masked man. He was almost certainly gone, swept out into the loch.

Now Brodie started shivering. Uncontrollably, as his body tried to generate heat. But it was a losing battle, and he knew he would never make it back to the hotel. Almost centimetre by centimetre, he dragged himself up the bank, getting finally to his knees and crawling the last metre and a half up on to Lochaber Road.

Almost immediately he was blinded by the lights of a large vehicle coming off the bridge and heading towards him. He raised a feeble hand to shade his eyes and heard the hiss of brakes as the vehicle came to a stop. Then a man was crouching beside him, strong hands helping him to his feet. Above the howl of the wind, Brodie heard his voice: ‘For Christ’s sake, man, what the hell happened? You’re soaked to the skin. You’ll freeze to death out here.’

With an arm around his shoulder, he supported Brodie’s failing legs to help him towards the passenger side of the truck. And Brodie saw then that this was a snow plough.

The cab was toasty warm and Brodie felt himself propelled into the passenger seat, barely conscious. Then the driver was beside him on the other side, a big man with a cloth cap and silvered whiskers that caught the light of the courtesy lamp. ‘You need a doctor, man.’

But Brodie shook his head. Through chittering teeth that he could barely control, he told the driver that he only needed to get back to the International Hotel. It could be no more than a few hundred metres away.

The driver exhaled his exasperation. ‘You’re mad, fella. I’m going to the power plant at Ballachulish A. There’ll be snow later, and we’ll have to keep the road clear. But there’s a duty doctor there.’

The words fell from Brodie’s mouth like marbles from a jar. ‘Just... just to the h... hotel.’

The driver took his snow plough right up to the front door, pulling in behind Brannan’s SUV, and with chittered thanks, Brodie fell out into the snow. He was only vaguely aware of the plough reversing away as he staggered up the steps to the door and almost collapsed into the hall.

It was fully dark outside now, and the lights were on in the hotel. It was warm here, and Brodie stood for a minute, supporting himself with a hand on the wall, to try to catch his breath. ‘Brannan!’ His voice sounded inordinately feeble in the vast silence of the hotel. ‘For fuck’s sake, Brannan!’ Still nothing. So much for waiting in for a call. With a great effort, Brodie pushed himself away from the wall and staggered to the stairs, using the banisters to pull himself up one step at a time.

When he reached his room, he was spent, hardly able to prise himself out of his wet clothes with hopelessly trembling fingers. He made it naked to the bathroom, flesh turning almost blue, and very nearly fell into the shower. It seemed almost impossible for him to turn the taps, but eventually he managed to start a stream of hot water tumbling from the showerhead, and he slid down to sit in the shower tray and let it cascade over his head and shoulders.

He could not have said just how long he sat there in that stream of hot water, but very gradually the feeling returned to his body, and with it, pain. Aching pain that seemed to infuse every muscle, every joint. And he reflected on how extraordinary it was that the icy waters of the tailrace and the river had so nearly taken his life, while the hot water that rained on him now from the shower was restoring it.

Finally he found the strength to get back to his feet, and stepped out to towel himself briskly dry. He wiped the steam from the mirror, and the face that stared back at him was bruised and battered from his encounter with the walls of the tailrace. Everything was stiffening up now, and he knew he needed to keep moving. He staggered painfully back to the bedroom and changed into his only remaining dry clothes. Clothes inadequate to protect him from the weather that powered unremittingly up the loch towards the village. He heard the first hail crackling against the window, and saw his reflection in it bulge with the force of the wind. With fingers that felt like bananas, he pulled on a pair of shoes, and searched through his sodden North Face to retrieve the Geiger counter zipped into an inside pocket. He had no idea if it would still function, but he wanted to take it to his meeting with Jackson to ask if he knew why Younger would have had it in his car.

He picked up the iCom earbuds that he had discarded on the floor and wondered if they had survived their underwater ordeal. He worked them back into his ears and asked iCom to connect him with the duty controller at Pacific Quay. Nothing. Either they had succumbed to the waters of the tailrace or the batteries were out of juice. He found the protective case that contained his glasses and took out the charging cable. After connecting the parts, he set it charging on the dresser. A winking green light offered the hope that it might actually still be working, and he headed off downstairs in search of something to eat, and more importantly, something hot to drink. He needed to warm himself up from the inside, too.

In the kitchen he found a coffee maker and brewed a tall mug of piping hot coffee, sweetened with several teaspoons of sugar to try to restore some of his energy. In a frying pan he cracked open several eggs he found in the fridge, fried them in butter, and sat down at the table to wolf them down. Between the coffee and the eggs, he was starting to feel vaguely human again. And his thoughts returned to McLeish. That he had killed both Younger and Sita seemed undeniable now. Though Brodie had no idea why. And the fact that McLeish had almost certainly been swept out to his death in the loch meant that the only person left who could throw any light on it all was Jackson.

He checked his watch. At least it was still working. It was almost time to leave for his rendezvous with Younger’s contact. He stood up as the kitchen door swung open and a harassed-looking Brannan hurried in. ‘Where have you been, Mr Brodie?’ he began, before his voice tailed away and his eyes opened wide. ‘What happened to you?’

And Brodie realised he must look even worse than the vision which had greeted him in the mirror. He said, ‘Getting swimming lessons.’ And as consternation creased Brannan’s face, added, ‘More to the point, where the fuck have you been?’

‘Trying to find you.’

‘Why?’

‘She’s gone.’

‘Who’s gone?’

‘Dr Roy.’ He jabbed a finger towards the door to the anteroom. It stood ajar, revealing darkness beyond. ‘I locked that door after you’d gone this morning. Just to be safe, because I had to go into the village for some provisions. Then this afternoon, after you’d left again, I thought I’d just check.’ He paused breathlessly. ‘The door wasn’t locked. Someone had forced it. And... she was gone.’

Brodie pushed past him and into the anteroom, reaching for the light switch. The lid of the cold cabinet had been lifted, and leaned back against the wall. The cabinet was empty.

‘What do you think?’ Brannan said.

Brodie turned back towards him. ‘I think someone’s fucking with us.’ And he held out an open hand. ‘I’ve got to go. Give me your car key. And I’m going to need to borrow a waterproof jacket.’