A Winter Grave

Chapter Twenty-Five

Brodie left fresh tyre tracks in drifting snow as he drove up to the steps of the International Hotel and pulled up sharply. He jumped out and ran up to the front door.

‘Brannan!’ he yelled into the cold yellow light of the hallway. But as had so often been the case over these last two days, the owner of the International was nowhere to be found.

Brodie climbed the stairs as fast as his failing legs would carry him, and burst into his bedroom. The place was in disarray. His laptop gone, his half-dried clothes strewn about the floor. But whoever had searched the room and taken his computer had left his earbuds still charging on the dressing table. Careless. Someone in a panic. The green light that had been winking when Brodie left them was no longer in evidence. He lifted the buds and inserted one into each ear. The protective case for his glasses was lying on the floor. He breathed a sigh of relief to find the glasses still within, and he slipped them on, feeling the magnets lock into place.

He closed his eyes and prayed that it would all still work. He said, ‘iCom, record audio and video.’ And heard a voice in his ears. Now recording.

He sat down then, and stared hard into the lenses, and began his account of the evening’s events, replaying the nightmare memories in his mind as if he were watching them scroll across a screen. He tried to recall everything. McLeish’s gloves in the garage. The attack at the hydro plant, and falling into the tailrace. Then his meeting with Jackson, and the reactor operator’s story of leaking radiation and buried reports. It was clear, he concluded, that McLeish had survived the ordeal in the River Leven, and followed him out to Ballachulish A for his meeting with Jackson, killing the latter, and sending Brodie down in the elevator to meet his maker in the contaminated tunnels below.

When he finished, he knew it wasn’t enough. So much detail he had missed. But there was no time to refine it. That would have to wait. Right now his only focus was on finding McLeish, and stopping him before he killed someone else. ‘iCom, send.’ His voice sounded flat in the cold light of his deconstructed bedroom. He stood up. Snow blowing against the window clung to it, held by the force of the wind, obscuring the view out to the loch. He closed his eyes and felt himself swaying as he stood. So tired. All he really wanted to do was lie down on the bed and drift away. His sense of balance deserted him, and he opened his eyes quickly as he staggered and nearly fell, heart pounding. He had almost fallen asleep standing up.

As he descended the staircase, Brodie called Brannan’s name several times. But the hotel was still deserted. The fire the owner had lit earlier in the bar was dead. Brodie pushed through the front door and on to the steps where he felt the wind pile into him as it powered up the loch, intensity accelerated by the narrow confines of the fjord.

He jumped into Brannan’s SUV, grateful for its residual warmth, and spun it around to head back down to Lochaber Road, peering forward into thick white flakes driving through his headlights, wipers smearing wet snow across the windscreen. Despite being an all-wheel drive vehicle, the SUV slithered about the road as Brodie pushed it to the limits of its grip. He collided with the low parapet on the bridge over the Allt Coire na Bà, and accelerated out of the bend, gathering speed along the straight stretch of road towards the river. Lights blazed in the police station as he passed it, before skidding right at the Tailrace Inn and turning into Riverside Road.

Curtains were closed against the storm in most of the houses here, occasional cracks of light leaking out into the night. But cold, naked light flooded over the snow drifting on McLeish’s drive where it had been so meticulously cleared away earlier in the day. The garage doors had not been closed. A light still burned inside. The curtains in the living room remained undrawn.

The pedestrian gate wouldn’t open for the snow piled up on the other side. There were no fresh footprints or tyre tracks, and Brodie was the first to leave traces in the freshly fallen snow when he vaulted the gate and trudged through it towards the front door. There he hesitated. If McLeish was in the house, there was no telling how dangerous he might be. He had shot Jackson in the face, so he was armed.

He took a quick glance in the window, and saw Mrs McLeish sitting on the edge of her settee, leaning forward, hands clasped tightly on her knees. She was the colour of putty, rocking very slowly backwards and forwards, as if in a trance. Faraway and lost in another world.

He withdrew from the light, and circled the house through the snow, peering into every lit window. The kitchen was deserted. There was an unoccupied bedroom. The dining room simmered in soft light, but there was no one in it. No sign of McLeish. Finally he came around to the open garage and saw that McLeish’s tools still lay strewn across the floor where he had left them. Nothing appeared to have moved since he was here earlier.

Brodie waded through the snow back towards the living room window and rapped softly on the glass.

Mrs McLeish was on her feet in an instant, looking hopefully towards the window. Then frowned when she saw Brodie’s face caught in the light. She hurried out of the room and a moment later opened the front door. Her own face was a mask of fear, grotesquely shadowed by the light reflecting off the snow. ‘What’s happened?’ she said.

‘Is Calum here, Mrs McLeish?’

She frowned. ‘He never came back from the hydro. And he’s not answering his mobile.’ She paused. ‘Didn’t you see him there?’

‘Someone in a ski mask attacked me at the plant, Mrs McLeish. Tried to stove my head in with a monkey wrench.’

Her eyes opened wide.

‘We both fell into the tailrace and got washed down into the river. I managed to get out. I can’t say for certain what happened to the other fella.’

She shook her head in frightened disbelief. ‘Well, it couldn’t have been Calum. Couldn’t have been! For God’s sake, Mr Brodie, why would he attack you?’

‘Maybe because he knew that I was on to him. That he had killed that missing journalist. Murdered my pathologist. But he must have got out of the river, because he shot a man in the face barely an hour ago.’

Her incomprehension was almost painful. ‘What are you talking about? My Calum wouldn’t hurt a mouse. Wouldn’t do any of those things. I mean, why would he? Why?’

Brodie shook his head. It was the one thing that had been troubling him all night, niggling away in the furthest, darkest recesses of his mind. Motive. What possible reason could McLeish have had for any of it? And yet the evidence against him appeared irrefutable. The gloves, the paint on the bull bar. The doctored CCTV video. The attack at the hydro plant. But doubt was creeping in now. He said, ‘I have no idea why. But he left the imprint of his gloved fist all over Charles Younger’s face when he attacked and knocked him off the summit of Binnein Mòr.’

She was shaking her head vigorously. ‘What gloves? What are you talking about?’

‘Work gloves that he owns. They’ve got reinforced fingers with a distinctive pattern etched along the back of each one.’

It still made no sense to her.

‘Here, I’ll show you,’ he said, and strode away towards the open garage door. Mrs McLeish folded her arms protectively around herself and followed him quickly, big wet flakes settling in her hair and on her sweatshirt as she ran after him through the snow.

Inside the garage, melting snow was pooling on the floor as Brodie strode across to the bench against the back wall. He lifted one of the tan and brown gloves and waved it at her.

‘Seem familiar?’

Her eyebrows shot up in incredulity. ‘Those gloves?’

Brodie lifted the other one. ‘Yes, those gloves, Mrs McLeish.’

The breath she expelled in consternation misted around her head. ‘Those are his work gloves, Mr Brodie. He got them for working on the cars. But he found that they were good on the mountain, too. Great grip and protection for the hands. And kept them fine and warm.’

‘Aye, well, your husband was wearing them when he followed Charles Younger up on to the mountain. And, I can assure you, they left their mark on him. A pattern that’s too distinctive for there to be any doubt.’

Mrs McLeish crossed the floor and snatched one of the gloves from Brodie’s hand. She looked at it, and then glared defensively at the policeman. ‘Well, you should know that my Calum’s not the only one to possess a pair of gloves like these.’

Brodie stared back at her, and felt all his certainty melting away like the snow on the garage floor. ‘Who else?’

‘One of the members of the mountain rescue team was very taken with them,’ she said. ‘So Calum bought him a pair for his last birthday.’

‘Who?’ Brodie demanded again. ‘Archie McKay?’ He remembered the team leader’s pugnacity from the day before.

‘No!’ She looked at him as if he were mad. ‘It was Robbie Sinclair.’