A Winter Grave

Chapter Twenty-Seven

Brodie moved around the house like a ghost, drawing the curtains in each room before searching it by torchlight. Robbie was probably somewhere out there watching. He would be cold, and in pain, increasingly desperate. All of which would only make him more dangerous.

The double bed in the couple’s bedroom was unmade, sheets and quilt tangled like detritus washed up on some barren shoreline.

This is where his little girl had spent all her sleeping hours with the man she thought she loved. Where they had made love. Where Cameron had been conceived. And he felt inestimably sad for her, knowing how it felt to be betrayed by the person you trusted most in the world. He wanted to go back downstairs and put his arms around her and tell her that everything would be alright. But he knew it wouldn’t. Her life, and Cameron’s, would never be the same again. Robbie had put an end to their future as surely as if he had put a gun to their heads and pulled the trigger.

The thought made him angry, but somewhere deep inside, he felt just a grain of empathy for the man who had done this to them. For Robbie had also done it to himself. He was a lost soul, lingering somewhere in his own self-inflicted purgatory, before taking his final steps upon the road that once no doubt was paved with good intentions.

Brodie searched the wardrobe, rifling through drawers of underwear. He checked beneath the bed. Just the fluff and dust that had gathered unseen and undisturbed through all the years of their marriage.

He moved to Cameron’s room, but found nothing there either.

In the bathroom, bottles of sedatives and painkillers crowded the shelves of a cabinet above the toilet. A jar of cotton wool balls. Flossers. Cotton buds.

Toothpaste and brushes sat in a tooth mug on a glass shelf above the sink. Used towels lay on the floor where they had been carelessly dropped by whoever last used the shower. Robbie, he thought, after dragging himself from the river, restoring life to frozen limbs by standing under hot water. Just as Brodie had done. In a laundry basket, he found all of Robbie’s wet, discarded clothes, and wondered how he would have explained them to Addie.

But mostly he just felt despondent, bearing witness to the demise of a life, a relationship, a family. He knew just how painful that loss could be, and he ached for Addie.

Downstairs he went through every cupboard in the kitchen, even checking the fridge and the freezer, struck by the banality of everything he found. An ordinary life lived in expectation of an ordinary future. More children. Grandchildren.

He turned away and went back to the sitting room. It was filled with the soft orange glow of a wood-burning stove with glass doors. Addie’s legs were tucked in beneath her as she leaned into the arm of the settee, Cameron’s head in her lap. The boy was fast asleep.

While he searched the house, Brodie had heard her crying, every sob tearing at his heart, ripping through his conscience. But she was all cried out now, and sat puffy-eyed, gazing vacantly at the flames beyond the glass. He had no idea how much radiation people living in the village had been exposed to. There was no record of the reading Younger must have taken from the GDN radiation sensor at the summit of Binnein Mòr on the day he died. How much was safe? How much was dangerous? Brodie simply didn’t know. But one thing was certain, he was not leaving here without his daughter and grandson.

He sat on the edge of the armchair opposite Addie, and vacant eyes flickered towards him. He said, ‘Where did Robbie keep his stuff? Toolbox, climbing gear, things like that. In the garage?’

She shook her head. ‘There’s a wooden hut out back. It’s pretty big. It was kind of like his den. I never went in there. Didn’t want to. I’m sure he kept a secret laptop somewhere in it so that he could go online and lose more money without me knowing.’ Her eyes filled with tears again. ‘I should have, though. For so long I just ignored it, hoping it would go away. Burn itself out.’ She scoffed at her own stupidity. ‘Of course, I was just burying my head in the sand.’ And the allusion brought back a moment of painful memory for Brodie, of his first meeting with Sita on the eVTOL. Her words filled his head. Ostriches don’t bury their heads in the sand. They don’t hide from danger, they run from it. Maybe that’s what Addie had been doing, running rather than hiding. She said, as if she could read his thoughts, ‘Maybe if I hadn’t, this would all have turned out differently.’

Brodie said, ‘You have no responsibility for any of this. You’re a victim here. You and Cameron. Just as much as any of those people Robbie murdered.’

She dropped her head into her hands, fingers spread, and held the weight of it for a moment. ‘I still find it hard to believe that he was really capable of any of this.’

In a strangely hoarse voice that made Addie look up, Brodie said, ‘We’re all capable of doing things others find hard to believe, Addie. Sometimes even ourselves.’ And he wouldn’t meet her eye.

He stood up.

‘I’m going to go and search his shed. Where will I find the key?’

‘It’s hanging beside the kitchen door.’ She hesitated. ‘What are you looking for?’

‘I’ll know when I find it.’

He felt the force of the storm the moment he opened the kitchen door. The wind drove large flakes into his face as he stepped out in the darkness, and almost blew him off the top step. He waited for some moments in the hope that his eyes would adjust themselves to the available light. But there was no light, and he knew that he would never find the hut without the torch.

He had been reluctant to use it, knowing that Robbie could well be out there somewhere, just waiting and watching. And the light of a torch would offer a tempting target, caught in the sights of a hunting rifle. But surely even a man as desperate as Robbie would have had to take shelter from this?

Brodie tensed, taking a calculated risk, and the light from his torch raked across the snow-covered wilderness that was the back garden before it alighted on the hut away to his right. He made a run for it, crouching low, hindered in his speed by the depth of the drifting snow. At the door of the shed, he fumbled to get the key in the lock, taking far too long. Just waiting for the bullet in his back. And then he was inside, slamming the door shut behind him, and breathing a deep sigh of relief.

The beam of his torch fell across a cluttered workbench. Tools and cables, a soldering iron, a vice. There were boxes lined up on the shelves above it, all marked with their contents. Screws in different sizes. Nails. Washers. Nuts and bolts. On the floor beneath the bench, large plastic containers stood side by side, different coloured lids clipped in place.

He laid his torch on the floor and crouched down to open them. In the first he found a black laptop and dozens of printed gambling receipts, some dating as far back as four years. This, then, was Robbie’s not-so-secret laptop. It was in here that he had sown the seeds of his own destruction.

In the second box Brodie found a silver laptop and a well-worn brown leather satchel. He opened up the laptop, but the battery was dead. He turned it over and saw a scuffed white sticker on the underside with Younger’s name and address handwritten on it, left over from a repair in an IT workshop somewhere. He could only imagine what secrets the computer might give up when charged.

The satchel was stuffed with laser printouts — early drafts of Younger’s story — and handwritten notes in an A4-sized ring-binder notebook. As in the notebooks he had found in Younger’s glovebox, these too were in shorthand, with scribbled figures that meant nothing to Brodie. Then, from the rear division of the satchel, he pulled out a weighty document held together with a foldback clip. It was a poor photocopy of an original, but still clearly legible. Beneath the Scottish Government crest, the title on the cover page made Brodie catch his breath. RISK FACTORS IN THE AFTERMATH OF A TECTONIC SHIFT AT THE GREAT GLEN RIFT. It had a subheading. ASSESSMENT OF POTENTIAL SEISMIC DAMAGE AT BALLACHULISH A. So this was the report that Sally Mack had buried when she was energy minister in the thirties.

Brodie wondered why Robbie had kept all of this. Insurance, maybe, against everything going wrong. Which, of course, it had.

He shone his torch around the walls and saw Robbie’s climbing gear hanging from a row of hooks. Several parkas and thermal trousers, various telescopic hiking sticks, a couple of ice axes, and three different sizes of backpack. Beneath them, on the floor, a row of hiking and climbing boots and a box full of crampons.

Brodie selected the largest of the backpacks and lifted it down to start packing it with Younger’s laptop and the satchel with its contents.

Against the far wall stood a row of cupboards with ill-fitting doors. He began pulling them open and dragging out their miscellaneous contents. Folders of old accounts, boxes of family detritus, the bits and pieces of a long-dead bicycle. And in the last of them, Sita’s missing Storm trunk. He heaved it out on to the floor and opened it with trembling fingers. All the tools of the dead pathologist’s trade, neatly packed away in fixed trays, and clips attached to the walls of the box. And in a sealed plastic bag, the jars and sachets of samples from Younger’s autopsy, along with her notes.

Brodie stuffed them into the backpack and was about to leave when he spotted Sita’s crime scene DNA analyser near the bottom of the trunk. He knelt down again to lift it out. He had no idea how it worked, and the battery seemed dead. He could get no read-out from its screen. But a paper printout, the result of her last analysis, curled out from a roll set into the back of the machine. He tore it off and straightened it out to run his eyes over the lines of print, and felt his heart push up into his throat.

When he returned to the kitchen, he slipped off Robbie’s backpack and kicked the snow from his shoes. There seemed to be no let up in either the wind or the snowfall, and he stood for a moment with his back to the door breathing hard. Then he trailed the pack through to the sitting room where the fire was dying, but the air was still warm. Addie had drifted off, and Cameron was in a deep sleep, both breathing softly in the still of the room.

Brodie laid the pack against the side of the settee, lifted the rifle from the sideboard, and sat himself down in the armchair facing Addie. He laid the rifle across his knees, and turned the printout over in his fingers again and again, gazing silently off into space. He was startled by her voice.

‘What did you find?’

He shifted focus to discover her watching him. ‘Everything the Scottish Herald will need to put together the story Charles Younger was writing.’

‘Which is what?’

And he told her what Joe Jackson had revealed to him in that cold concrete bunker on the edge of the loch. Her eyes opened wide in shock. Understanding for the first time, perhaps, the pressures that had been brought to bear on Robbie. Stakes that were too high even for him to contemplate.

They sat then for a very long time without saying anything, until at length he got up to chuck another couple of logs into the wood burner before resuming his seat. Sparks flew around inside it, funnelling fresh smoke up the chimney as the wood caught, and new flames sent light flickering around the room. He set the rifle once more across his knees.

She said very quietly, ‘I can’t imagine what it feels like knowing you are going to die.’

He glanced at her quickly, then away again. ‘We’re all going to die, Addie. Usually we don’t know when, or how. Though in the early years, I think sometimes we believe we’re going to live forever.’ He drew a reflective breath. ‘When the doctor first told me, it was like the biggest wake-up call ever. Fuck, Cammie, you’re going to die! Who knew?’ He sighed. ‘It’s a shock, and you feel sorry for yourself. Why me? Then, when that wears off, you start to get a perspective on it.’

He stared at the flames licking all around the logs.

‘The hardest thing to come to terms with is the regret. I mean, life is an opportunity. The chance to do something that maybe won’t mean much in the grand scheme of things, but will have significance in your own little universe. Which is not so little, by the way.’ He looked at her. ‘It’s everything, Addie. It’s your whole being. And my overwhelming sense of my whole being is one of failure. Of having somehow wasted my life. Thrown away that opportunity. Because, you know...’ he shook his head, ‘you always think there’ll be time. To put things right, to catch up later. And there isn’t. You waste your life on things that don’t even matter. You want things you can’t have, and dream of stuff that can never be. And all the time, your life is slipping away through your fingers, like so many finite grains of sand, squandered on... nothing. Then suddenly you’re staring down the barrel of the end of your life, and all you’re left with is the regret. The things you said, or didn’t say. The things you did or didn’t do. And it all seems like such a pointless fucking exercise.’

He forced himself to smile, a wry, self-deprecating smile.

‘You know what’s weird? I mean, the doctor gave me six to nine months. And I just had a dose of radiation that’s going to cut that down to — who knows — days? Weeks? But I never felt so alive as I do right now.’ He looked at her very directly. ‘And never had a greater reason to live.’

The light from the fire reflected in her mother’s eyes. She pursed her lips, and he felt her regret, too. ‘Earlier today, when you told me it was Mum who’d had the affair, not you, you said there was more. But you weren’t going to tell me then.’ She paused. ‘Now might be as good a time as any.’

And he felt the biggest regret of all filling him up, displacing everything else inside, like the cancer that was killing him.