A Winter Grave

Chapter Two

The rain was mixed with hail, turning to ice as it hit frozen ground and making conditions treacherous underfoot. Such little light penetrated the thick, sulphurous cloud that smothered the city, it would have been easy to mistake mid-morning for first light.

Overhead electric lights burned all the way along the corridor, making it seem even darker outside, and turning hard, cream-painted surfaces into reflective veneers that almost hurt the eyes. Brodie glanced from the windows as he strode the length of the hall. The river was swollen again and seemed sluggish as the surge from the estuary slowed its seaward passage.

The DCI’s door stood ajar. Brodie could hear the distant chatter of computer keyboards and a murmur of voices from further along. They invoked a sense of hush that he was reluctant to break and he knocked softly on the door.

The voice from beyond it demonstrated no such sensitivity. ‘Enter!’ It was like the crack of a rifle.

Brodie stepped in, and Detective Chief Inspector Angus Maclaren glanced up from paperwork that lay like a snowdrift across his desk. He was in shirtsleeves, his tie loose at the neck, normally well-kempt hair falling in a loop across his forehead. He swept it back with a careless hand. ‘You like a bit of hillwalking, I’m told, Brodie. Bit of climbing. That right?’ There was a hint of condescension in his tone, incredulity that anyone might be drawn to indulge in such an activity. Not least one of his officers.

Born four years before the turn of the millennium, Brodie had worked his way up through the force the hard way. Graduating from Tulliallan, and spending more than ten years in uniform before sitting further exams and embarking on his investigator pathway, gaining entrance finally to the criminal investigation department as a detective constable. Two promotions later, he found himself serving under a senior officer twenty-five years his junior, who had fast-tracked his way directly to detective status as a university graduate with a degree in criminology and law from the University of Stirling. A senior officer who had little time for Brodie’s old school approach. And even less, apparently, for his passion for hillwalking.

‘Yes, sir.’

It was his widowed father, an unemployed welder made redundant from one of the last shipyards on the Clyde, who had taken him hillwalking for the first time in the West Highlands. Brodie had only been fourteen when they took the train from Queen Street up to Arrochar to climb The Cobbler, ill-dressed and ill-equipped. The right gear cost money, and his father had precious little of the stuff. But that first taste of the wild outdoors gave Brodie the bug, and as he grew more experienced, and began to earn, he started taking safety more seriously, spending all his spare time haunting sports equipment shops in the city. He was devastated when his father was struck down by a stroke. Semi-paralysed, he died a year later when Brodie was just twenty-one. And Brodie’s weekend trips to the hills and mountains of the Highlands became something of an obsession, an escape from a solitary life. And in recent years, an escape from life itself.

Maclaren pushed himself back in his chair and regarded the older man speculatively. ‘Remember those stories in the papers about three months ago? Scottish Herald reporter going missing in the West Highlands?’

Brodie didn’t. ‘No, sir.’

Maclaren tutted his annoyance and pushed an open folder of newspaper cuttings towards him. The Herald itself, the Scotsman, the Record. Most of the other national papers had gone to the wall. Apart from these, and a handful of surviving local newspapers, most people got their news from TV, internet and social media. ‘A modern police officer needs to keep himself abreast of current affairs, Brodie. How can we police a society in ignorance of them?’

Brodie supposed that the question was rhetorical and maintained a silence that drew a look from Maclaren, as if he suspected dumb insolence.

‘Charles Younger,’ he said. ‘The paper’s investigative reporter. Specialised in political scandals. Last August he went hillwalking in the Loch Leven area, even though by all accounts he’d never been hillwalking in his life. Went out one day, never came back. No trace of him ever found. Until now.’ He paused, as if waiting for Brodie to ask. When he didn’t, the DCI sighed impatiently and added, ‘Younger’s body was discovered frozen in a snow patch in a north-facing corrie of Binnein Mòr, above the village of—’

Brodie interrupted for the first time. ‘I know where Binnein Mòr is. I’ve climbed most of the mountains in the Kinlochleven area.’

‘Aye, so I heard. All of the Munros in the Mamores, I believe.’

Brodie offered a single nod in affirmation.

‘I want you to go up there and check it out.’

‘Why are Inverness not dealing with it?’

‘Because the two officers they sent to investigate were killed when their drone came down in an ice storm. Edinburgh have asked us to send someone instead. And I’m asking you.’

‘Then you’ll have to ask someone else, sir.’

Maclaren canted his head and Brodie saw coals of anger stoking themselves in his eyes. ‘And why the fuck would I do that?’

‘I have a doctor’s appointment today, sir. To get the result of hospital tests. I’m likely to require treatment.’

Maclaren glared at him for a moment, before banging the cuttings folder closed and drawing it back towards himself. ‘Why didn’t I know about this?’ No concern or query about the state of his health.

Brodie said, ‘You will, sir. When I’ve got something to tell you.’ He glanced at his watch. ‘If that’s all, sir, I have to go. There’s a tech briefing at ten-thirty, and I wouldn’t like to keep the DCS waiting.’

Tiny joined his long-time partner as he stepped into the lift and pressed the button for the fifth floor. ‘So what did you tell him?’

‘To go fuck himself.’

Tiny pulled a face. ‘Aye, right. What did you really tell him?’

‘That I didn’t want to do it.’

‘I thought you’d have jumped at the chance, pal. Right up your street, that. Climbing mountains and shit.’

Brodie shrugged. He wasn’t about to go into medical details, even with his oldest friend.

‘Anyway, I thought your daughter lived in Kinlochleven these days.’

Brodie nodded.

‘So...’

‘So, maybe that’s why I don’t want to go.’

The lift doors slid open and Brodie stepped briskly out into the hall. Tiny fell into step beside him as they walked along to the briefing room at the end of the corridor, and held his tongue. He knew better than to push Brodie on the touchy subject of his daughter.

The briefing room was packed with both uniformed and plain-clothes officers. This was to be the much-anticipated introduction of the new comms kit, some kind of ultralight mobile video phone that packed more processing power than most desktop computers. Everyone was anxious to get a sight of it. And get their hands on one.

Brodie and Tiny found seats by the window and Brodie looked out across the Clyde. The new Glasgow police HQ had been built at Pacific Quay in the early thirties and, like its neighbouring media complexes — the publicly owned Scottish Broadcasting Corporation, and the commercial Scottish Television — it stood hemmed in by the levees built in the forties to provide protection against the storm and tidal surges that had flooded large areas south of the river. Despite radical changes to local government since the country voted for independence in the late twenties, Police Scotland was still a unitary force.

After the country’s reaccession to the European Union, sponsored by France, the new Scottish Government at Holyrood had restructured largely along the French model. Scotland was divided now into four regions, roughly corresponding to the country’s diagonal geological fault lines — Central, South, Mid and Highland — then carved up into departments administered by government appointees. These were subdivided, with towns and defined rural areas being established as cantons, each electing its own local mayor. Both the Western and the Northern Isles had been declared separate, semi-autonomous mini-regions.

So much had changed in Brodie’s lifetime that he found it hard to keep up, and harder still to summon any interest in doing so.

Rain ran down the windowpanes, distorting the outline of the Armadillo across the river. The Finnieston Crane was almost obscured by it. Distant tenements, standing atop the hill that rose above Partick, where he lived, were a depressing rust-red blur, almost subsumed, somehow, by the sky.

A hush of anticipation fell across the gathering when the DCS strode in. He was followed by a bespectacled younger man in plain clothes, with hair that grew down almost to his collar. He was carrying a large cardboard box stencilled with the logo ‘iCom’. Both installed themselves behind a desk that sat below the whiteboard on the end wall, and the box was placed on top of it. The DCS removed his chequered hat and laid it on the table in front of him. He had a thick head of silvered hair, and a shiny, shaven, well-defined jawline. About the same age as himself, Brodie reckoned. But today there was something different about him.

And as if reading his thoughts, the DCS said, ‘How many of you have noticed a change in my appearance today?’

Tiny called out, ‘You’re wearing glasses, sir.’ He’d always had an eye for detail that Brodie envied.

‘Correct, Thomson. And yet, not.’ There was a moment’s puzzled silence. ‘They are not glasses.’ He raised a hand to one of the legs and removed them from his face, leaving the elements that curl around the ear in place. ‘Believe it or not, the legs of a pair of spectacles are called temples. In these iCom units, the temples detach from the ends that loop around your ear, and reattach magnetically. You can take them off like this, or you can swivel them up on to your forehead.’ He placed the glasses back on his nose, then pushed them up into his hairline to demonstrate. ‘If I ask my iCom to darken the lenses, then I look like I’m wearing sunglasses.’ He adopted a commanding tone. ‘iCom, shade my lenses.’ They instantly turned dark as he dropped them over his eyes again. ‘There. Now I look cool, right?’

‘Poser,’ somebody said in a stage whisper, which drew laughter from around the room. The DCS grinned, anxious to show that he, too, had a sense of humour.

Raising a hand to his right ear, he said, ‘The piece that goes in and around your ear on each side translates sound into silent vibration that your brain then retranslates into sound. It’s very sharp, very clear, and no one can hear it but you.’ He ran his index finger from the back of his ear around the curved end of his jaw below it. ‘You probably can’t even see this, because it’s flesh-coloured and will adapt to the tone of your skin, whatever that might be. But it picks up the vibration from your jaw as you speak and sends it as a voice signal across the police 15G network. So you will be in constant two-way communication with whoever you call.’ He pushed the glasses back into his hairline. ‘Bring the glasses into play, and they provide an augmented reality VR screen that allows you to receive video calls, surf the internet, or interpret the world around you. Facial recognition is instant. Everything functions on voice command.’ He smiled. ‘But here’s the beauty of it: you can still see everything that’s going on beyond the lenses. It’s just a matter of jumping focus. You get used to it very quickly.’

‘What about two-way video?’ someone said.

The DCS turned to the younger man standing impatiently beside him. ‘This is DI Victor Graham from IT. Our hacker in chief.’ The hacker in chief seemed less than impressed by his monicker. ‘He can explain it better than me.’

Graham removed his own glasses and ran a delicate finger around the outside edge of the lenses. ‘There are eight tiny cameras built into the rims,’ he said. ‘They scan your face and reinterpret the digital information to send a faithful video rendering of your likeness to the other party.’ He replaced his glasses. ‘Make no mistake, the processing power of these iCom sets is enormous, powered by miniature cells built into the end pieces.’ He touched the angled joints where the legs were hinged to the frames. ‘You’ll get about ninety-six hours of uninterrupted use without having to recharge.’

The DCS stepped in again. ‘Now here’s a really interesting feature...’ he smiled, ‘which should appeal to our friend, DI Brodie.’

Heads turned towards Brodie, and he felt the colour rising on his cheeks.

‘Software in the iCom will allow officers to view video and scan it to determine whether or not it is genuine.’

Graham said, ‘The process is lighting-fast, and the software is generations ahead of the competition. It’s foolproof.’

The DCS grinned. ‘So you’ll all be able to tell whether the actress in your porn videos is real or not.’ Which brought a ripple of laughter around the room. ‘Just a pity it wasn’t available last week when Brodie fucked up the case against Jack Stalker. Bastard wouldn’t have walked free, then, eh?’

Brodie clenched his jaw.

‘Okay, I’m going to hand you over to DI Graham here to provide a full briefing and issue you with your individual iComs. Any queries, direct them to him. Lose the fucking thing and you’ll answer to me.’

He picked up his hat to set squarely on his head and marched briskly out of the room.

DI Graham waited until he was gone. ‘And me,’ he said. ‘These things come out of my budget, and they cost a fucking fortune.’