Also by Peter May

FICTION

The Lewis Trilogy

The Blackhouse
The Lewis Man
The Chessmen

The Enzo Files

Extraordinary People
The Critic
Blacklight Blue
Freeze Frame
Blowback
Cast Iron
The Night Gate

The China Thrillers

The Firemaker
The Fourth Sacrifice
The Killing Room
Snakehead
The Runner
Chinese Whispers
The Ghost Marriage: A China Novella

Stand-alone Novels
The Man With No Face
The Noble Path
Entry Island
Runaway
Coffin Road
I’ll Keep You Safe
A Silent Death
Lockdown
 NON-FICTION
Hebrides (with David Wilson)
This ebook published in 2023 by

an imprint of
Quercus Editions Ltd
Carmelite House
50 Victoria Embankment
London EC4Y 0DZ

An Hachette UK company

Copyright © 2023 Peter May

The moral right of Peter May to be

identified as the author of this work has been
asserted in accordance with the Copyright,
Designs and Patents Act, 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication

may be reproduced or transmitted in any form
or by any means, electronic or mechanical,
including photocopy, recording, or any
information storage and retrieval system,
without permission in writing from the publisher.

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available

from the British Library.

HB ISBN 978 1 52942 848 3

TPB ISBN 978 1 52942 849 0
EBOOK ISBN 978 1 52942 850 6

This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters,

businesses, organisations, places and events are
either the product of the author’s imagination
or used fictitiously. Any resemblance to
actual persons, living or dead, events or
locales is entirely coincidental.

Ebook by CC Book Production

www.riverrunbooks.co.uk
In memory of Stephen Penn,
my best and oldest friend
1951–2022
RIP
 CONTENTS
Also By
Title
Copyright
Dedication
AUTHOR’S NOTE
PROLOGUE
CHAPTER ONE
CHAPTER TWO
CHAPTER THREE
CHAPTER FOUR
CHAPTER FIVE
CHAPTER SIX
CHAPTER SEVEN
CHAPTER EIGHT
CHAPTER NINE
CHAPTER TEN
CHAPTER ELEVEN
CHAPTER TWELVE
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
CHAPTER NINETEEN
CHAPTER TWENTY
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
CHAPTER THIRTY
CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE
CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO
CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE
CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
 AUTHOR’S NOTE
In 1990, as NASA’s Voyager 1 spacecraft was about to leave
the solar system, Carl Sagan – a member of the mission’s
imaging team – asked that the camera be turned around to
take one last look back at Earth. The image it captured of our
world, as a speck less than 0.12 pixels in size, became
known as ‘the pale blue dot’.
Later, when considering that speck of dust in his 1994 book
Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space, he
wrote: ‘There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly
of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world.
To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly
with one another, and to preserve and cherish the pale blue
dot, the only home we’ve ever known.’
 PROLOGUE
NOVEMBER, 2051
Little will heighten your sense of mortality more than a
confrontation with death. But right now such an encounter is
the furthest thing from Addie’s mind, and so she is
unprepared for what is to come.
She is conflicted. Such a day as this should lift the spirits.
She is almost at the summit. The wind is cold, but the sky is
a crystal-clear blue, and the winter sun lays its gold across
the land below. Not all of the land. Only where it rises above
the shadow cast by the peaks that surround it. The loch, at
its eastern end, rarely sees the sun in this mid-November.
Further west, it emerges finally into sunshine, glinting a deep
cut-glass blue and spangling in coruscating flashes of light. A
gossamer mist hovers above its surface, almost spectral in
the angled mid-morning sunshine. Recent snowfall catches
the wind and is blown like dust along the ridge serpentining
to the north.
But she is blind to it all. Distracted by a destiny she
appears unable to change. Such things, she thinks, must be
preordained. Unhappiness a natural state, broken only by
rare moments of unanticipated pleasure.
The wind seems to inflate her down-filled North Face parka
as well as her lungs. Her daypack, with its carefully stowed
flask of milky coffee and cheese sandwiches, rests lightly on
her shoulders, catching the breeze a little as she turns
towards the north. The peaks of the Mamores rise and fall all
around her, almost every one of them a Munro, and in the
distance, sunlight catches the summit of the towering Ben
Nevis, the highest mountain in Scotland, the loftiest
prominence in the British Isles – a little of its measured
height lost now with the rise in sea levels below.
She stops here for a moment and looks back. And down.
She can no longer see the tiny arcs of housing that huddle
around the head of the loch where she lives. Kin is the Gaelic
for head. Hence the name of the village: Kinlochleven. The
settlement at the head of Loch Leven.
Somewhere away to her left lies the shimmering
Blackwater Reservoir, the sweep of its dam, and the six huge
black pipes laid side by side that zigzag their way down the
valley to the hydro plant above the village. The occasional
leak sends water under pressure fizzing into the air to make
tiny rainbows where it catches the sunlight.
Finally, she focuses on the purpose of her climb. An ascent
she makes once a week during the fiercest weather months
of the winter to check on the condition of the flimsy little
weather station she installed here – she stops to think – six
years ago now. Just before she got pregnant. Fifty kilograms
of metal framework and components, carried on her back in
three separate trips during the more clement summer
months. A tripod bolted to the rock, a central pole with
sensors attached. Air temperature and relative humidity.
Wind speed and direction. Ultraviolet, visible and infrared
radiation. Solar panels, radio antenna, a satellite
communication device. A metal box that is anchored at the
summit to sandstone recrystallised into white quartzite. It
contains the data logger, barometric pressure sensor, radios
and battery. How it all survives here, in this most
inhospitable of environments, is always a source of
amazement to Addie.
It takes her less than fifteen minutes to clear the sensors
of snow and ice, and to check that everything is in working
order. Fifteen minutes during which she does not have to
think of anything else. Fifteen minutes of escape from her
depression. Fifteen minutes to forget.
When she finishes, she squats on the metal box and delves
into her pack for the sandwiches thrown together in haste,
and the hot, sweet coffee that will wash them down. And she
cannot stop her thoughts returning to those things that have
troubled her these last months. She closes her eyes, as if
that might shut them out, but she carries her depression with
her like the daypack on her back. If only she could shrug it
from her shoulders in the same way when she returns home.
Eventually, she gets stiffly to her feet and turns towards
the north-facing corrie that drops away from the curve of the
summit. Coire an dà loch. The Corrie of the Two Lochans.
She can see sunlight glinting on the two tiny lochs at the foot
of the drop which give the corrie its name, and starts her
way carefully down the west ridge. There is a mere skin of
snow here, where the wind has blown it off into the corrie
itself, rocks and vegetation breaking its surface like some
kind of atopic dermatitis.
Before the Big Change, long-lying snow patches had
become increasingly rare among the higher Scottish
mountains. Thirty years ago they had all but vanished. Now
they linger in the north- and east-facing corries in increasing
size and number all through the summer months. Melting
and freezing, melting and freezing, until they become hard
like ice and impervious to the diminished estival
temperatures. She had watched this patch in the Coire an dà
Loch both shrink and grow across the seasons, increasing in
size every year. The next snowstorm will bury it, and it will
likely not be visible again until late spring.
But today there is something different about it. A yawning
gap at the top end. Like the entrance to a hollow beneath it,
disappearing into darkness. Maybe it had been there during
her last visit, and she had simply not seen it. Obscured by
snow, perhaps, which was then blown away by high winds. At
any rate, she is intrigued. She has heard of snow tunnels.
Periods of milder weather, as they have just experienced,
sending meltwater down the corries to tunnel its way
beneath the ice of long-lying snow patches.
She forgets those things that have been troubling her, and
slithers down the ridge and into the corrie. The snowfall that
fills this narrow valley is peppered by the rocks that break its
surface from the scree below, and she has to make her way
carefully across it to where the snow patch it hosts lies deep
in its frozen heart. Twenty metres long, seven or eight wide.
Maybe two-and-a-half deep. She arrives at the lower end of
it, swinging herself round to find herself gazing up into the
first snow tunnel she has ever seen. It takes her breath
away. A perfect cathedral arch formed in large, geometric
dimples of nascent ice stalactites above the rock and the
blackened vegetation beneath it. Light from the top end of
the tunnel floods down like the water before it, turning the
ice blue. Big enough for her to crawl into.
She quickly removes her pack and delves into one of its
pockets to retrieve her camera, then drops to her knees and
climbs carefully inside. She stops several times to take
photographs. Then a selfie, with the tunnel receding behind
her. But she wants to capture the colour and structure of the
arch, and turns on to her back so that she can shoot up and
back towards the light.
The man is almost directly overhead, encased in the ice.
Fully dressed, in what occurs incongruously to Addie as
wholly inadequate climbing gear. He is lying face down, arms
at his side, eyes and mouth wide open, staring at her for all
the world as though he were still alive. But there is neither
breath in his lungs, nor sight in his eyes. And Addie’s scream
can be heard echoing all around the Coire an dà Loch below.
 CHAPTER ONE
FIVE DAYS EARLIER
The Glasgow High Court of Justiciary was an impressive
building, all the more so for being stone-cleaned in the latter
part of the twentieth century. A-listed as a structure of
historic importance. Very few A-listers, however, had passed
through its porticoed entrance. Just a long list of mostly men,
in unaccustomed suits, who had gone on to wear a very
different kind of attire after sentencing by the Lord Justice
General, or the Lord Justice Clerk, or, more likely, one of the
thirty-five Lords Commissioners of Justiciary.
Detective Inspector Cameron Brodie had given evidence in
various of its courtrooms many times over the years. He was
well used to the odour of the justice being dispensed by men
and women in wigs and black gowns from lofty oak benches
beneath artificial skylights. Justice, it seemed to him, smelled
of cleaning fluid and urine and stale alcohol, with the
occasional whiff of aftershave.
It was cold outside in the Saltmarket, rain leaking, as it did
most days, from a leaden sky. But the heat of legal argument
in this courtroom, where a certain Jack Stalker, alias the
Beanstalk, stood accused of first-degree murder, had
warmed the air to a high level of humidity among all the
rainwater trailed in on coats and umbrellas. Stalker sat in the
dock, flanked by police officers, a grey man in his thirties
with a deeply pockmarked face and a livid scar transecting
his left eyebrow. Thinning hair was scraped back and
plastered across the shallow slope of his skull with some evil-
smelling oil that Brodie imagined he could detect from the
witness stand, even above the odour of institutional justice.
Stalker’s lawyer, the elderly Archibald Quayle, was well
known for his defence of over five hundred murder cases,
more even than the twentieth century’s legendary Joe
Beltrami. And despite the sweat that gathered comically in
the folds of his neck and chin, he was known by Brodie to be
a formidable opponent.
Quayle had wandered away from the big square table
beneath the bench where the lawyers and their clerks sat,
and now insinuated himself between the jury and the witness
stand. He had the condescending air of a man supremely
confident in his ability to achieve an acquittal, carrying about
him a sense of absolute incredulity that this case had ever
come to court.
To Brodie, there was no question of Stalker’s guilt. He had
been caught on a high-definition CCTV security camera
kicking his victim to death on top of the levee on the north
bank of the Clyde near the SEC conference centre.
Quayle turned dark, penetrating eyes in Brodie’s direction.
‘What witnesses did you interview in relation to the alleged
assault, Detective Inspector?’
‘None, sir.’
Quayle raised both eyebrows in mock surprise. ‘And why
was that?’
‘We were unable to find any. The incident took place in the
small hours of the morning. Apparently there was no one else
in the vicinity.’
The lawyer for the defence pretended to consult his notes.
‘And what forensic evidence did you acquire that led you to
suspect my client of committing this heinous crime?’
‘None, sir.’
The eyebrows shot up again. ‘But your scenes of crime
people must have gathered forensic traces from the victim
and the crime scene.’
‘They did.’
‘Which matched nothing that you found on the accused.’ A
statement, not a question.
‘It took us nearly two days to find Stalker. He had ample
time to dispose of anything that might have linked him to the
murder.’
‘And how did you find him?’
‘We asked around. He was known to us, sir.’
Quayle frowned. ‘Known to you? How?’
Brodie took a moment before responding. He wasn’t about
to fall into Quayle’s trap. He said evenly, ‘I’m afraid that
because of the Rehabilitation of Offenders Act 1974, I am
unable to say how.’ Which brought smiles around the
lawyers’ table, and a glare from the judge.
Quayle was unruffled. ‘Asked around, you say. Asked who?’
‘Known associates.’
‘Friends, you mean?’
‘Yes.’
‘The victim, too, was a friend, wasn’t he?’
‘I believe they once shared the same accommodation.’
‘Flatmates?’ Quayle asked disingenuously.
Brodie paused once more. ‘You might say that; I couldn’t
possibly comment.’
Quayle ignored the detective’s flippancy and strode
confidently towards his chair. ‘So the only evidence you have
against the accused is the CCTV footage that the advocate
depute has presented to the court?’
‘It’s pretty damning, I think?’
‘When I want your opinion, Detective Inspector, I’ll ask for
it.’ He turned away dismissively, towards the judge. ‘I
wonder, my Lord, if I might ask for the court’s indulgence in
replaying Production Five A one more time?’
The judge glanced towards the advocate depute, who
shrugged. After all, it could only reinforce the case against
the accused. ‘I have no objection, my Lord,’ the prosecutor
said.
Large screens mounted on all four walls flickered into life,
and the murder of the unfortunate Archie Lafferty replayed
for the umpteenth time in all its graphic detail. An argument
of some kind was in progress. In full view, just across the
river, of police headquarters at Pacific Quay, whose lights
reflected in the dark waters of the Clyde flowing swiftly by.
The levee on the north bank was deserted, except for the two
antagonists. Stalker bellowed in Lafferty’s face. You could
almost see the spittle gathering on his lips. Then he pushed
the other man in the chest with both hands and Lafferty
staggered backwards, gesticulating wildly, as if pleading
innocence to some savage accusation. Another push and he
lost his footing, falling backwards and striking his head on
the cobbles. Enough, the pathologist later confirmed, to
fracture his skull, though not apparently to induce
unconsciousness. Lafferty was more than aware of the kicks
that rained in on him from the vicious feet of his attacker,
curling up foetally to protect his head and chest. But Stalker
was relentless, and when his right foot finally breached the
other man’s defences and caught Lafferty full in the face, you
could see the spray of blood that it threw off.
The kicking continued for an inordinate and excruciating
period of time, long after Lafferty had stopped trying to fend
off his attacker and lay spent on the cobbles, soaking up the
repeated blows and leaking blood on to stone. Stalker
appeared to be enjoying himself, putting all his energy into
each repeated blow, until finally he stood breathing hard and
looking down on his victim with clear contempt. Lafferty was
almost certainly dead by now. Stalker turned on his heel and
walked briskly out of shot. The screens flickered and the
video came to an end.
No matter how many times he had watched it, Brodie still
felt a shiver of disquiet. A silence hung momentarily in the
court, before Quayle said casually, ‘That will be all, Detective
Inspector.’
Brodie could barely believe it. Quayle was concluding his
cross-examination with a replay of the murder, reinforcing
his client’s guilt in the minds of every man and woman in the
courtroom. Brodie got to his feet, stepped down from the
stand and walked briskly to the door.
 Tiny was waiting for him outside in the hall. DI Tony
Thomson was a man so thin that he didn’t wear clothes, they
hung on him. He measured a cool two metres, hence the
nickname, and even with his voice lowered, it echoed
sonorously around the tiles and painted plaster of this
ancient chamber. ‘That didn’t take long, pal. Come on,
there’s a pie and a pint with our name on it at the Sarry
Heid.’ He turned towards the door leading to the street. But
when Brodie made no move to follow, he stopped and looked
back. ‘What’s up with you, man?’
Brodie shook his head. ‘Something’s not right, Tiny.’
‘How?’
‘Quayle had me on the stand for less than five minutes,
and most of that time he spent rerunning the CCTV footage.’
Tiny frowned. ‘What? He voluntarily showed the jury his
client kicking shit out of that poor bastard again?’
Brodie nodded. ‘I’m going back in.’
A few heads turned as the door creaked open and Brodie,
followed by Tiny, tiptoed into the courtroom to find
themselves places in the crowded public gallery. The
advocate depute half turned and offered Brodie a quizzical
frown. Brodie just shrugged.
Quayle was on his feet again. ‘My Lord, I have only the one
witness. I call Mr Raphael Johnson.’
The court officer returned with the witness in short order
and beckoned him towards the stand. Raphael Johnson could
have been no more than twenty-seven or twenty-eight years
old, with a pimply, adolescent complexion and a mane of
thick dark hair that tumbled over narrow shoulders. His T-
shirt, beneath a hooded leather bomber, was emblazoned
with the faded red logo of some unidentifiable creature
breathing fire. His jeans were frayed at the knees and
concertinaed over the baseball boots that were once again in
fashion. Brodie clocked the nicotine-stained fingers and
thumb, his bloodshot eyes and reddened nostrils betraying a
likely acquaintance with a certain white powdered substance.
Though perhaps Brodie was doing him an injustice. Maybe he
simply had a cold, or was recovering from the latest mutation
of Covid. It was hard to tell the two apart these days.
He affirmed, rather than take the oath. When asked to tell
the court who he was, he called himself Raff, and described
his occupation as a computer programmer with special
working expertise in audiovisual manipulation.
‘Who is your employer?’ Quayle asked him.
‘I’m self-employed, mate.’
‘And your qualifications?’
‘First-class honours degree in computer science from
Strathclyde University.’
‘Tell me about the process of video manipulation known as
“deepfake”.’
Raff made a snorting sound. ‘No one calls it that any more,
mate. Neural masking. That’s what it’s known as these days.’
‘Tell us about it.’
The advocate depute was on his feet. ‘Objection, my Lord.
Relevance?’
Quayle raised a finger. ‘Coming to it.’
The judge nodded. ‘Be quick then, Mr Quayle.’
Quayle nodded and returned to the witness. ‘Mr Johnson?’
‘The technology’s about thirty-five years old. Originated
somewhere in the early twenty-tens, with the development of
software called GAN.’
‘Which is what?’
‘Well, it stands for generative adversarial network, in which
two neural networks use AI to out-predict one another.’
It was clear that no one in the courtroom had the least idea
what he was talking about. In an attempt to be helpful, the
judge leaned forward and said, ‘I take it we’re speaking of
artificial intelligence?’
‘Yes, Your Honour. It’s kind of complicated to explain, but
we’re talking about video here, and what GANs did was
produce fake videos that you really couldn’t tell were fake.
The two neural networks do different things. One of them is a
generator; the other we call a discriminator.’
‘And in layman’s terms?’ Quayle was hoping for more
clarity.
‘Well, in the early days, GAN was used to superimpose
celebrity faces on to the participants in porn videos. Give the
generator a few videos, or even some still samples of the
celebrity face, and it would seamlessly superimpose it on to
the target porn actor. You, or I, maybe couldn’t tell that it
had been done. But the discriminator would scan the video
and find lots of faults with it. The generator would learn from
that, redo the original and let the discriminator scan it again.
That process would go on many times until, finally, it was
virtually impossible to tell that the video wasn’t genuine.’
Quayle said, ‘And is it still used for that purpose?’
‘Nah.’ Raff shook his thick mane. ‘Nobody does that any
more. The software has advanced a lot since then. It has
much more sophisticated applications now.’
‘Such as?’
‘Well, you’ve probably read they’ve started making movies
with actors who’ve been dead for years, even decades. Big
stars of the past. They employ unknown actors to make the
film, then superimpose the faces of the dead stars on to
them. Bingo! You’ve got Cary Grant playing the latest
incarnation of Batman. Or Marilyn Monroe playing herself in a
brand-new biopic. They can do the same thing with the
voices, too. So . . .’ He shrugged. ‘CGI went out of business.’
Again the judge leaned forward. ‘CGI?’
‘Computer-generated imagery. It’s how they used to turn a
dozen people into a thousand in the movies, or make a scene
shot in a studio seem like they were in the Bahamas. Pretty
crude stuff by today’s standards.’
Quayle cleared his throat and steered Raff gently back to
the subject in hand. ‘This neural masking,’ he said. ‘Just how
convincing is it?’
An expression of amusement escaped Raff’s lips in a tiny
explosion of air. ‘Mate, you can’t tell it’s not genuine. Unless
you have the next-generation AI software – which likely
won’t even exist yet – there’s no way to tell that it’s not the
real McCoy.’
Quayle nodded sagely, as if he understood every nuance of
the technology being described. ‘Are you able to show us an
example?’
‘Well, as you know, I prepared a short video by way of
demonstration.’
The advocate depute was on his feet again. ‘My Lord . . .’
But the judge was one step ahead of him. ‘Mr Quayle, you
are stretching the court’s patience. This had better be good.’
There was, however, no doubt in anyone’s mind that his
lordship was as intrigued as everyone else to see Raff’s
video.
‘Thank you, my Lord.’ Quayle nodded towards his clerk and
the video screens around the courtroom flickered once more,
before the video of the assault on the levee began replaying.
The judge frowned. ‘That’s the wrong video, Mr Quayle.’
Quayle’s smile was almost imperceptible. ‘No, my Lord, it’s
not.’
Eyes drawn by this exchange returned to the screens as
Jack Stalker turned to confront his victim, and his face was
caught in full street-light glare for the first time. Except that
it wasn’t Stalker. There was an involuntary collective gasp in
the courtroom as DI Cameron Brodie’s superimposed face
snarled and pushed Archie Lafferty to the ground before
kicking him repeatedly about the face and head. So
convincing was it, that there was not a single person in the
courtroom who would not have sworn that it was Brodie.
Those same eyes tore themselves away now from the video
to glance at Brodie himself, sitting in the public gallery,
before returning to the screens, anxious not to miss the
moment. Brodie’s face burned with shock and
embarrassment. And anger.
 CHAPTER TWO
SEVEN DAYS LATER
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.’
 CHAPTER THREE
An air-conditioning fan rattled and whirred behind the rusted
grill in the ceiling. Rain thundered on a skylight that spilled
bruised daylight into the waiting room. The sound of the
large-screen television fixed high up on the far wall was only
just audible above it. Discoloured plastic chairs stood lined up
against three walls, facing a low square table in the centre of
the room. The table groaned with grubby, dog-eared
magazines, and Brodie imagined them to be contaminated by
the invisible bacterial and viral infections carried by all of the
sick patients who had handled them.
The walls of the room had not been painted in years, and
were stained with damp and scarred by the backs of chairs.
It was empty when Brodie first entered, dripping rainwater
on the floor after a perilous ride through flooded streets in
the open electric taxi boat he had caught at one of the
temporary south-side jetties. Private boats for hire clustered
around all the jetties like so many feeding fish.
He was always depressed by the rain-streaked sandstone
tenements that lined the streets. They stood between the
gap sites like the few remaining rotten teeth in a sad smile.
Abandoned like the tower blocks and the newer social
housing. Shop windows had been boarded up long ago, and
were almost obscured by graffiti. The Citizens Theatre in
Gorbals Street had been forced to close its doors
permanently after almost a hundred years of productions on
the stage of what had once been known as the Royal
Princess’s Theatre. All the drama these days played out on
water in the streets around it.
For a while he had sat on his own in the waiting room,
feeling the air thicken with humidity, before an elderly man
in a flat cap and dripping grey raincoat pushed open the door
and took a seat against the far wall. After the briefest nod of
acknowledgement, he had begun amusing himself by
stamping on the cockroaches scuttling across the tiles. The
hardy German variety of the insect that infested the city had
moved indoors to survive the falling temperatures which had
come unexpectedly with climate change. The little bastards
were hard to kill. Brodie watched, fascinated, for a while,
before finding himself drawn by a familiar jingle interrupting
a succession of annoying infomercials on the television. The
equally irritating jingle was the one adopted by the Eco Party
to herald its endless political party broadcasts ahead of the
imminent election.
The incumbent Scottish Democratic Party, led by the
charismatic Sally Mack, was well ahead in the polls. The SDP,
unlike the EP, did not seem to feel the need to constantly
badger the electorate for their votes. Which imbued them,
somehow, with a reassuring sense of self-confidence, even
superiority. The Scottish Tories had long since faded into
oblivion, leaving the Ecologists as the only genuine
opposition. But there was a sense of desperation in their
floundering campaign as election day approached.
Their latest offering was a rerun of the testimony given to a
US Senate committee by the famous twentieth-century
American scientist Carl Sagan in 1985. Dark hair, greying at
the temples, fell carelessly around his large skull. His face
was dominated by huge teardrop glasses, a reflection
perhaps of his fear for the future. But his voice was almost
soporifically calm, despite the tenor of his subject. Climate
change. A favourite topic of the Eco Party. A concern, Brodie
thought, that was thirty years and more too late. In fact,
more than twice that, if Sagan was to be believed.
In his evidence on climate change, he told the senators,
‘Because the effects occupy more than a human generation,
there is a tendency to say that they are not our problem. Of
course, then, they are nobody’s problem. Not on my tour of
duty. Not on my term of office. It’s something for the next
century. Let the next century worry about it.’
Brodie shook his head. They were halfway through the next
century, and the fact that nobody had done nearly enough
worrying about it was self-evident.
‘And so,’ Sagan went on, ‘in this issue, as in so many other
issues, we are passing on extremely grave problems to our
children, when the time to solve the problems, if they can be
solved at all, is now.’
Brodie could barely hear him above the rain hammering on
the skylight.
‘The solution to this problem requires a perspective that
embraces the planet and the future, because we are all in
this greenhouse together.’
Out of interest, Brodie slipped on his new glasses. He felt
the magnets lock into place as the legs connected with the
earpieces he and his fellow officers had been asked to wear
while on duty, and he requested his iCom to scan the Sagan
video for authenticity. The old man on the other side of the
waiting room looked up momentarily from his cockroach
squashing, and wondered who Brodie was talking to.
As his iCom performed its scan, Brodie noticed a cockroach
crawling across the lower portion of Sagan’s face, reaching
his lips as he spoke. Brodie almost expected it to disappear
into his mouth, choking off the words of warning. Scan
completed, flashed up on his screen. Video authenticated.
So, the Eco Party was correct in its assertion that the world
had been given notice more than sixty years ago.
A grim-faced Eco spokesman appeared on-screen, urging
voters to crush the Democrats at the polls, as if somehow the
climate change afflicting them had been brought about solely
by the SDP.
Brodie pushed the glasses up on to his forehead and sighed
his frustration. He hated politics. Politicians all told lies. Lies
that changed depending on what demographic they were
appealing to.
The sudden opening of the door from the doctor’s surgery
startled him back to the grim reality of the waiting room. A
middle-aged woman, head bowed, hurried past and out into
the hall to negotiate the gloomy curve of the stairs down to
the flooded streets below.
The doctor was a good ten years younger than Brodie and
almost completely bald. He wore a tweed suit and horn-
rimmed glasses, and waved Brodie into his inner sanctum.
He beckoned the policeman absently towards a seat, closed
the door and rounded his desk, distracted.
‘Fucking cockroaches,’ he said, and Brodie blinked in
surprise. The doctor never once looked at him as he shuffled
through the plethora of papers on his desk. ‘The
extermination people were supposed to come last week.
We’re overrun with the damn things. Little fuckers are
everywhere. This is a doctor’s surgery, for Christ’s sake. It’s
supposed to be a sanitary environment.’ He looked up for the
first time. ‘Do you have any idea what kind of diseases are
carried by cockroaches?’
Brodie didn’t.
‘Dysentery, gastroenteritis, salmonella . . .’ The doctor
waved frustrated arms and slumped into his seat. ‘It’s a
bloody disgrace.’ Scanning his desk again, he pulled a folder
towards him to open it up and examine the contents. He
rubbed the bristles on his chin and Brodie heard the scrape of
them against the soft skin of his palm. He turned gloomy
eyes towards his patient. ‘It’s bad news, I’m afraid.’

Brodie emerged from the doctor’s surgery, back into the

waiting room, like a man in a trance. As if every nerve in his
body had suddenly surrendered perception. He had no sense
of putting one foot in front of the other. Breathing had
become a conscious act that required concentration. The
tinnitus in his ears drowned out the world.
The old man in the flat cap and raincoat pushed past him in
his hurry to enter the surgery, as if someone might suddenly
appear to jump his place in a non-existent queue. Brodie
heard the door behind him close. He stopped, standing in the
waiting room below the green-blue light of the window
above. He was not conscious of thinking about anything.
Then, incongruously, he became aware of the Carl Sagan
interview replaying on the TV. We are passing on extremely
grave problems to our children. And his eyes flickered
towards the screen. The remains of the cockroach were
smeared across his mouth. Its brown innards and smashed
wings stuck to a rolled-up magazine lying on the table.
Rain still battered the glass overhead. The air-conditioning
fan still whirred and rattled behind its rusted grill. Nothing
had changed. Except everything had.
Outside, he saw a group of water taxis gathered beneath a
cluster of umbrellas at the entrance to the waterlogged car
park of the Central Mosque. The drivers were playing cards
under black protective oiled cloth, and only by shouting was
he able to attract their attention. One of them reluctantly
disengaged, swinging his tiller and directing his shallow-draft
boat silently in the direction of the medical centre.
‘Where you going, pal?’
‘Suspension bridge, Carlton Place.’
The driver breathed his frustration. ‘Hardly worth the
fucking fare.’
‘How else am I supposed to get there?’
He shook his head. ‘Get in.’
Brodie clambered into the front of the boat and sat
watching the buildings drift by in the rain. The mosque had
been closed for several years. The underground, once known
as the Clockwork Orange because of its single circle and
orange trains, had been flooded in the first storm surges and
never reopened. Nearby shops and apartments had been
ruthlessly looted in the early days of the initial flooding. And
although there was no longer anything of value left to steal,
these were still dangerous streets after dark. Gangs of white
youths roamed in high-powered boats looking for trouble,
searching out the Asian immigrants who had poured into the
country over the last decade to colonise large parts of this
cold northern city, escaping disastrous flooding and crop
failure on the subcontinent.
But, in truth, he saw nothing but the fading light of his own
mortality. Of course, we were all going to die sometime. But
it is a very human trait to lock that thought away, to face it
when keeping it in the dark is no longer viable. You know
that one day it will seek you out, but are never prepared for
it when it does. The doctor’s words still rattled about in his
head.
You have severe and rapid-moving prostate cancer.
Unfortunately, it has metasticised to the bone. Ribs, hips, the
small intestine . . .
Strangely, except for the blood in his urine that had
prompted the first visit to the doctor, he felt fine. There were
the occasional bouts of fatigue, and the difficulty he had
some nights in sleeping. But, then, he had never been a good
sleeper. Not since that long ago night in the dark under the
King George V Bridge on the Clyde.
His boat turned into Carlton Place. Falling behind in the
building of levees, the Glasgow prefecture had belatedly
undertaken work to raise the entire suspension bridge, which
still only just cleared the water during the worst storm
surges. The disgruntled driver dropped Brodie at the foot of
the steps and examined the handful of coins placed in his
hand. ‘Make more at the fucking poker,’ he said, and spun
his boat away to hurry back to the game, sending a wash of
black water sloshing into the flooded basements of the
buildings that lined this once grand terrace. The Sheriff Court
at the end of the street had been built above street level,
with steps leading up to its entrance. Opened in 1986, it was
almost as if the architect who designed it had taken heed of
Carl Sagan’s warning and placed the administration of justice
beyond the reach of rising sea levels and storm surges.
Brodie walked across the bridge, the rain slashing his face.
It was ice-cold, and numbed his skin as effectively as the
doctor’s words had numbed his senses. There was no room
for fear. Just a yawning, aching emptiness.
 CHAPTER FOUR
Brodie’s top-floor flat looked out across the city, east and
west, from this red sandstone tenement at the top end of
Gardner Street.
If he looked out the back from his kitchen window, he could
see down into the cricket ground at Hamilton Crescent,
where the first Scotland–England international football match
had taken place in 1872. A goalless draw played out in front
of 4,000 spectators.
From the bay window at the front, he could look down the
hill to Dumbarton Road, which flooded frequently when the
sewers and drainage system backed up from the river. The
smell that lingered along the famous old road was
nauseating. He had no idea how people continued to live
there, how the shops survived. He avoided it as far as it was
possible. Fortunately the odour rarely made it this far up.
It was dark by the time he got home. He switched on a
light above the kitchen sink, and saw dirty crockery soaking
in scummy water. Pans with the burned-on remains of
forgotten meals. Aluminium carry-out cartons were stacked
untidily on the worktop next to piles of cardboard lids stained
with the residue of Chinese and Indian takeaways. The stink
of stale food was very nearly as odious as the smell that
stalked Dumbarton Road.
He saw his face reflected in the glass of the window. A
ghost of himself. Short hair bristling silver and black and
receding from a high brow above blue eyes. Cheeks hollowed
out in the shadows cast by the light, and by the words of
death delivered by a doctor more concerned with an
infestation of cockroaches.
Unable to look at himself, he turned off the light and went
through to the front room. He had no appetite, either for
eating or for clearing up the mess. Neither seemed to have
any point any more. Light from the street lamp outside
reflected on the ceiling, casting the shadows of furniture
around the room. He dropped heavily on to the settee. A
half-empty bottle of whisky nestled between the arm and the
cushion on his right. Golden oblivion. He reached for it and
unscrewed the cap, raising the neck of it to his lips and
letting the amber liquid burn all the way down to his gut.
Maybe if he drank enough of it, the alcohol would kill the
fucking cancer. Or him. Either would do.
It took him no time at all to empty the bottle, but if he had
hoped to find escape in it, he was disappointed. Oblivion
evaded him. When he closed his eyes, the room spun, and
when he opened them again, the world was still there.
Unchanged. Dark and depressing. The only emotion he
seemed able to conjure from the whisky was self-pity. He
forced himself out of the settee and staggered across the
room to a G-plan sideboard that his parents had inherited
from his grandparents, and then by him from them. The
drawers were full of detritus from his folks’ house that he had
never bothered to clear out, and when opened, always
released a flood of memories in the timeless smell that
lingered still among their belongings. He lifted out an
ancient, dark green photo album embossed with a crocodile-
skin pattern. Its brittle pages were held in place by red string
threaded through punched holes. Photographs, read the
washed-out gold script in the bottom right of the front cover.
Between each page of photographs, as he squinted at them
in the semi-dark, lay a protective sheet of patterned
greaseproof paper.
The album had belonged to his paternal grandparents and
dated back to a generation before that, black and white
prints lovingly pasted on to each page, annotated in faded
black ink. Granny Black. Papa Brodie. People long dead, like
everyone else pressed between these pages. Lives that had
come and gone, genes passing from one generation to the
next in a line that ended with him. And he wondered what
the hell it was all about. What any of it meant. What any of it
was for.
And then he realised, of course, that it didn’t all end with
him. That was just self-pity, self-obsession. There was Addie.
Who wouldn’t even speak to him. If procreation was your
raison d’être, then surely the estrangement of your child was
the ultimate failure.
He dropped the album back in the drawer and went in
search of another bottle. There was a little gin left in one he
found in the kitchen, and he brought it back with him to the
settee. It tasted vile after the whisky and he spat it out in an
aerosol spray that settled slowly in the still of the room, the
finest droplets catching light from the window as they fell.
‘Fuck!’ His voice reverberated around the room. Then, ‘TV,
show me my photos.’
The screen on the wall above the original Edwardian
fireplace flashed and flickered before presenting a pale blue
background to a succession of digital photographs. They
arrived like postage stamps from one side, grew to fill the
screen, then shrank to vanish from the other. An
accumulation of pictures taken in happier times, increasing in
quality with each new generation of iPhone, at almost the
same rate as the people in them grew older. And sadder.
His heart ached as it did every time he set eyes on Mel
again. So young and fresh at first. Beautiful in her plainness.
A wisp of a girl with a smile that would break your heart. Big,
doleful eyes hiding mischief in their darkness. Long, straight,
mouse-brown hair tonged into curls for their wedding day. He
was transfixed by her, unable even to look at the pictures of
himself, afraid that he would see only what he had become,
not what he had been. Thirty seconds of video scrolled by.
Mel laughing, almost choking on a piece of wedding cake.
‘Try it, Cam,’ she was saying and holding out cake towards
the camera. ‘Try it.’ So innocent, and so cursed. And long
dead. Like his parents, and their parents before them.
 CHAPTER FIVE
2023
In those days I couldn’t see myself ever getting married. I
was twenty-seven years old, and I knew a lot of guys that
age who were still living with their parents, drawing on the
bank of Mum and Dad. But I had a top-floor flat of my own
up in Maryhill. A great view of the cemetery, and a problem
with dry rot that seemed to be creeping its way through the
building. But it was just a rental, so what did I care?
Tiny and I had shared it in the years after we graduated
from Tulliallan. That’s the police college in Fife. It’s where we
met. Hit it off straight away. And blazed our way through all
the pubs and clubs in Dunfermline. Heading into Edinburgh
on the weekends to try our luck with the capital girls.
We were lucky to finish our training together in the
Glasgow East command area, posted to the same police
station in London Road. We weren’t earning much in those
days, so a one-bedroom tenement flat was all we could
afford. We took it in turns, alternating weeks, to sleep on the
sofa bed in the front room. It was better than staying with
your folks. Not that I had any left by then. But Tiny’s people
were still alive.
Everyone thought there was an endless stream of girls
passing through that wee flat. But in truth it was usually just
me and Tiny, a six-pack of Tennent’s Lager and Sky Sports
on the telly.
He was a good pal, Tiny. You could tell him anything and
trust him to keep it to himself. Made me laugh. Big, long
drink of water that he was. Always had a running
commentary on life. You know, that observational thing that
Billy Connolly had. An eye for the absurd. Always saw the
funny side, even in the darkest moments.
I can confess to it now, even if I couldn’t admit it to myself
at the time, but I was devastated when he met Sheila.
Suddenly all those nights and weekends when we’d be
watching the game, or down the pub, or off clubbing in town,
came to an end. It was like losing a leg. I’d never really
thought about the future. I guess I didn’t want to. I was
happy with the life we had, the respect we got as cops
(usually). Someone to share my thoughts with and have a
laugh together. Fuck’s sake, it was almost like we were
married!
Then everything was about Sheila. Can’t go to the pub.
Can’t go to the game. Me and Sheila are going to the flicks
tonight. Sheila’s booked a table at that Chinese in Hope
Street. I’d ask you to join us, but, you know . . .
That’s when I got really serious about the hillwalking. If I
was going to be on my own, I’d rather be climbing a
mountain somewhere than sitting on my tod fetching endless
beers from the fridge and watching a game that was only half
as entertaining without the banter.
I was jealous as fuck when he said they were getting
married. Of course, I agreed to be his best man. How could I
tell him I didn’t really like his Sheila very much? I suppose
there was never any chance I would. After all, she’d stolen
my best mate.
He and Sheila put down a deposit on one of those four-in-
a-block houses in King’s Park, and after the wedding I hardly
saw him outside of work. To be honest, I didn’t want to
socialise with the two of them, and I’m pretty sure Sheila
didn’t like me very much anyway. I stayed on at the flat after
Tiny left, but I was spending less and less time there. Every
day I wasn’t working, every holiday, I was off up the
Highlands bagging a Munro. In Scotland, that’s any mountain
over 3,000 feet. There are 282 of them, and I must have
clocked up well over a hundred back in the day. In the
Mamores, the Cairngorms, the Grampians . . .
 Tiny was still my mate, always will be. But it wasn’t the
same any more. We were cops together and that was it. And
I was sick to death of him telling me how great it was being
married, and how I needed to find myself a woman and settle
down, raise a family. Irony of it is, I was the one that ended
up having the kid. Tiny and Sheila never could.
It all changed for me one October night, about a year after
they were married. Tiny and I were still working out of
London Road. We were lucky. We had a BMW 530, which
could fairly shift when we needed it to. Tiny usually drove,
cos he had these long legs that meant he had to push the
seat right back, and I couldn’t be bothered readjusting it
every time. I mean, I’m not short. Just under six foot. But
my feet wouldn’t even reach the pedals.
A call came over the radio for us to attend a domestic at a
block of flats at Soutra Place in Cranhill. Overlooking that
tousy wee park. Routine shit. It was pitch when we got there,
lights in all three towers burning against a black sky that had
been spitting rain at us all night. Seventeen storeys in those
blocks. It was just our luck that the domestic was on the
fifteenth and the fucking lift wasn’t working.
I was used to climbing, so it didn’t really bother me. But
Tiny was well out of puff by the time we got there. And we
could hear the raised voices all the way down the hall. It
sounded like World War III. The man’s voice dominating, and
what sounded like a young girl pleading. A constant stream
of exhortations for him to stop. And then a scream when he
hit her. There were other residents standing in open
doorways as we pushed along to the end door.
‘Took yer fucking time,’ someone told us in a voice that
sounded like sandpaper.
‘It’s been going on for hours,’ a woman said. ‘He’s going to
kill her one of these days!’
Tiny hammered on the door, and the sound of it
reverberated all the way back down the hall. There was a
sudden silence inside. A moment. Then a man’s voice
shouting, ‘What the fuck?’
Tiny glanced at the nameplate above the bell. ‘Open up, Mr
Jardine, it’s the police.’
Another pause. ‘Fuck off!’
My turn. ‘Sir, we need to verify that there is not a criminal
assault in progress. If you don’t open up, we’re going to have
to call in reinforcements and break your door down.’
The door flew open and Jardine stood silhouetted against
the light in the hall behind him, swaying unsteadily. The
smell of alcohol off him was rank. He was a big man. Not as
tall as Tiny, but built. He had a half-grown beard on a pale
face that was oddly handsome in its own way. Green eyes
that seemed lit from behind. Sculpted eyebrows and a shock
of thick, black hair. ‘There,’ he said. ‘I’m fucking fine. See?
Nae blood.’
I peered around him, trying to see into the living room.
‘And the young lady?’
‘That’s no lady, that’s my wife. Ha, ha, ha. Only joking.
She’s my bidey-in and she’s fine. Alright?’
‘We’d like to verify that, sir,’ Tiny said, and Jardine found
himself looking up into Tiny’s implacable face. Probably
something he really wasn’t used to.
Without a word he stood aside, holding the door open, and
we went through into a room that looked like a bomb had
gone off in it. Chairs were overturned. A burst cushion had
sent feathers flying. They were still settling. There was an
overturned wine bottle and a broken tumbler on a coffee
table that was scorched and pitted by cigarette burns. The
place smelled of alcohol and vomit and stale smoke, a fugg of
it still hanging in the air. An overhead lamp threw a cold
yellow light on to this sad scene of domestic bliss, casting
cruel shadows on the slip of a girl who sat on the settee,
hunched forward, palms pressed together between her
knees.
It was the first time I ever set eyes on Mel. And I guess I
knew even then there was something special about her. Can’t
say what it was. I mean, she was no beauty. Not in any
conventional way. There wasn’t a trace of make-up on a face
that was swollen and bruised, blood clotting on a split lip. Her
hair was greasy and limp, and hanging down like hanks of
torn curtain that she was trying to draw on herself. As if
somehow they could hide her shame.
I suppose it was her eyes. I’d never seen eyes that dark.
I’d read descriptions in cheap novels of folk having eyes like
coal, but it was the first time I’d been able to picture it. Later
I understood that while her eyes really were a very deep
brown, it was the dilation of her pupils that had made them
so black that night. But you could see there was light in the
darkness. And something that said there was intelligence
there too, even if it wasn’t immediately apparent.
She wore a bloodstained T-shirt and baggy blue jog pants,
bare feet revealing pale pink painted toenails with chipped
and broken varnish.
I figured she was eighteen, maybe nineteen, and couldn’t
work out what she was doing with a man a good ten years
her senior. A brute of a man at that. My first instinct was to
lift her to her feet and take her in my arms. My second was
to beat the shit out of the man who’d done this to her. I did
neither.
Tiny said, ‘Big man, eh? Beating up on a lassie.’
‘She fell,’ Jardine said.
I couldn’t bring myself to speak, but the look on my face
must have said it all.
He stared back at me. ‘What!’
I said, ‘I think you’d better come down to the station with
us, Mr Jardine.’
‘And why would I do that?’
‘The desk sergeant might just want to charge you with
breach of the peace.’
‘Whose fucking peace?’
‘The peace of every neighbour who called to complain
about the noise you’ve been making.’
 Tiny said, ‘And then there’s the question of assault.’ He
reached for Jardine’s wrist, but wasn’t expecting the reaction
he got.
Jardine pulled away abruptly, fuelled by that potent mix of
alcohol and the anger that burns in all bullies. ‘I’ll give you
fucking assault,’ he shouted. And his clenched fist came
swinging into the room. A punch that connected with nothing
but fresh air as Tiny took a step back and Jardine lost his
balance.
I moved in fast, catching his forearm and swinging him
round to bang face-first into the wall. Tiny had the cuffs on
him before he could move. ‘Add resisting arrest to that
count,’ I breathed into his ear.
Tiny took him down to the car then, and I stayed with the
girl to see if she needed medical attention.
‘I’m alright,’ she insisted. But I made her sit where she was
and went through to the kitchen to boil a kettle, then wadded
up some kitchen roll to clean the blood from a cut in her
hairline and the split on her lip. She pulled away from the
sting of it, and I looked at the bruising coming up on her
face. I could see that there was old yellow bruising beneath
the fresh stuff, and more on her forearms, where maybe she
had raised them to protect herself.
‘You should put witch hazel on that bruising,’ I said. I
remembered that my mum had always kept some in the
house for when I had a tumble from my bike or got into a
fight at school.
Unexpectedly, she laughed, and her face shone as if
someone had turned on a light. ‘Don’t know any witches,’ she
said. ‘And for sure not any called Hazel.’
‘I’ll need to introduce you to her, then. She can magic
those bruises away.’ She smiled and I said, ‘What are you
doing with him, darling?’ And the light went out. Tears filled
those dark eyes and she shook her head.
‘None of your business.’
And maybe it wasn’t. We sat for a moment before I said,
‘What’s your name?’
In a tiny voice she said, ‘Mel.’ And then smiled again
through her tears. ‘My mum was a big Spice Girls fan.’
Of course I’d heard of the Spice Girls, but they’d gone their
separate ways before I even started primary school, so the
reference was kind of lost on me at the time.
She saw my confusion and grinned. ‘Two of them were
called Mel. Well, Melanie, I suppose. But I was just Mel.
That’s what’s on my birth certificate. Just plain old Mel.’
It’s hard to describe why, but something in the childlike
innocence of this touched me. It was a quality she had that
she never lost, and that never failed to affect me. I would
learn in time that she was also smart, and perceptive. But it
was that intractable innocence that led to her downfall.

It was still raining when I got to the car. I don’t know why,
but I had kind of worked myself up into a lather going back
down all those stairs. The only thing I could picture was that
pale bruised face, and the innocence of her smile. And the
drunken fist that Jardine had thrown at Tiny. The thought of
it connecting with Mel. I knew that whatever happened to
him tonight, he would take it out on her when he got home,
and I wanted him to know I wasn’t about to let that happen.
Tiny was sitting at the wheel with the window down. ‘She
alright, mate?’ he said. But I just walked past and opened
the rear door. Jardine wasn’t expecting it, so it was easy
enough to pull him out on to the forecourt. He fell to his
knees before scrambling unsteadily to his feet. I heard Tiny’s
voice from somewhere behind me. ‘What the fuck?’
I grabbed Jardine’s jacket and pushed him up against the
car, thrusting my face in his. ‘Lay a finger on that lassie
again, Jardine, and I’ll fucking have you.’
‘You and whose fucking army?’ he roared. And I was totally
unprepared for the headbutt. A Glasgow kiss delivered
properly will break your nose, but all that Jardine managed
was a clash of foreheads that stunned him and infuriated me.
 I piled in with knees and fists, catching him in the crotch
and pummelling his ribs until his legs gave way. A final fist
caught him full in the face, jerking his head to the side before
he vomited on the tarmac.
Tiny was pulling me away, his voice hissing in the dark,
‘Jesus Christ, man! Stop!
I turned towards him. ‘He headbutted me. You saw that,
didn’t you?’
His face was dark with anger. ‘Fuck’s sake, Cammie! Get in
the fucking car.’ And he dragged Jardine to his feet and
bundled him in the back.

London Road police station comprised a long, three-storey

brick building that stood in an industrial desert in the east
end of Glasgow, a spit away from Celtic Park football ground.
The compound at the back of it housed umpteen overspill
Portakabins that had become permanent fixtures. It was a
depressing place at the best of times.
The sergeant behind the charge bar cast a dubious eye
over the sorry figure we presented to him at a little after one
o’clock that morning. From the driving licence in Jardine’s
wallet, we had gleaned that his full name was Lee Alexander
Jardine, and that he was thirty-one years of age.
The blood from his nose had dried on his face, with one eye
bruised and puffed up till it was almost closed. I figured there
was probably a loose tooth or two, but that wasn’t obvious at
a glance. His wrists were still cuffed behind him, and he
stood half-hunched, his jacket stained with his own vomit,
the stink of alcohol hanging about him in a cloud.
The sergeant swivelled his eyes in my direction and took in
the swelling on my forehead. ‘Breach of the peace,’ I said,
‘resisting arrest, assault of an officer.’ The sergeant’s gaze
flickered towards Tiny, who shuffled uncomfortably and
nodded.
The sergeant’s gaze returned to me. Then back to Jardine.
‘Resistance like that would do credit to the French Maquis.’
Eyes to me again. ‘You know who that is, Brodie?’
‘No, sergeant.’
‘Nah, I thought not. He’s one helluva fucking mess, is all I
can say. Used minimal force to restrain him, did you?’
‘Yes, sergeant.’
He sighed. ‘You know I’m going to have to get the doctor
in.’
I returned his sigh and nodded. Medical examinations of
injured suspects rarely ended well for the arresting officers.

I got home just before two that morning. Went straight to

the cabinet in the bathroom. I was sure I’d brought a bottle
of witch hazel from my folks’ place when I cleared it out after
Dad died. And there it was, behind a bottle of mouthwash
and a bunch of prescription painkillers Tiny had taken once
for a twisted ankle. I showered and changed and went
straight back out. Didn’t take long to get over to the east
side at that time of the morning.
I was getting a bit fed up by now with the fifteen flights. I
was tired after a long shift, and should just have crashed
when I got home. But I needed to see her again when I was
sure Jardine wouldn’t be there. Breathless, I knocked softly
at the door. Didn’t want to go waking up all the neighbours
again. When she didn’t respond, I tried the bell and stood
waiting in the hall. Not sure why I was so tense, but I was all
bunched up inside. Nervous, I guess.
And then the door opened, just a crack, and I saw the
curtain of hair hanging down over her face in the dark. I
could almost feel her relief as the door opened wider and she
stood staring at me with startled rabbit eyes.
‘I thought you were him,’ she said in a voice so small I
could barely hear it.
‘He’s being detained at Her Majesty’s pleasure,’ I told her.
‘What do you want?’
I fished the bottle of clear liquid out of my jacket pocket
and held it up. ‘I promised to introduce you to Hazel. She’s a
good pal.’
She looked at the label and a reluctant smile brought light
to her dark eyes. She held the door wide and I brushed past
her into the sitting room. In the hours since I’d left, she’d
made something of an effort to clear the place up. The bottle
and broken glass were gone. Chairs righted. There were still
feathers everywhere. I turned as she came into the room
behind me.
‘Got some cotton wool?’
She nodded and went through to the kitchen, returning
with soft, coloured balls of cotton wool in a clear plastic bag.
I sat down on the settee beside her, soaking a ball with the
witch hazel and applying it liberally to the bruising on her
face and arms.
In keeping with the rabbit eyes, she sat like one caught in
the headlights and just let me do it. A patient and long-
suffering creature who has learned through experience that
resistance is pointless. I was so focused on what I was doing,
I didn’t notice at first that although she was facing straight
ahead, she had turned her eyes in my direction and was
staring at me. It came as something of a shock, and I think I
might have blushed.
‘What?’ I said.
‘Did Lee do that to you?’
And I felt my hand go involuntarily to the swelling on my
forehead. I nodded.
‘Why are you doing this?’
It was a good question. Why was I? I couldn’t admit that I
fancied her. Cos it wasn’t really that. I mean, I fancied lots of
birds. But there was something . . . compelling about her.
Yeah, that’s the word. In some way beyond my control, I had
felt compelled to come back. It wasn’t a decision I took, or a
choice I had made. It was her fault, not mine. But all I said
was, ‘I hate bullies.’
She smiled sadly. ‘So do I.’
‘So why do you stay with him?’
 She just shrugged. There was a word I’d come across
recently. Lassitude. It means kind of lethargic. Lacking
energy. That’s what she was like. As if the hand that life had
dealt her owed everything to fate and nothing to choice. ‘It’s
complicated.’
‘Then try and explain it to me.’
‘Why?’ She turned genuinely puzzled eyes towards me.
‘Because . . .’ She was asking such simple questions and I
was finding them so hard to answer. ‘Because I’m
concerned.’
Her smile then was dismissive, as if to say that I shouldn’t
be wasting my time, or my concern. She said, ‘He’s not
always like he was tonight.’ Her eyes turned down towards
wringing fingers between her knees. ‘Not when he’s sober.
Tomorrow he’ll be a different man. You wouldn’t recognise
him. The place’ll be full of flowers, and chocolates. He’ll have
booked us a table in a nice restaurant somewhere . . .’ Her
voice trailed away and she cast uncertain eyes towards me,
as if fearing I wouldn’t believe her. ‘He treats me well. Spoils
me.’
‘Aye, until the next time.’
And she saw her own doubt reflected in my scepticism.
‘Listen . . .’ I took one of her hands in mine. ‘You can get
away from him if you want. I can recommend a refuge. There
are good people there. You’ll be safe. It’ll be the first step to
a new life. One where being battered by a drunk today isn’t
the price you pay for being spoiled tomorrow.’
She drew her hand quickly away from mine and wouldn’t
meet my eye. ‘Lee would never let me go. He’d track me
down. He’d find me.’
I found myself shaking my head, and knelt down in front of
her to take her by the shoulders. It kind of forced her to look
at me. ‘Mel, as long as I’m around, I’m not going to let him
hurt you.’
And I saw such pain then in her black, black eyes. And felt
the scorn in the breath that escaped with her words. She
shook her head. ‘And when you’re not around?’

I met Tiny in the locker room when we started our shift at

five the following afternoon. He was still in a mood with me,
and we shared our own little pool of silence amid the banter
of the guys finishing up and the officers just starting. No one
seemed to notice. But there was a definite lull in the
conversation when Joe Bailley stuck his head round the door
and said that the sergeant wanted to see me and Tiny in his
office toot sweet.
This was our regular sergeant. Not the duty officer on the
charge bar from the night before. Frank Mulgrew was a big
man with a ring of fuse-wire ginger hair around his otherwise
bald pate.
‘Shut the door,’ he said when we went in, and we knew
then that we were in trouble. He sat behind his desk and
glared up at us from beneath bushy ginger brows. He lifted a
handful of clipped sheets from the desk and dropped them
again. ‘Medical report on one Lee Alexander Jardine.
Extensive bruising, couple of cracked ribs, concussion,
broken nose. Injuries not exactly consistent with a simple
case of resisting arrest.’
I said, ‘He was drunk, Sarge. Headbutted me and came at
Tiny fists flying.’
He cast a sceptical eye over the two of us. ‘Is that right?’
He lifted the medical report again. ‘A couple of big fellas like
you needed to inflict this much damage just to restrain a
drunk man?’ He almost threw it back on to the desk.
Me again. ‘He was well gone, Sarge, wouldn’t come
quietly.’
Mulgrew got slowly to his feet, brown-speckled green eyes
bathing us in the light of his contempt. He placed clenched
fists on the desk in front of him and leaned forward on his
knuckles. ‘You are so fucking lucky that Jardine’s common-
law missus didn’t want to press charges against him. And he
just wanted out of here so fast he wasn’t interested in raising
a complaint against you two.’
‘You let him go?’ I couldn’t believe it.
‘Maybe you’d have preferred to face disciplinary charges,
Brodie.’
Which shut me up.
Mulgrew raised himself up to his full and not inconsiderable
height. ‘Cross the line one more time and I’ll make it my
personal mission to see you both out of uniform before you
can say Section 38. Now get the fuck out of my sight.’

Tiny didn’t say a word until we were safely ensconced in the

BMW. Even then he just sat silent behind the wheel for the
longest time before he turned a look on me that would have
wilted flowers. I’d never felt the full force of his fury before.
It came in softly spoken words that delivered each blow like a
punch.
‘You ever do that to me again, Cammie, I’ll no’ stay silent.
I’ll fucking shop you. I’ve worked hard to get where I am. No
chance I’m going to throw it all away for some wanker with a
hard-on.’
 CHAPTER SIX
2051
Earlier Brodie had turned on lights all over the flat, tearing it
apart to look for more whisky. Finding, finally, a drawerful of
miniatures collected from flights and hotel rooms.
Now he sat in the sad, harsh light of the front room
working his way through them, one after the other, as he
watched more images of the past slide across the screen
above the fireplace.
In the early photographs, when Addie was just a baby, Mel
had been happy and radiant, and he lingered over them. But
the increasingly haunted face she presented to the world in
later years made him scroll more quickly by. Somehow, when
someone close to you loses weight, and sadness leaches the
life from their eyes, you’re not always aware of it. Not at the
time. It’s only later, and with the benefit of hindsight, that
you see it. The before and the after. And it is shocking.
Brodie was shocked now that he hadn’t seen it in the
moment. Or maybe hadn’t wanted to. And couldn’t face the
self-recrimination on top of his self-pity.
He focused instead on Addie. How easy it was in the digital
age to take photographs and videos. Hundreds of them,
thousands of them. Most languishing on hard drives and SD
cards, seldom viewed beyond the taking. But there could
hardly have been a generation in history whose lives had
been more visually chronicled than Addie’s.
Dozens and dozens of her as a baby. Newborn, crusty and
wet, fresh from the womb. First nappies, first pram, first cot,
first step. Every first of almost every day recorded for
posterity.
Mel had told him the night they met that her mother had
named her after one of the Spice Girls. Or maybe two of
them. Mel herself had wanted to name their daughter after
her favourite singer. Adele. In the early days she’d always
had music playing. The sad, haunting, self-pitying songs of
Adele had predominated, to the point where Brodie had come
to hate them. Lyrics mirroring a generation obsessed with
itself. Though he never said anything.
When Mel told him she wanted to name their daughter
after the singer, he had bitten back an objection. There was
not a single happiness he would have denied her. But right
from the start, he had been unable to bring himself to call
her Adele, shortening it instead to Addie. Which had stuck.
All her life.
Now he watched through a haze of alcohol as his daughter
grew up before his eyes. From laughing toddler, to the
solemn-faced five-year-old in her brand-new uniform whose
hand he had held as he walked her to the school gates for
the very first time. He could remember, still, the sense of
loss he’d experienced watching her passing through them
and into her new life. The loss was one of innocence. He
understood now that each chapter of our lives changes us
irrevocably. That we grow and adapt to fit the new narrative.
And that nothing is ever the same again.
But he had loved that little girl. And loved her again as he
watched her once more grow towards womanhood. The video
that Mel had taken of him teaching her to swim. Then the
first wobbling turn of the wheels as she learned to ride a
bike, screaming, ‘Don’t let go, Daddy, don’t let go,’ long after
he had.
Now a toothy twelve-year-old with braces, arms wrapped
around the astrological telescope he had bought for her
birthday. She was almost unable to contain her glee. An
obsession with the sky, an early indicator of where the future
might lead her. Now she could see the stars that she had
somehow always wanted to reach for.
Then came the succession of inappropriate boyfriends that
punctuated her teen years, the knee-jerk rejection of
parental advice as she very nearly drowned in a sea of
adolescent hormones, almost unrecognisable from the little
girl he had taken to school that first day.
And finally, the very last photograph he had of her. One
she had taken herself. A defiant, accusatory selfie. Her anger
at the world – and more specifically, her father – was evident
in the curl of her lips, the fire in her eyes. He could barely
bring himself to look at it. How had he even acquired it? He
had no recollection now. Maybe she had sent it to him. A
farewell gift. Of her hatred and contempt. The force of it had
not diminished in all the years since.
He fumbled on the cushion next to him among the empty
miniatures, in search of one with an unbroken seal. He found
the last one. A bulbous, dented little bottle. Haig Dimple. He
tore off the lid and sucked at the neck of it till it was empty.
His breathing was stertorous in the still of the room. He
closed his eyes and felt the world spinning away. Then
opened them to find Addie still directing her hostility at him.
He shut his eyes again to escape the pain of it. And made a
decision.
 CHAPTER SEVEN
It was just over a mile and a half from his tenement home in
Gardner Street to police HQ at Pacific Quay. As he did most
days, he walked it, avoiding Dumbarton Road where he
could. It took him a little more than half an hour. His parka
kept him dry in the rain for up to two hours, and his
waterproof leggings saved his trousers from a soaking. He
wore a baseball cap beneath his hood to keep the rain out of
his face.
Today it was falling in a steady, breathless stream, just a
degree or two above turning to snow. He hardly noticed it.
His head hurt and his mouth was like the bottom of a
birdcage. But he didn’t much notice that either. His mind was
somewhere else altogether, and he was only vaguely aware
of the extra weight on his back from the weekend pack
chock-full of climbing gear and a change of clothes. He was
accustomed to taking it on much more arduous expeditions
than this.
The south side of the river was almost obscured by rain as
he walked across the Millennium Bridge. The multistorey
blocks that housed the media and the police stood wraithlike
against a grey sky indistinguishable from the horizon, hazy
electric light illuminating misted windows in the gloom. He
felt better for the walk. But only just.
DCI Maclaren’s door stood ajar, as it always did. Paying lip
service to the open-door policy that he had promised but
never quite delivered. His familiar bark told Brodie to enter
when he knocked on it.
‘Got a minute, sir?’
Maclaren looked up. Brodie had changed out of his wet
gear, and only his reddened cheeks betrayed evidence of his
half-hour walk in the rain. ‘What is it?’
 ‘Just wondered if you’d managed to get someone to fly up
to Kinlochleven.’
‘Aye. McNair’s going. He’ll be taking a water taxi down to
Helensburgh within the hour.’ He tugged at his collar to
loosen his tie below an outsized Adam’s apple that seemed to
slide up and down his neck like a gauge recording levels of
profanity. ‘He’s not very pleased about it. The spot where the
body was found is halfway up a fucking mountain. The only
climbing McNair’s done in the last twenty years is into his
bed.’ He paused for a moment and frowned. ‘Why?’
Brodie said, ‘I could go.’
Maclaren’s frown deepened. ‘What happened to your
medical condition?’ The way he stressed the word medical
betrayed a certain scepticism.
‘I’ve been given the all-clear, sir. I brought in my backpack
and my climbing gear just in case.’
‘Well, la-de-fucking-da. McNair will be your friend for life.’
He shuffled through the detritus on his desk to retrieve a
buff-coloured folder and held it out. ‘The background’s all in
there. The water taxi will take you downriver to pick up an
eVTOL from the temporary airbase at Helensburgh golf
course. You’ll go via Mull to pick up the pathologist. She’s
been there carrying out PMs on the victims of the Tobermory
fire.’ He paused. ‘You do know what an eVTOL is, don’t you?
Never know with you old-timers.’
‘It’s an electric vertical take-off and landing vehicle, sir.
What us old-timers used to call a chopper.’ He paused long
enough for Maclaren to register the sarcasm, then said
quickly, ‘When was the body actually discovered?’
‘Three days ago. Too bloody long. They’ve been keeping it
in some kind of cold cabinet. It was found by a young part-
time meteorologist who’s married to the local cop. She was
up there servicing a mountaintop weather station. Installed it
herself apparently, along with a whole bunch of others in the
area about six years ago. She now only works a few hours a
week, on a service and maintenance basis. Childcare issues,
apparently.’
Brodie felt the skin tighten across his face.
‘I need you to determine whether it was an accident or foul
play and report back.’
Brodie said nothing. He was still reeling.
‘If it’s foul play, we’ll have to send in a full team.’ He
looked at his watch. ‘You’d better hurry. The water taxi’s
booked for half past.’
 CHAPTER EIGHT
Brodie stood on the landing stage. Its raised helipad
extended from Pacific Quay out into Cessnock Dock. In the
last century they had built ships here, a forest of cranes
lining each side of the river, breaking the skyline like
dinosaurs. Both species now extinct.
From where he stood, the levees blocked his view of the
north side of the Clyde. He huddled down under his parka
hood, watching the rain drip from the brim of his baseball
cap, a curtain of water obscuring his view of the flooding in
Govan Road that extended all the way up to Ibrox Stadium.
He very nearly didn’t hear his water taxi coming, its rotors
beating almost silently in the rain. Water taxi was something
of a misnomer. It was a taxi, certainly, one of many that
ferried passengers up and down the river between the city
and the temporary airbase at Helensburgh. But they never
touched the water. They were smaller versions of the eVTOL
that Brodie knew would take him up to Loch Leven. Like
grown-up incarnations of the drones he had played with as a
kid. Eight rotors in a circle around a glass bubble that carried
four passengers. They flew above the river at something like
two hundred feet, keeping to the left of an invisible centre
line, obeying the rules of the road as if the river itself was
some kind of highway. Which, Brodie supposed, it was. They
had a good range, around three hours flying time, and could
recharge wirelessly in fifteen minutes on any compatible
helipad.
It touched down lightly on the pad in front of him, its
coloured navigation lights cut through by rain. A door
detached itself from the bubble and slid back as the rotors
ceased to turn, and Brodie ran, crouched, through the
downpour. A photoelectric cell mounted in the door frame
read the card he flashed at it, and Brodie could see his face
and ID appear on the driver’s screen inside. The driver
leaned towards him. ‘Alright, pal. Jump in so I can shut the
fucking door.’
Brodie swung his backpack through the open doorway and
pulled himself up into one of four seats that faced each other
behind the driver. As soon as the sensor in the seat detected
his weight, a soporific American-accented female voice
prompted, Buckle up, buckle up, repeatedly until he did. The
door slid shut.
‘How could they no’ get a Scottish wumman to say that?
Fucking American cow. That’s all I get all day long, mate.
Drives me round the fucking bend. Try not to drip all over the
good leather, eh?’ The driver engaged the rotors, and the
eVTOL jerked gently as it lifted away from the ramp and
banked across the levee to the river. ‘Another beautiful day,’
he said, without a hint of irony. He hovered for a moment
until another water taxi had passed, before swooping up and
out over the water.
Brodie could never quite get used to the lack of engine
noise. The cab was cocooned in a silence broken only by the
sound of rain on glass. The Clyde lay like some long grey
slug beneath them, vanishing into the misted distance.
Glasgow itself sprawled away into the rainfall, north and
south, sporadic areas of flooding catching and reflecting what
little light there was in the sky, like a random patchwork of
paddy fields.
‘Cop, eh?’ the driver said, half glancing back over his
shoulder.
Brodie grunted.
‘Should be out catching crooks instead of swanning off
down the Clyde coast.’ He grinned into a rear-view screen.
‘Holiday, is it?’
‘Aye, right.’
‘Seriously, though, crime in Glasgow’s beyond a fucking
joke these days, know what I mean, mate? Break-ins,
carjackings. The lot. You’re not even safe in an e-chopper
noo. Don’t know what the hell the government’s playing at.
Mind you, who are you gonna vote for? The fucking
Ecologists? Gimme a break.’
Brodie was aware of him looking in the rear-view screen
again, but pretended that his interest had been drawn by
something way below them and off to the north. Why did taxi
drivers always assume you were a kindred spirit?
‘I blame the immigrants, me. All those . . . what are we
supposed to call them now? Asians. Flooding in. Scuse the
pun. Hardly ever see a Scottish face these days.’
Brodie couldn’t stop himself. ‘And what does a Scottish face
look like?’
‘Like yours, mate.’
‘White, you mean?’
‘Aye, well, pink in your case. What’s wrong with that?’
‘There are plenty of Scots who’re not white.’
‘I’m talking about real Scots, pal.’
‘So am I. Folk born here. Second, third generation. As
Scottish as you and me.’
The hundreds of thousands of immigrants fleeing climate
catastrophe in Africa and Asia had been welcomed in through
the Scottish Government’s open-doors policy. A policy
prompted by concern over falling birth rates and extended
life expectancy – an economically unsustainable
demographic. But a policy that had fed a growing sense of
protectionism, blatantly manifesting itself now as racism. The
closed-doors policy pursued by the government in England,
on the other hand, had only served to increase clandestine
immigration, leading to soaring crime rates there, and even
worse discrimination.
The driver said, ‘Baw-locks! Just cos they sound Scottish
doesn’t mean they are.’
‘Aye, and just because the words coming out of your mouth
bear a passing resemblance to the English language doesn’t
mean they make any sense.’
 The driver cast an aggrieved glance towards the rear-view
screen. ‘Who fucking rattled your cage?’
Brodie shook his head and averted his gaze to the
landscape drifting by below. Mercifully the driver took the
hint and sat in brooding silence for the remainder of the
journey.
Large wipers worked overtime to keep the glass free of
rain. But it was a losing battle. The world was visible only
through sheets of water that constantly distorted it.
Away to the south-west, Brodie saw the inundation
surrounding the towns of Renfrew and Paisley. Water that lay
in dull reflective sheets shimmered off into more rain. In the
early days, the flooding had quickly subsumed the low-lying
ground at Abbotsinch, north of Paisley, an area once criss-
crossed by the runways of Glasgow Airport. An international
hub where hundreds of flights had come and gone each week
was now little more than a haven for water birds and
fishermen.
They flew over the Erskine Bridge, and as they headed
further west, Brodie could just pick out the taller buildings
and church spires rising above the floodwaters which had
claimed the lower-lying areas of Port Glasgow, and Greenock
and Gourock. On the north bank of the estuary, the peninsula
of Ardmore was now an island, not much more than a
pinnacle of rock. And as they banked to the right, he saw
that the snow-peaked mountains to the north were lost in
cloud. It was impossible to tell where the land ended and the
sky began. Immediately below them, the entire seafront at
Helensburgh was gone.
The water taxi swooped over the town and up to the
fingers of green that extended across the hilltop. What had
previously been the golf course was now a temporary airbase
for civilian, and some military, traffic. The extent of its links
to the rest of the British Isles was limited by the range of the
eVTOLs that served it. International flights were out of the
question, except in hops via England, or the recently reunited
Ireland, to Europe. Transatlantic flights in and out of
Scotland had ceased a long time ago.
The old-fashioned cream clubhouse above the town
comprised a jumble of steeply sloped slate roofs, chimneys
and dormers, expanding to lounges and a pro shop under
several flat-roofed extensions. It stood surrounded by winter-
dead trees stripped of their leaves by a series of ice storms
the previous month. Taken over by both military and civilian
air traffic controllers, it was a hub of airborne activity, with
drones and eVTOLs coming and going in a daily traffic halted
only by extremes of weather.
The main helipad occupied the former eighteenth green
and was surrounded by smaller satellite pads that handled
the incoming and outgoing flights of aircraft like the water
taxi that had brought Brodie downriver.
The driver settled his e-chopper with a slight bump on the
pad furthest from the clubhouse. A much larger eVTOL stood
on the main pad awaiting Brodie’s arrival. The driver squinted
at it through the water streaming across his windscreen.
‘That yours, do you think?’ It was the first time he’d spoken
in about twenty minutes.
‘Looks like it.’ Brodie struggled into his still-wet backpack.
‘Where are you going in that, then?’
‘Out to Mull, then Loch Leven.’
The driver turned as the door slid open, and there was
something malevolent in his half-smile. ‘Rather you than me,
mate.’ He tapped his screen. ‘According to the weather
reports, we’ve got a nasty ice storm incoming this afternoon.
Get caught in that, and yon big bird’ll drop oot the sky before
you can say “ice on the rotors”.’
Brodie pulled on his baseball cap. ‘Thank you.’
But his sarcasm only amused the driver further. ‘Yer
welcome, pal.’
Brodie’s face was wet and stinging from the cold before
he’d taken barely a dozen steps. Icy water seeped in around
his neck and his cuffs as he dashed across the neatly
manicured grass towards his waiting eVTOL. It stood dripping
in the pewtery late morning light. Built more like a
conventional aircraft with an extended fuselage, its rotors
were mounted at the end of either wing, on forward
extensions, and on a V-shaped tail at the rear. Six in total.
The aircraft sat on three legs splaying out front and back,
and the cabin, like his water taxi, was made almost entirely
of smoked glass.
As he reached it, Brodie saw a figure clad in luminous
yellow oilskins hurrying towards him from the clubhouse.
Old-fashioned cotton cloth waterproofed with oil, he
assumed, since plastics had been banned for years now.
Brodie stood, dripping impatiently, on the pad. When the
technician reached him, he pulled a contactless card reader
from under his cape and held it out towards Brodie. ‘ID,’ he
barked through the wet.
Brodie flashed his card at the reader and the technician
satisfied himself that this was indeed the police officer whose
arrival was expected.
‘Cool,’ he said, and waved an RFID card at the nearside
door of the aircraft to open it, then held it out to Brodie. ‘Use
this to secure the aircraft at destination.’
Brodie frowned. ‘Won’t the pilot do that?’
The technician laughed. ‘There is no pilot, pal. Well, there
is.’ He jerked his thumb over his shoulder. ‘He’s in the
clubhouse. This thing’ll fly itself. It’s been preprogrammed.
Pilot’s got a watching brief in case anything goes wrong.
We’ve not lost one yet.’
‘I’m not surprised if he’s always sitting in the clubhouse.’
Oilskins pulled a face. ‘Very funny.’ He reached past Brodie
and pulled open a flap on the side of the fuselage.
‘Retractable charging cable’s in there. Two hundred metres of
it, which should be more than enough. Get it charging as
soon as you arrive. No wireless charging available on the
football pitch, I’m afraid.’
‘Football pitch?’
 ‘Aye. That’s what we’ve been using as a temporary landing
area at Kinlochleven. There’s a charging terminal installed at
the changing pavilion. And your hotel’s right next door. The
International.’ He nodded towards the interior. ‘You’d better
get in out of the rain. Sit up front so you’ve got access to the
computer screen.’
Brodie heaved his pack into the rear of the cabin and pulled
himself in, sliding across into one of the two front seats.
Oilskins climbed in beside him.
‘We took out the passenger seats in the back in case you’re
returning with a body. And the pathologist’s usually got a fair
amount of gear.’ He leaned forward and tapped the middle of
the screen twice with his index and middle fingers. It
immediately presented a welcome screen. A photograph of
the eVTOL taken against a clear blue sky on a bright, sunny
day. Brodie thought that it couldn’t have been taken here, or
at any time recently. A soothing, English-accented female
voice introduced herself. Welcome to your Grogan Industries
Mark Five eVTOL air taxi.
Oilskins said, ‘Zebra-Alpha-Kilo-496. Eve, activate remote.’
The screen flickered and displayed an aerial topographical
map with their projected route marked in red.
Remote activated, Zak.
Oilskins turned a wry smile towards Brodie and shook his
head. ‘Even the damn machines call me that now. You been
in one of these things before?’
‘Never.’
‘You’ll get the computer’s attention just by saying Eve.
She’ll put you in direct communication with the pilot if you
have any problems or questions. You can watch a movie if
you want, or catch the news.’
Brodie couldn’t imagine that he would be doing anything
except sitting on tenterhooks until Eve had put him safely on
the ground again.
‘So, if you’ve got no questions, I’ll let you get on your way.’
Zak slipped off his seat to jump down to the pad.
 Brodie said, ‘I’m told there’s an ice storm coming in.’ He
cast eyes around him. ‘I hear these things don’t do too well
in ice storms.’
Zak grinned. ‘No worries, mate. You should reach
destination long before she arrives.’
‘She?’
‘Aye, she’s a named storm. Hilda, they’re calling her. A
German name. Means battle, or war, or something.’ He
grinned. ‘Let’s hope you and Eve don’t get into a fight with
her.’ He laughed now. ‘Only joking. Eve’ll take care of you.
They’ve programmed a bit of a detour, via Glencoe, just in
case it gets a bit blowy before Hilda actually gets here. It’s
more sheltered that way and you’ll be able to maintain max
speed of about 200k. You’ll be fine.’ He pressed a button on
the inside of the door frame and jumped down as the door
slid shut.
Brodie felt himself encased again in silence, save for Eve
urging him to buckle up. The sound of the rain retreated to a
distant patter, although it still streamed down the
windscreen. Zak vanished at a run towards the clubhouse
and Brodie felt more than heard the rotors starting up.
Through the sweep of smoked glass overhead, he could see
them rapidly reach speed before Eve lifted gently off the pad,
rising slowly into the rain. The rotors canted unexpectedly,
angling themselves into a semi-vertical position to provide
forward thrust, and the eVTOL shot off suddenly across the
roofs of the clubhouse and the trees, lifting higher as it did.
Still there was no sound, and Brodie, sitting alone in this
strangely alien environment, felt oddly disconnected from the
world, as if he had just surrendered his present and his
future to some invisible guiding hand over which he had no
control.
Eve flew low and fast above the sodden winter ground
below. Over the Gare Loch and its long-abandoned nuclear
submarine base at Faslane. Loch Long with its lost village of
Arrochar, drowned by the storms and the accompanying rise
in sea level, cutting off direct access to the West Highlands
by road.
Most of the settlements along both shores of Loch Fyne
were gone. Strachur, Auchnabreac, and much of Inveraray.
There was snow lying on higher ground now, and the
mountain ranges to the north – when you could see them
through the cloud – were mostly blanketed by it.
Of course, Brodie knew, Scotland had escaped relatively
lightly. Large parts of eastern England had simply vanished
under the North Sea. From Hull, as far inland as Goole and
Selby. And to the south, Grimsby, Skegness, Boston, King’s
Lynn. Great Yarmouth and Lowestoft had barely survived. On
the west coast, the bright lights of Blackpool had been
washed away. Lytham St Annes and Southport were gone.
Much of London was underwater, too. The authorities had
moved too slowly in replacing the old Thames barrier, and
had run into funding problems when building the levees that
would have protected the estuary.
On the near continent, most of the Netherlands, including
Amsterdam and Rotterdam, had been reclaimed by the sea.
A good chunk of Belgium, the German seaports of Hamburg
and Bremen, as well as large swathes of the western
seaboard of Denmark had also succumbed to rising sea
levels.
There was worse, much worse, elsewhere in the world. But
there was a limit to how much you could absorb before you
became waterlogged yourself by too much information. It
was one of the reasons Brodie had simply stopped listening
to the news, or reading the newspapers, or watching TV. It
was depressing beyond words. Suicide rates, he knew, were
soaring. Because above all, there was nothing you could do
about it. Any of it. So, like many others, he had simply zoned
out, limiting consciousness to his own little bubble of
existence. The only place he had any say in how things
played out.
Now they were flying over the mouth of Loch Linnhe
towards the Inner Hebrides, leaving the mainland behind.
White caps broke the surface of a turbulent sea below, and
Brodie could feel the wind buffeting his eVTOL. Snow started
to fall as they reached land again, and Eve banked north-
west over the Isle of Mull. Brodie saw how the Atlantic Ocean
had nibbled away at a rocky coastline that rose well above
sea level in most places, keeping the bulk of the island intact.
Tobermory at the north of the island, where his pathologist
awaited, had fared less well. The dock and coast road were
awash; the row of multicoloured seafront properties that
featured on island postcards was semi-submerged. The rest
of the town rose steeply up from the water, cowering among
the trees. The coastline of Calve Island opposite had been
completely reconfigured by the relentlessly rising ocean.
Eve lifted up over the town to the golf course that sprawled
across the hill to the north of it. There was no helipad here.
Brodie saw how they were manoeuvring to land on an almost
perfect circle of manicured green. He could even see the
hole. Someone had removed the flag, and a figure, huddled
in waterproofs and hood, stood in a bunker at the edge of the
putting surface with two large slate-grey Storm travel cases.
He could barely see anything beyond the figure because of
the snow that was driving in now from the west, though it
was wet and not yet lying.
He opened the door and felt large wet snowflakes slap into
his face. A woman’s voice called out from the bunker. ‘Well,
come and give me a hand, then! I can’t carry these on my
own.’
Brodie sighed and wondered how she’d got them here.
There didn’t appear to be anyone else around. He pulled up
his hood and braced himself to face the blast, jumping down
on to the green and running at a tilt into the wind. There was
little visible of the pathologist’s face, with her hood crimped
tightly around it. Angry dark eyes flashed at him through the
snow. ‘You’re late!’ As if somehow he had any control over
departure and flying times. ‘Take my kit case, it’s heavier.’
She lifted the other one and ran for the eVTOL. Brodie
gasped at the weight of the case containing her kit as he
heaved it up out of the bunker and staggered across the
green. She was waiting for him by the open door, and
together they lifted the two cases to slide into the back of the
cabin. He helped her then to climb in and quickly followed,
closing the door behind them.
The howl of the wind was instantly extinguished, and a pall
of damp silence hung in the air as Brodie slipped into the
front seat beside her. She pulled away her hood to reveal jet-
black, crinkly hair drawn back from her face and tied at the
nape of her neck. Her complexion was a pale brown, her eyes
almost as black as Mel’s. She had a small, dark brown mole
on the right side of her upper lip. Her lips themselves were
full and marginally darker than the skin of her face, but
touched with red. A handsome woman. In her late thirties,
perhaps, or early forties. She glared at Brodie. ‘I’ve been
hanging about there in the wind and the snow for nearly half
an hour. Ever since they dropped me and told me you’d be
here in a few minutes.’
He protested. ‘I have no control whatsoever over the
timing of this flight.’
But she wasn’t letting him off with anything. ‘You must
have been late arriving for it, then.’
Irritatingly, Eve’s relentless voice was urging them to
buckle up. He could barely think above it. ‘For Christ’s sake,
do what she says and shut her up.’
They both engaged their seat belts and the voice ceased,
leaving them once more in silence.
He glared at her, before nodding towards her cases in the
back. ‘You’re welcome, by the way.’
She scowled back at him from beneath dark eyebrows. And
then her face creased suddenly into the most disarming
smile, and he saw the twinkle of mischief in her eyes. She
thrust out her hand. ‘Sita Roy. Dr Sita Roy, actually. But you
can call me Sita.’
 He shook her hand and felt the power of the pathologist’s
grip in muscles developed by the cutting of bone and the
prising open of ribcages. ‘Cameron Brodie. Detective
Inspector, actually, but you can call me mister.’
She laughed out loud. ‘Yes, sir.’ She half turned towards
the computer screen below the windshield. ‘Eve, we’re ready
to go.’
Eve responded immediately. Thank you, Dr Roy. Hold on
tight. And the rotors above them sprang to life.
‘You two are acquainted, then,’ Brodie said.
She grinned. ‘Eve and I have made many a trip together.
We’re old friends.’
The eVTOL lifted up from the green and wheeled away,
back towards the town, rising as it headed south.
Sita said, ‘Eve, what’s our flight plan?’ And the
topographical map displayed earlier reappeared, with the
route to Kinlochleven outlined again in red. Sita frowned.
‘Eve, why are we taking such a circuitous route?’
Incoming ice storm, Dr Roy. It’s more sheltered if we
approach via Glencoe.
Sita puffed up her cheeks and exhaled through puckered
lips. ‘And I’d been hoping for a short flight, too. I never
travel well in these things at the best of times.’
 CHAPTER NINE
They reached the mainland again just north of Oban. Much of
the port town was underwater, its roll-on, roll-off ferry
services to the islands long since defunct. Inland then
towards Tyndrum and banking north to Bridge of Orchy. The
snow was still wet, but lying here; the ominous peaks that
flanked the darkly sinister Glencoe with its history of betrayal
and massacre reflected white where light tore through breaks
in the cloud.
‘Where are you based?’ Brodie asked Sita.
‘Queen Elizabeth University Hospital in Glasgow. But they
send me all over Scotland.’
‘Yeah, they said you were doing PMs on victims of the hotel
fire in Tobermory. Is there some doubt about the origins of
the fire?’
Sita nodded. ‘Your guys think it was an insurance job. If so,
then technically the fatalities are murders.’ She sighed
deeply, lips curled in distaste. ‘Two children among them. My
American colleagues call burn victims crispy critters. I don’t
share their sense of humour. There’s nothing worse in my
book than performing autopsies on people who have died in a
fire. You get used to the perfumes of the autopsy table, but it
takes days to get the smell of burned human flesh out of
your nostrils.’ She canted her head towards the computer
screen. ‘Mind if I put on the news? I’ve been out of the loop
for a few days.’
He shrugged his acquiescence.
‘Eve, play me the news headlines.’
A voice Brodie recognised as a newsreader at SBC said,
‘Good afternoon, listeners. Welcome to SBC Radio One. Here
are the news headlines. The United Nations reports that the
immigration wars raging across North Africa have reached a
tipping point. Sheer weight of numbers is overpowering
national defences across the continent, from Morocco to
Egypt. Tens of thousands are already feared dead in the
conflict. Estimates put populations on the move from
equatorial Africa and Asia at around two billion, and South
European countries are bracing for a fresh flood of migrant
boats across the Mediterranean. The United Nations High
Commissioner for Refugees, in a statement earlier today,
described national immigration policies around the world as
unsustainable.’
They played a thirty-second clip of an interview with the
High Commissioner herself. She raged at political leaders in
Europe and Africa, describing them as immoral and ostrich-
like, accusing them of burying their heads in the sand. ‘The
problem is simply not going to go away,’ she said. ‘We have
to address it head-on and find solutions. Simply letting
people die is no answer.’
‘Jesus!’ Brodie said. ‘Two billion people?’
Sita shrugged. ‘That’s at least how many people live in
coastal settlements around the world, and in those equatorial
and sub-Saharan African countries made uninhabitable by
rising temperatures.’
He shook his head. It made no sense to him. People were
dying from heat at the equator and here they were flying into
an ice storm.
Sita looked at him quizzically. ‘Where have you been, Mr
Brodie?’
‘I don’t listen to the news. It’s too depressing.’
‘Burying your head in the sand, then.’ She sounded
unimpressed.
‘Ostrich-like.’ He echoed the High Commissioner for
Refugees.
Sita spluttered her derision. ‘Well, of course, that’s just not
true.’
‘What isn’t?’
‘Ostriches don’t bury their heads in the sand. At least, not
to hide from reality. They bury their eggs in the sand and
stoop to turn them over frequently. They don’t hide from
danger, they run from it. At up to seventy kilometres an
hour. And if forced to fight, they will. An ostrich can kick with
a force of a hundred and forty kilos per square centimetre,
enough to kill a lion with a single blow.’
Brodie looked at her in astonishment. ‘Wow. How do you
know all that?’
She shrugged lightly. ‘It’s sort of a hobby. I’ve been
teaching my kids all about the animals and birds and fish
that’ll soon be extinct. It’s important they know about the
world we’ve destroyed, don’t you think?’
‘And human beings? Where do they figure on your
extinction list?’
‘Oh, pretty high up, the way things are going.’
The radio was still playing in the background. Brodie said,
‘I don’t want to listen to any more of this.’ He turned towards
the screen. ‘Do you mind?’
She shrugged.
‘Eve, stop,’ he said, and the news broadcast came to an
abrupt end. ‘Okay, so I’m not an ostrich. I’ve just got enough
problems of my own to deal with.’ And he realised, with
something of a shock, that for several hours now he hadn’t
thought once about the death sentence his doctor had
handed down to him just yesterday.
‘Don’t we all?’ She didn’t sound sympathetic.
He looked at her. ‘So are you one of the two billion, then?’
‘I would have been. Except I’ve been here for nearly
twenty years. One of the allocation of so-called skilled
immigrants allowed in by the Scottish Government. People
were welcoming at first. There was already a well-integrated
Asian population here anyway. Both my children were born
here and consider themselves Scottish. But since the
country’s been overrun by immigrants, legal and otherwise,
hardly anyone sees us as Scottish any more. They just see
brown faces and tell us to go home.’
 ‘Why don’t you?’ He’d asked it before he realised how it
sounded.
She scoffed. ‘You’re no different, are you, Mr Brodie? This
is my home. And for your information, where I grew up is
gone. I guess that’s something else you didn’t hear on the
news you don’t listen to. Kolkata, where I was born, where I
trained as a doctor, is somewhere under the Bay of Bengal
these days. Lift your head, look a little to the north, and
you’ll see that Bangladesh is gone, too. A whole country. Just
not there any more. A bit like Florida. And large tracts of the
eastern seaboard of the US.’ Frustration escaped her lips in a
hiss. ‘Just don’t get me started on how the world failed to
meet its net-zero targets.’ She spoke quietly, but there was a
dangerous anger seething behind her words.
Brodie said, ‘I thought India was one of the worst
offenders.’
She flashed him a look that quickly turned to
embarrassment. ‘It was. Along with China and the US.’
They were following the line of the road now as it wound its
way through Glencoe. Jagged peaks on either side pushed
themselves up into a broken sky, patches of watery late
afternoon sunlight slanting through to land on snow in
dazzling patches that came and went like random
searchlights in a war zone. The snow had stopped falling, but
the wind had risen, and they felt the eVTOL stabilising itself
against the buffeting. Here and there, clutches of pine trees
pushed themselves up above the snow on some of the lower
slopes. The wind blew fresh snowfall off sheer rock ridges in
fine clouds that caught sporadic glimpses of sunlight from the
sunset beyond the mountains to the west. Tiny, unexpected
rainbows appeared and vanished in the blink of an eye.
By the time they reached Glencoe village at the western
end of the valley, the sky had darkened, the sun sliding down
beyond the horizon, its light snuffed out by the sudden fall of
night. The first hail carried on the edge of the wind crackled
against the glass.
 ‘What the hell’s that?’ Sita said suddenly, peering forward
into the gloom.
Ahead of them, on the far side of Loch Leven, a phalanx of
lights reflecting in the black of the loch blazed around what
looked almost like a small city.
‘Ballachulish A,’ Brodie said. ‘A fucking eyesore. Excuse my
French.’
‘The nuclear power station?’
He nodded. ‘This was a beautiful, unspoiled part of the
world before they built that monstrosity in the thirties. They
generate 3500 gigawatts a year there. Enough to supply
electricity to every household in Scotland, they said. I used
to come climbing here a lot, and hillwalking. It ruined almost
every view, from every hilltop and every mountain.’
‘But zero emissions,’ she said dryly.
‘Aye, zero fucking emissions.’
She leaned forward to get a better look as Eve banked to
the north-east. ‘They built it right on the water’s edge. Isn’t
it in danger of flooding?’
He shook his head. ‘They demolished the Ballachulish
Bridge, just to the west there.’ He pointed towards a thin line
of red lights spanning and reflecting in the loch. ‘Replaced it
with a barrier to contain rising sea levels. Generates tidal
electricity, too. And they ran a road across the top of it, so
you don’t have to go round the loch to get to the other side.’
‘Ballachulish A,’ she said thoughtfully. ‘Does that mean
they’re planning a Ballachulish B?’
He scoffed. ‘Probably.’
She said, ‘I can see the point of building a place like this
somewhere out of the way, but how do they get the spent
plutonium out? I can’t imagine that it would be very safe by
road. Or sea.’
‘They don’t,’ Brodie said. ‘They drilled into the bedrock next
to the plant. Half a kilometre down, something like that.
Then excavated a network of tunnels. That’s where they put
the waste. Buried for eternity, they say.’
 ‘Eternity, eh? That’s a long time. I wonder how they
measure it against something that’s got a radioactive half-life
of 24,000 years.’
Brodie smiled sadly in the dark. ‘Well, we’ll not be around
to find out.’
And she said quietly, ‘I wonder if anyone will.’
Eve shook suddenly, as if something had slammed into her.
Involuntarily Sita reached forward to grab the dash. ‘What
the hell was that?’
Brodie’s heart was pounding. ‘The wind, I guess.’
Rain turned increasingly to sleet and hail and slashed
through the lights of their eVTOL as it followed the course of
this Scottish fjord, mountains rising steeply in the dark on
either side of a loch that was in reality a glaciated valley
flooded by seawater. And all that Brodie could hear in his
head were the words of his taxi driver earlier in the day,
when he told him there was an incoming ice storm. Get
caught in that, and yon big bird’ll drop oot the sky before you
can say ‘ice on the rotors’.
Almost as if she had read his mind, Eve reduced her
height. Dropping fifty feet or more in a matter of seconds.
Sita cried out, ‘Woah!’ She grabbed Brodie’s arm.
They felt the storm snapping at their heels, the eVTOL’s
stabilisers working overtime. To their right, at Caolasnacon,
they saw the lights of houses lining the water’s edge and
extending back into the trees.
Sita said, ‘Is that Kinlochleven?’
Brodie shook his head. ‘Nah. These were homes built for
workers at the nuclear plant. All 3D printed. Ugly things.’
He saw Sita turning to look at him in the reflected light of
the computer screen. ‘They’re printing houses this far north
now?’
He shrugged. ‘Apparently.’
In the distance, at the head of the loch, they saw the lights
of Kinlochleven for the first time. They seemed feeble
somehow, almost smothered by the dark. Arcs of street
lamps delineated rows of houses built around the curve of
the valley and dissected by the dark passage of the River
Leven as it tumbled down from the mountains above, cutting
a swathe of fresh icy water into the warmer, salinated
seawater that washed up on the shore.
‘Tell me that’s the village,’ Sita said, a hint of quiet
desperation in her voice.
‘It is,’ Brodie said, with his own sense of relief. In just a
few minutes they would be on the ground, and the storm
could do its worst.
Then all the lights went out, and it was as if they had been
sucked into a black hole. There was no light anywhere,
except for the reflected glow of the computer screen in the
eVTOL, and a couple of spots directed by Eve on to the water
below. Water that seemed perilously close now and rushing
past at speed.
Sita let out a tiny scream. ‘What’s happened?’
‘Must be a power cut.’
‘Power cut?’ She almost shouted it. ‘You just told me
they’re generating three and a half thousand gigawatts of
electricity at the other end of the loch. How can there be a
power cut?’
‘I don’t know. The storm must have brought down power
lines.’
‘Well, how are we going to land in the dark?’
‘I have no idea!’ He turned towards the screen. ‘Eve, how
are we going to land in the dark?’
Eve sounded unruffled. I am preprogrammed for landing,
Detective Inspector Brodie. I do not require light.
Sita was still grasping his forearm, her pathologist’s grip
almost cutting off the blood supply to his hand. Below, by the
light of the eVTOL, they saw a shoreline exposed by low tide,
white-topped surges washing over it, forced up loch by the
wind that scoured the valley, winter-bare trees now bucking
and bending among a scattering of houses. The River Leven
in spate, white water generated by its power, almost glowing
as it fought against the storm surge to feed itself into the
loch.
Then they banked against the force of the wind, frozen rain
hammering on the glass, and Brodie just prayed that the
rotors wouldn’t ice up before they landed. A perfectly
delineated rectangle of unbroken snow swung crazily into
their field of vision. The football pitch. And both of them held
their breath as Eve dropped from the air to settle with a
bump in the snow, light from her spots spilling out around
them in a wide circle that faded into the darkness beyond.
The rotors powered down and Brodie felt Sita’s grip on his
arm relax as they both drew deep breaths.
‘Well, that was fun,’ she said.
‘Not.’
She turned towards him and laughed with relief. ‘Nothing
like a near-death experience for bringing folk together.
Thanks for the use of your arm. You might need witch hazel
for the bruising.’
And his heart leapt. A thousand memories of Mel flashing
through his mind in a moment. He rubbed his arm to get the
circulation back in his hand. ‘With a grip like that, it might
need to be set in plaster.’
She laughed again. ‘Plaster? You’re giving away your age
now, Mr Brodie. They haven’t used plaster to splint broken
bones since the Dark Ages.’
They were interrupted by Eve, whose oleaginous tones
seemed to coat the interior glass of the eVTOL. Her lack of
panic in the landing had been reassuring somehow, although
they both knew that panic was not programmed into her
software. Warning. Low battery. Low battery.
‘Jesus,’ Brodie said. ‘Now she tells us!’
Extinguishing lights to save power. Please connect me to a
power source as soon as possible.
Her lights went out, and the computer screen powered
down, leaving them in a darkness so thick it felt almost
tangible.
 ‘Fuck!’ It was Sita’s voice that reverberated around the
cabin. ‘What do we do now?’ She heard Brodie swinging
himself out of his seat to clamber into the space behind
them, and cursing as he stumbled over one of her Storm
cases. A moment later, light filled the interior.
‘I always keep an LED headlight in my pack,’ he said, and
she turned to see him stretching the elasticated band around
his head so that the tiny lamp projected from his forehead to
light the way in front of him.
‘Very practical,’ she said. ‘Can you teleport us to our hotel
now?’
‘If only I knew where it was.’
‘Huh! And just when I was starting to like you.’
‘The technician at Helensburgh said it was right beside the
football pitch. So it can’t be far.’
‘Well, I’ll let you go and find it. And when you do, you can
come back and give me a hand with my stuff.’
‘Yes, miss. Whatever you say, miss.’ Brodie raised a hand
to tug an imaginary forelock.
She grinned. ‘Well, it doesn’t make sense for both of us to
go stumbling about in the dark. And you’re the one with the
light.’
Brodie pulled a face. ‘So I am.’
He pushed the button to open the door, unprepared for the
blast of wind and sleet that nearly took him off his feet. He
zipped his parka up to the neck and pulled the hood over his
head, bracing himself with a hand either side of the door
frame before jumping down into the snow. Sita reached over
to shut the door quickly behind him.
He turned in a quick arc, but the light from his headlamp
didn’t penetrate far through the freezing rain that drove into
his face. He had a sense that since the wind was coming from
the west, that was the direction he should take. So he
staggered into it, semi-blind, until he reached a perimeter
fence. It stood around two-and-a-half metres high. His face
was stinging, almost numb now. There had to be a gate
somewhere. He worked his way along the fence. He could
see there were trees on the far side of it, and beyond them,
a strangely eerie glow that seemed to flicker through
branches that creaked and swayed in the wind. And, finally, a
gate. It opened on to an area that felt firmer underfoot
beneath the snow. Tarmac, perhaps. He leaned forward into
the wind and pushed himself up a short slope, where a path
appeared, cutting a way through the trees. And there,
conveniently planted in the ground, was a white arrow sign.
International Hotel, it read.
He found his way back to the eVTOL by following his own
footsteps, accelerated on his return by the wind behind him.
He banged on the glass with the flat of his hand until Sita
opened the door. She jumped down into the storm, a tiny
circle of wide-eyed face peering out from her hood.
‘You found it?’ She had to shout above the roar of the
wind.
‘Yes. But we’ll never be able to carry both your cases.’ He
reached in for his pack and swung it over his shoulders. ‘You
can get your kit in the morning. You won’t be doing any post-
mortems tonight.’
‘What about recharging Eve?’
‘Even if there was any electricity, I haven’t the first fucking
idea where the charging hub is.’ He felt the wind whipping
the words from his mouth as he shouted them into the night.
‘Nobody’s going to steal her tonight.’
She nodded, and reached in to pull her personal Storm
case from the hold. ‘We can take an end each.’
Brodie grimaced into the rain. ‘Of course we can.’
She grinned. ‘I always knew a policeman would come in
handy someday.’
Brodie smiled, and realised that for someone close to
death, he hadn’t felt this alive in years. He leaned in to hit
the close button and pulled back as the door slid shut.
‘I hope you know how to get back into that thing.’
He patted his pocket. ‘Got the keycard right here.’
 A smile twinkled in her black eyes.
They stooped to take a handle each and lifted her trunk,
and set off by the light of his headlamp to follow his footsteps
back to the gate.
By the time they had cleared the trees beyond the fence,
the International Hotel came in range of their light, a
sprawling, cream-painted building on two storeys with a faux
tower and pointed dormers. All its windows simmered in
darkness, but beyond the glass around the entrance porch at
the foot of the tower, a faint flickering light offered the hope
that they weren’t the only humans still alive in this storm.
They struggled up the half-dozen steps to the entrance, the
wind catching and swinging Sita’s Storm case between them,
and pushed gratefully through the door into a long, tartan-
carpeted entrance hall. Candles burned in a reception hatch
below a set of antlers, and on a table opposite. The door
swung shut behind them, and the storm receded into the
night, leaving flames flickering in the hallway to send their
shadows dancing around the walls.
Brodie and Sita set her case down and stood dripping on
the carpet. There was a residual warmth in here, but it still
felt chilly, the air laced by a faint smell of damp. Brodie
stepped up to the reception hatch. Glass windows were slid
shut and it was impenetrably dark beyond them. A bell sat on
the counter and he banged it several times with the palm of
his hand. Its shrill ring resounded around the emptiness of
the place. ‘Hello,’ he called into the silence that followed.
‘Anyone home?’
Sita said, ‘I feel like I’ve just walked on to the set of The
Shining.’
‘Don’t say that,’ Brodie said. ‘I’ve never been able to watch
that movie beyond the twins in the corridor.’
‘Big brave man like you?’
He grunted. ‘We all have our demons.’
A door at the far end of the hall swung open, startling
them, and the silhouette of a large man approached in the
gloom. A candle set in a holder in his left hand cut an oblique
penumbra on a bearded face, the larger shadow cast by his
bald head and shoulders increasing in size on the wall behind
him as he drew nearer.
He broke into a grin. ‘Welcome, welcome. You made it,
then?’ And he laughed. ‘Well, of course you did. You’re here.
To be honest, I wasn’t really expecting you, with the storm
and all. And there’s no telephone, no internet, so how could
anyone let me know?’ He stopped for a breath and held out a
bony hand. ‘Mr Brodie? Mike Brannan. I own the place, for
my sins.’
Brodie shook it reluctantly, and resisted the temptation to
wipe his palm on the seat of his trousers. Brannan turned to
Sita.
‘And Dr Roy, I presume.’
Brodie stifled amusement at the brief flicker of pain that
registered in Brannan’s face as the pathologist shook his
hand.
‘Can’t feed you, I’m afraid. No power. Kitchen’s out of
action.’
Brodie said, ‘Alcohol will do.’ He glanced at Sita for
affirmation. She nodded.
‘Yes, please.’
‘That can be arranged.’ He waved a hand towards the
entrance to the Bothy Bar. ‘You’ll have the place to
yourselves. There’s not another soul in the hotel. I’ll light a
fire, if you like. It’s a wood burner, so carbon-neutral.’ He
smiled, as if waiting for a round of applause. When none
came, he said, ‘I’ll show you to your rooms.’
They followed him up the staircase to a long, carpeted
hallway with rooms along each side. Brodie had extinguished
his headlight to save the battery, and the place felt oddly
disconnected from reality.
Brannan half turned a salacious smile towards them. ‘Not
sharing, I take it?’
‘No,’ Sita said firmly.
 ‘Thought not.’ He opened a door. ‘You’re in here.’
Brodie and Sita struggled in with her Storm case and
heaved it on to a luggage stand. The cream room had purple
carpet and curtains, and fresh towels folded on the bed.
‘And you’re right next door,’ he told Brodie. He began
lighting candles on the dresser. Clearly power cuts were not
an uncommon phenomenon.
Brodie slipped his pack from his back. ‘What happened to
Charles Younger’s car?’ He’d spent some of the flight to Mull
reading over the notes that Maclaren had given him. There
had been no mention of a car.
Brannan seemed perplexed. ‘I don’t understand.’
‘Younger’s car. He must have parked it here at the hotel.’
‘Oh, I’ve no idea. We don’t reserve parking places for
guests. We were busy last August, so he’d have had to take
pot luck. If he had a car at all, that is.’
‘How else would he have got here?’
‘Haven’t the foggiest.’
‘But his personal belongings were still in his room?’
‘Yes, but they couldn’t stay there after he’d gone missing.
The room was booked by someone else. So Robbie came to
bag it all up and take it away.’
‘Robbie?’ Sita said.
‘Yes, the local bobby.’ He chuckled. ‘Robbie the bobby.
Robert Sinclair.’
Brodie said, ‘I used to come here years ago, climbing and
hillwalking. There was no local bobby then. The old police
station was an Airbnb.’
‘Ah, yes,’ Brannan said. ‘But there was a mini population
explosion in the thirties while they were building the power
plant, and apparently it was decided to reinstate the local
policeman. The old police station was for sale at the time, so
they reacquired it and Robbie’s your bobby.’ He handed
Brodie a keycard. ‘Here’s your key. I’ll light some candles in
your room and go down to get the fire going.’ He paused in
the doorway, turning, as if struck by an afterthought. ‘Do you
want to see the body?’
After a moment’s shocked silence, Sita said, ‘It’s here? In
the hotel?’
Brannan shrugged philosophically. ‘Well, they’d nowhere
else to put him. And I had a big cold cabinet for cakes and
desserts lying empty in the kitchen.’

The kitchen was at the back of the hotel, pots and pans and
cooking utensils hanging from a metal rack above a central
stainless steel worktop. The place smelled of stale oil, taking
Brodie back to pub meals in Highland villages and scampi in a
basket. The shadows from Brannan’s candle cavorted among
the appliances and the big overhead extractor units. ‘Through
here,’ he said, and Sita and Brodie followed him into an
anteroom that might have served as a pantry. The air was
heavy with the astringent stench of detergent.
The cake cabinet stood on castors and was pushed up
against one wall. Its glass top was misted so that it was
impossible to see inside. Brannan handed his candle to
Brodie.
‘Here, take this.’ And he lifted the lid.
Charles Younger was a man in his forties, big built.
Thinning fair hair lay slicked across his forehead. He was still
fully dressed, just as he had been found. Vomit-green parka,
black ski pants, cheap walking boots. His woolly hat had been
recovered separately and lay beside him. He was folded,
knees drawn up, to fit into the cabinet. His eyes were open,
his mouth gaping, his face bruised and grazed. Those parts
of his skin that were visible had taken on a pink-reddish hue.
Brodie was struck by the ice-blue of eyes that seemed to
match the colour of his lips. There hadn’t been much about
him in Maclaren’s dossier. A single man. No relatives apart
from a very elderly mother who was living in a care home in
Livingston. He’d been with the Herald since graduating from
Edinburgh University. Won numerous awards, and struck the
fear of God into any politician who learned that he was
digging into their history. Brodie had never read a word he’d
written.
‘Looks fresh,’ was all he said. ‘For someone who’s been
dead for three months.’
‘Being frozen in ice most of that time will have preserved
him pretty well,’ Sita said. ‘And this cabinet’s what? Three,
four degrees?’
Brannan said, ‘Usually around four or five.’
‘Which means he probably hasn’t completely defrosted on
the inside yet. Though this power cut is going to accelerate
decomposition. Even so, I’m going to have cold hands when I
go pawing about his interior tomorrow.’
Brannan lowered the lid on the sightless body inside. ‘What
I want to know is who’s going to pay for a new chiller. I
mean, is it an insurance job, or do the cops cough up? Cos,
let’s face it, no one’s going to want a slice of chocolate cream
gateau from this one now.’
 CHAPTER TEN
The bay windows in the bar rose from a wooden floor to a
stucco ceiling and opened, in summer, on to a terrace with
unrestricted views back down the loch. There was no view
now, though. Just black beyond glass that ran with rain,
distorting their reflections. Despite the double glazing, the
flames of their candles ducked and dived in the draught, and
Brodie watched the glass bend with the force of the wind. He
shivered, despite the comparative warmth that came from
the fire that Brannan had lit.
A pool table lurked in the darkness of one corner, the balls
of a half-finished game casting shadows on the baize. In a
flicker of candlelight at the bar, Brannan placed a bottle, a
jug of water and two glasses on a tray, threw on a couple of
packs of crisps, and crossed to the window. He set the tray
down on their table and straightened up, running a large
hand back over the shining baldness of his head.
‘Shame you can’t see the view. It’s one of the big selling
points of this place. But never mind, you’ll see it tomorrow.
The forecast’s quite good, and you’ll no doubt want a drink
after . . .’ he hesitated and rephrased, ‘before you leave.’ His
smile was unctuous. ‘As for tonight, just help yourself to the
bottle. I’ll put it on your room, shall I, Mr Brodie? No doubt
Police Scotland will be paying for it.’
‘No doubt.’ Brodie grunted and leaned forward to break the
seal and uncork a bottle of Balvenie DoubleWood, pouring
generous measures of its pale amber into each of the
glasses. ‘Thank you, Mr Brannan.’ It was clear, he thought,
that he and Sita wanted some privacy, but Brannan wasn’t
taking the hint. Or maybe he was just lonely.
‘Ironic, isn’t it?’ he said. ‘A nuclear power plant at one end
of the loch, and a hydroelectric power station at the other,
and all we seem to get all winter these days is power cuts.’
‘And why’s that?’ Sita asked him.
‘Because the power still leaves here on pylons. They never
invested in underground cabling. So the overhead cables are
exposed to the full force of the weather. All these storms. Ice
forms on them and the weight of it brings them down. Bloody
short-sighted, if you ask me.’
Nobody was, Brodie thought. But kept his own counsel.
‘You know, they’ve had hydro power here since the first
decade of the twentieth century. Way ahead of its time. They
built it to power an aluminium smelter across the river there.
That’s long gone now, mind you, but Kinlochleven was the
first village in the world to have electricity in every home.
The electric village, they called it.’ He chuckled to himself.
‘When I bought this place six months ago, it was called the
MacDonald Hotel. I toyed with the idea of changing it to the
Electric Hotel. But people thought that was a bit shocking.’
He laughed. And when neither Brodie nor Sita joined him, he
added lamely, ‘So I settled for the International instead.’
Brodie took a long pull at his whisky and closed his eyes,
trying to shut out the voice, hoping that it might be drowned
by the wind. A forlorn hope.
‘Wish I’d bought it back in the thirties when they were
building Ballachulish A. There was an influx of thousands of
workers then, a lot of foreign experts among them. They all
needed accommodation. So the International, or the
MacDonald as it was then, and every other hotel and B & B
for miles around was full. The bars and restaurants were
stowed out, summer and winter, for more than five years.
Even when they finished work, the plant itself employed
nearly two thousand folk, and until they built the 3D homes
across the loch, they all needed accommodation.’ A long, sad
sigh escaped his lips. ‘Different story now, though. Business
has dropped right off. We still do well in the summer, but the
winter’s dead. Just dead.’
‘Like Mr Younger,’ Brodie said.
 Brannan leaned in a little, and his voice became softly
suffused with a sense of confidentiality. ‘You won’t be
advertising the fact that he was staying here, will you? It
wouldn’t be good for business.’
Brodie opened his eyes and felt a wave of fatigue wash
over him, as if he had just endured a long, sleepless night.
‘I’m afraid I can’t say what the press will or won’t report in
relation to the case, Mr Brannan. I suspect that if his death
was the result of natural causes, or an accident, they won’t
pay it very much attention at all.’
‘Well, what else would it be?’ Brannan seemed surprised.
‘Until Dr Roy has conducted her post-mortem, nothing can
be ruled out, including foul play.’
The hotel proprietor frowned. ‘Murder, you mean?’
Brodie shrugged. He had assumed that this was self-
evident.
‘But who would want to murder him?’
‘We don’t know that anyone did. But if he was, then it’ll be
my job to find out who killed him and why.’
Brannan stood staring forlornly at his reflection in the
window. ‘Never even thought of that. Let’s just hope he fell,
or had a heart attack or something. Can’t afford to lose any
more business.’ He folded his arms across his chest.
Sita said, ‘With all the snow you get here, you’d think it
would be good for winter skiing.’
‘Oh, we have the snow, but not the infrastructure. And too
much snow, if the experts are to be believed. Ballachulish A
might have brought a lot of business, but it also buried us in
bloody snowfall.’
Brodie frowned. ‘How’s that?’
‘So, to cool the reactor they use water from the loch, which
then goes back in to recirculate. That raises the overall
temperature of the loch, making it warmer in winter than the
air. So winter precipitation almost always falls as snow. Kind
of like the lake-effect snow they get in North America. The
stuff just dumps on us. Metres of it at a time.’ That thought
seemed to draw the curtain on his desire to talk to them any
further. He said, ‘I’m afraid it’ll be a cold breakfast, unless
the power comes back on again overnight.’ He made a tiny
bow. ‘Sleep well.’ And he retreated into the dark of the hotel
from which he had emerged half an hour earlier.
Brodie let out a long sigh of relief. ‘I thought he’d never
go.’
‘Interesting, though,’ Sita said, ‘that it never occurred to
him that Mr Younger might have been murdered.’
Brodie took a thoughtful sip of his DoubleWood. ‘Well, in
truth, it does seem unlikely. I mean, if someone had killed
him, they would hardly drag him halfway up a mountain to
get rid of the body.’
‘Maybe they killed him up there.’
‘Well, there is that. But, then, you’d have to figure it would
have been easier to kill the man before he went up.’
Sita emptied her glass and poured herself another. ‘You?’
She waved the bottle in his direction, and when he nodded,
refilled his glass. ‘What was he doing up the mountain
anyway?’
‘Hillwalking, apparently.’
‘Ah. A passion, was it?’
‘That’s the odd thing. He was supposed to be on a
hillwalking holiday, but from all accounts he’d never been
hillwalking in his life.’
‘How did he manage to climb a mountain, then?’
Brodie sucked in more whisky. ‘Binnein Mòr’s not a difficult
climb. Anyone could walk it, really. Take the long way round,
in good weather, and in August, and you wouldn’t need much
experience to reach the summit.’ He paused and ran the rim
of his glass thoughtfully back and forth along his lower lip.
‘But the body was found in a north-facing corrie. Coire an dà
Loch.’
‘Which means?’
‘Corrie of the Two Lochans. And you wouldn’t venture up
that way unless you had considerable experience.’
 They became aware for the first time that the wind outside
seemed to have dropped. The rain was no longer hammering
against the window. Brodie used a hand to shade his view
through the glass from his own reflection and peered out into
the dark.
‘It’s snowing,’ he said. ‘Quite heavily.’
‘Will that make it more difficult for you tomorrow, then, if
you’re going to go up there to take a look at where the body
was found?’
He nodded. ‘It will. But I came equipped for it.’ He grinned
at her. ‘And my kit doesn’t weigh nearly as much as yours.’
She shrugged. ‘Tools of the trade. You don’t cut open
another human being without the right equipment.’ She
drained her second glass and refilled it, before pushing the
bottle towards Brodie.
He grasped it to pour another. ‘And what drew you to doing
that?’ he said.
‘Oh, it was never my ambition to become a pathologist. I
wanted to be a doctor, Mr Brodie.’
‘Cameron,’ he corrected her. But she just smiled.
‘I trained at the Medical College and Hospital in Kolkata for
five years to get my MBBS.’
‘Which is what?’
‘Bachelor of Medicine, Bachelor of Surgery. We had a guest
lecturer in my fifth year, a visiting American pathologist, and
when he took us step by step through an autopsy, I was
intrigued by just how much you could tell about a person
from their dead body. How they had lived. How they had
died. And I was struck by something he said. He told us that
when he performed an autopsy on the body of a murdered
person, he felt like their last remaining representative on this
earth. The only one able to tell their story, explain how they
had died, even catch their killer.’ She smiled. ‘And that’s
when I decided I wanted to be a pathologist.’ She issued a
self-deprecating little laugh. ‘Maybe I’d have thought
differently about it at the time if I’d realised it would involve
another four years of specialty training.’
Brodie was amazed. ‘Nine years’ training to cut open dead
bodies. But just five to make folk well again?’
She laughed. ‘Yes. Seems like it should be the other way
round, doesn’t it? But I enjoyed my time there. The Kolkata
Medical College was the second oldest in Asia to teach
Western medicine. And the first to teach it in the English
language.’ She raised a hand to pre-empt his comment. ‘And
before you say anything, I know my English is good. In my
opinion, I speak it better than most Scots.’
He chuckled. ‘That wouldn’t be difficult.’
She was getting through her Balvenie DoubleWood at a
good lick, and there was a glassy quality now in her eyes. ‘So
what else should I know about Mr Younger before I go
cutting him up tomorrow?’
Brodie shrugged. ‘I don’t know that much myself. An
investigative journalist with the Scottish Herald. Single. Not a
hillwalker, despite the reason he gave people for being here.
It was Brannan . . .’ he nodded vaguely towards the interior
of the hotel, ‘who reported him missing when he didn’t return
to check out and pick up his belongings. There was no real
search for him, because nobody knew where he had gone,
where to look.’ He swirled some whisky pensively around his
mouth. ‘One thing, though. There’s about a minute or so of
CCTV footage of him on the day he disappeared. Talking to
someone in the village. A man, apparently, who has never
been identified.’
‘You’ve seen it?’
He shook his head. ‘No. But I should be able to view it at
the local police station. They record all the feeds there from
around the village.’ He lifted the bottle and held it up against
the candlelight. They were about two-thirds of the way
through it. He raised an eyebrow in admiration. ‘You can
drink,’ he said.
She raised her glass. ‘So can you.’
He laughed. ‘Goes with the territory, I guess. Folk like you
and me, we see things that most people never do. When I
was a traffic cop, I lost count of the number of times I
attended road accidents where we had to cut people out of
their cars in pieces. Or as a detective investigating a murder
where the victim had been hacked to bits. Most murders
aren’t pat and clever constructs like they write about in
books. They’re just brutal and bloody.’ He paused. ‘Well,
you’d know all about that.’
She nodded. And it was his turn to refill her glass before
topping up his own.
‘So . . . you mentioned kids earlier. You’re married, I take
it?’
‘Was.’
‘Oh. Divorced?’
‘Widowed.’
And for the first time he saw a sadness behind her eyes,
and realised it had always been there. He just hadn’t noticed
before.
She took a gulp of whisky and held it in her mouth for a
long time before finally swallowing it. ‘Viraj. We were at
school together. A lovely boy. Fell head over heels the first
time I ever set eyes on him. He had such big eyes, and
luscious curls that fell about his forehead. I could only have
been about eight.’ She smiled sadly, replaying some fond
memory behind the increasing opacity of her eyes. ‘I went to
medical school, he trained as a computer programmer. We
were sort of an item off and on for years. Then, when I came
to Scotland, he followed me here. Got a job in what they
laughingly called Silicon Glen, and told me he wasn’t about to
let me escape that easily.’ She laughed. ‘What’s a girl to do?
When a man demonstrates his love like that, and gets down
on one knee to propose . . .’
She stared into her glass now, as if the amber in it
provided some window to the past.
‘We had two beautiful children together. Palash. Two years
older than his little sister, Deepa. They’re nine and eleven
now.’ She looked up over her glass at Brodie. ‘My whole
world.’ And he wondered how much of this she would be
telling him if it wasn’t for the whisky.
‘What happened?’ And he knew it was the whisky that
emboldened him to ask. But he did want to know.
‘I was working one night at the mortuary at the Queen
Elizabeth Hospital. I’d just called home, expecting him to pick
up. I left a message, then called his mobile, but there was no
answer. I knew he’d been out earlier, and the kids were
overnighting with school friends. I just wanted to say I was
going to be late that night. They’d just wheeled in a body.
Victim of a street attack, and I had to do the PM.’ The deep
breath she drew had a tremble in it as she tried to control
her emotions. ‘I went to the autopsy room to open up the
body bag. And there was Viraj, lying there staring back at me
from the slab. My beautiful boy with his big brown eyes, and
those gorgeous curls falling over his forehead. Sticky with
blood now. His face all swollen and broken. Missing teeth.
Beautiful white, even teeth he’d had. Lips all split and bloody.
Lips that had kissed me so many times. A random attack,
they said. Kids whipped up into a racist fury by anti-
immigration politicians. Killed for the colour of his skin.’ Her
voice cracked. ‘Dead because he followed me here.’
A silent tear tracked its way from her eye to the corner of
her mouth.
Brodie was shocked to his core. ‘I can’t imagine.’ His voice
was the merest whisper in the dark.
‘No, you can’t,’ she said, as if daring him to even try.
He had no idea what to do, or say. And they sat in silence
for the longest time. Until finally she drew a long, quivering
breath and wiped away the tear. She took a sip of whisky
and cleared her throat, a determined effort to change the
direction of their conversation.
‘So what about you?’
‘What about me?’
‘Married?’
 His eyes dropped to the glass he clutched in both hands.
‘Widowed,’ he said, and he felt her eyes on him in the dark.
There was another long silence before she said, quietly, ‘Do
you want to tell me?’
He closed his eyes and thought that probably he didn’t. He
had spent most of the last ten years trying to forget. Images
burned into his retinas, scorched into his memory. Pain that
had never left him in all that time. And yet, hadn’t Sita just
bared her soul to him? The whisky speaking, for certain. But
she had told him things she had quite possibly never
revealed to anyone. Opened up her own little box of horrors
to public view. How could he refuse to reveal his to her? A
grown-up version of ‘you show me yours and I’ll show you
mine’.
As if she could read his mind, she said, ‘It’s okay, you don’t
have to.’
But he wanted to now. As if some invisible constraint had
suddenly been removed. He needed to share it with her.
Things he had never spoken about to anyone. And with the
sense of his own death little more than a breath away, he felt
the urge almost to shout it from the rooftops.
‘I was on the night shift,’ he said. Then looked up. ‘Why is
it these things always seem to happen at night?’ He
remembered it had been a warm, humid Glasgow night. He’d
had a fish supper earlier, liberally sprinkled with salt and
vinegar. And he still recalled the taste of it in his mouth when
he threw it up just a few hours later. ‘I was a detective
constable then. Working out of Pacific Quay. I got a message
that the DS wanted to see me. I thought he was behaving
kind of strange. Told me that he was taking me off shift. That
I was needed at home. Said he didn’t have any further
information. But I could tell that he did, and I knew that
something awful must have happened.’
His recollection of it was painfully vivid. The frantic drive
across the city. Turning into the road where he lived. The two
police cars, and an ambulance, sitting outside his home.
Neighbours standing at gates, gazing from windows, an
intermittent blue cast on inquisitive faces.
‘I ran up the steps to the door. There was a cop in uniform
barring the way. He raised a hand and asked where I thought
I was going.’
He heard himself shouting. It’s my fucking house!
‘Someone was crying inside. My daughter. Just crying and
crying. Throaty, like she had cried herself hoarse. Which she
had.’
Sita sat perfectly still. ‘What age was she?’
‘She’d have been seventeen then. Just started at Glasgow
Uni. Everyone was upstairs. A cop on the half landing, and a
couple of ambulance men a few steps above him. Addie was
sitting on the bed in our room, a policewoman with an arm
around her. She was inconsolable. There was a medic. A
woman. She was standing in the open door to the bathroom.
I still remember her turning towards me, eyes wide with
shock, face the colour of chalk. And she must have seen
things in her time.’
He paused to draw breath. Closing his eyes and replaying it
all in the dark.
When he opened them again, he said, ‘She advised me that
it would be better to remain on the landing. Like there was a
chance in hell I was going to stand out there. I glanced into
the bedroom and Addie was staring back at me. The look on
her face . . . I . . . I’ve seen it every night since, when I’m
trying to sleep. The accusation in it. The naked hatred. I felt,
right there and then, like my life was over, whatever it was
that lay beyond the bathroom door. But still I had to look.’
He turned his head slowly towards the window, as if it
might offer a reflective insight into the moment. Wet snow
slapped the black pane and ran down it in slow rivulets, like
tears.
‘I pushed past the medic and stepped into the bathroom.
The overheadlight seemed unnaturally bright, reflecting back
at me off every tiled surface. Like some overexposed film.’
He shook his head. ‘Of course, I realise now it was just my
pupils that were so dilated with the shock.’ A series of short,
rapid breaths tugged at his chest. ‘Mel was lying naked in the
bath. Her eyes were shut, and there was this strange, sad
smile on her lips. First time I’d seen her smiling in months.’
He turned away suddenly from the window, as if he could no
longer bear the vision it was offering him. ‘The water was
crimson with her blood. Marbled darker by it in places. The
woman I’d loved since the first time I ever set eyes on her
was dead.’
He turned now towards Sita.
‘Took her own life. It was Addie who found her. Came
home from a night at the student union, and . . .’ He couldn’t
bring himself to finish. ‘I’d give anything to be able to erase
that moment from her life. It’s when she stopped being my
little girl. It’s when she started hating me.’
Sita’s brows crinkled into a frown. ‘Why would she do that?’
‘Because she blamed me. Mel left a note, you see.’ He gave
a sad little chuckle that nearly choked him. ‘She wasn’t the
most . . . literate person in the world. Articulate in every
way, except on paper. I suppose she’d been trying to explain
why she’d done it. But they were her last confused thoughts,
and they were all jumbled up, difficult to interpret.’ He shut
his eyes again and shook his head. ‘She couldn’t take the
deceit any more, she said, knowing that she no longer loved
me. Even if I had been the love of her life. The affair had
somehow destroyed all her feelings.’ He paused. ‘As if it was
me who’d had the affair.’ He opened his eyes to gaze off into
the darkness. ‘That’s what everyone thought. Including
Addie.’ He turned his gaze towards Sita. ‘Blamed me for
cheating on her mother. Driving her to suicide.’
‘But there was no affair?’
‘There was. Only, it wasn’t me who had it.’ He raised his
glass to empty it and found that he already had. He leaned
forward to grasp the bottle by the neck and refill the glass
before raising it, trembling, to his lips. But the whisky
seemed to have lost its malted flavour now. It tasted harsh
and burned his mouth. ‘Though it didn’t look like that at the
time. I was partnered with a female detective in those days.
Jenny. We were colleagues, mates, but that was all. Jenny
came to the funeral with me for moral support, and Addie
thought she was my lover. How dare I bring my girlfriend to
her mother’s funeral!’
He could still feel the sting of her slap, delivered with all
the power of pure loathing when everyone had left the house
after the wake. Words hurled at him in a fury, barely heard in
the moment, and lost now in time. But the shrill tone of
anger and accusation still lived with him in every moment of
every day. As it would, he knew, till he died.
‘She packed all her stuff in a case and left that night to
stay with a friend. I haven’t seen her or spoken to her since.’
Sita reached through the candlelight in the dark to place a
hand over his and gently squeezed it.
He was overwhelmingly touched, feeling his eyes fill, and
fought to prevent the tears from spilling. Big, macho Scottish
men didn’t show their emotions, after all. He raised his glass
to his mouth and emptied it in a single draught. And the
sound of a glass smashing broke the soft, simmering silence
of the hotel.
They were both startled by it. Sita half turned towards the
barroom door. ‘What was that?’
Brodie blinked away his emotion. ‘Must have been
Brannan. I’ll go and see.’ He was almost glad of the excuse
to break the moment. He lifted a candle from the table and
carried it to the door.
Shadows moved around the walls of the hall as he crossed
it to the open door of the dining room. Empty tables stood in
rows, draped with white cloth, chairs tipped up, a forest of
legs at angles disappearing into darkness. It felt much colder
in here, draughty, and the flame of his candle danced
dangerously close to extinction. He saw shards of glass on
the floor catch its flickering light. Freshly knocked from a
table of wine glasses by someone no longer in evidence.
‘Hello?’ His voice sounded dully in the dark. ‘Brannan?’ No
response.
An icy gust blew out the candle, plunging him into total
darkness. He groped for a tabletop to lay it down and
searched through the pockets of his open parka for the
headlight he had stuffed into one of them earlier. His fingers
found the elastic headband and he pulled it out. A loud bang
somewhere on the other side of the dining room startled him.
He fumbled for the switch on his torch, and bright white light
pierced the gloom. He slipped the elastic over his head to
free both hands and turned his head to rake torchlight across
the dining room. One half of a pair of French windows
opening on to an outside terrace lay open, swinging in the
wind. As he hurried towards it, Brodie saw wet footprints on
the wooden floor. They came fresh from the open door, and
returned to it more faintly. Someone had come in from the
outside and beat a hasty retreat when Brodie entered with
the candle.
Brodie followed the fresh prints from the open door, back
across the dining room and into the hall, where they
vanished in the carpet. Had someone been eavesdropping on
him and Sita in the bar? If so, why? Retreating into the
dining room, the intruder had knocked over a glass,
smashing it on the floor.
Brodie crunched his way through the broken glass now,
heading back to the open door, and stepping out into the
snow that lay ten centimetres thick on the wooden terrace.
There, the footprints that came and went were crisply
imprinted in the fresh fall, and he followed them down the
steps and on to the driveway, zipping up his jacket.
Snowflakes fell through the beam of his torch as he followed
the footsteps through the darkness towards the trees and the
football field beyond.
He could feel his heart pounding distantly beneath fleece
and waterproof layers, cold wet snow settling on his bristled
head. Up ahead, he saw a shadow darting between the trees.
He shouted, ‘Stop!’ but only succeeded in sending the
intruder off at a run. Brodie ran several metres himself into
the trees, but quickly realised he would never catch their
eavesdropper. There had been far too much whisky
consumed. He stopped, breathing heavily for several
moments, before turning reluctantly back to the hotel.
Sita turned in her seat as he came into the bar, surprised
to see the snow on his jacket. He stamped his feet and shook
it off in front of the fire. She said, ‘Who was it?’
‘No idea. But someone was out there in the hall listening to
us talking in here. I don’t know how much they could hear,
or why they would want to, but they ran off through the
snow when I went after them with my torch.’
She stood up, a little unsteadily. ‘How did they get in?’
‘Through French windows in the dining room.’
‘Broke in, you mean?’
Brodie shook his head. ‘There didn’t appear to be any
damage. It couldn’t have been locked.’ He pursed his lips
thoughtfully. ‘But we’d better lock ourselves into our rooms
tonight. Don’t want to offer open invites to any unwanted
guests.’
She lifted her bag and crossed to the fire. ‘You think we’re
in danger?’
He shook his head. ‘No. I mean, why would we be?’
She shivered, in spite of standing in front of the flames. ‘I
don’t like this place,’ she said. ‘I’ve spent half my life with
corpses. But the thought of that dead man folded into the
cake cabinet in the kitchen gives me the willies.’

Brodie lay on his bed in the dark, fully dressed. He didn’t

think he would sleep much tonight, and every time he closed
his eyes, the room seemed to spin around him. So he stared,
unseeing, at the ceiling.
He had never, in all the years since, told anyone about the
events of that night when he came home to find Mel dead in
the bath. Not even Tiny. He had locked them away tight in a
dark place that only he visited. Scared to let the memories
escape into the light where, somehow, he felt they would
only do him even more harm. He knew exactly why he had
not wanted to confront Addie with the truth at the time. She
wouldn’t have believed him. Wouldn’t have wanted to hear it.
The man who had betrayed the trust of his wife and daughter
just trying to make excuses.
And in bottling it up, he had only made it worse, burying it
and damaging himself in the process. Until they had passed
the tipping point, he and Addie. That crossroads beyond
which there was no return. A time when healing might still
have been possible, if only they had made the effort. It
wasn’t until now, with his own death imminent, that he had
been moved, finally, to drag all the skeletons from his closet
and lay them out to be judged. Whatever that judgement
might be.
He thought of Sita, lying on her own in the next room, cold
probably, and a little scared, guarding her private grief
behind a bold façade that she had let slip tonight.
Unintentionally. To a stranger. And maybe that was easier.
Harder, he thought, to face someone you love with the
truth that you’ve been hiding from them for years.
 CHAPTER ELEVEN
Brodie awoke to daylight and a hangover, still fully dressed
and surprised to find that he had slept at all. He had not
even thought to draw the curtains the night before. Now the
reflected light of a white world beyond the glass washed
across the ceiling, and he blinked with the pain of it, his head
still fuzzy from the whisky.
Slowly, he swung his legs to the floor and stood up,
stretching all the stiffness out of his limbs. Outside, sunlight
touched the tops of snow-capped peaks as far down the loch
as he could see. Garbh Bheinn, Mam na Gualainn, and
others. The valley itself languished in the permanent shadow
cast at this time of year by the mountains that ringed it, and
Brodie saw wisps of mist curl gently upwards from the
coruscating surface of the loch.
He recalled Brannan talking of lake-effect snow the night
before, and wondered just how much the waters of the loch
were warmed by the process of cooling a nuclear reactor. He
doubted that it would feel particularly warm if he were to
plunge himself naked into it.
An unbroken blue sky lay mirrored in the water. As did the
mountains themselves, reflections shimmering in the gentle
breeze that breathed through the fjord and ruffled its
surface. It seemed very still out there. The only sign of life
was the occasional thread of blue smoke rising from the odd
village chimney. There would be few folk left burning wood
these days, he thought. Most had converted to geothermal or
air source heat pumps. But wood burned from managed
forests was thought to equal carbon-neutral. So . . .
He tried the light above the bathroom sink. Nothing. Still
no electricity. He slunged his face in cold water and cleaned
his teeth with a few perfunctory strokes of his brush, then
realised he had forgotten to remove the earbuds of his iCom.
Without power, there would be no signal, but he decided to
leave them in anyway. He regarded the day’s silvered growth
on his face and decided, too, not to shave. He would get
done what needed done today. The stuff said that needed
said. And, power cuts permitting, he would be gone by
tonight.
He knocked softly on Sita’s door, and when there was no
reply, tried the handle. It wasn’t locked and he pushed the
door open. Like him, she had not slept in the bed, but on it.
An impression of her body in the duvet was clearly visible,
the shape of her head pressed into the pillow.
He went downstairs and heard voices coming from the
dining room. Sita and a young man were sitting at a table set
for two. She turned as he came in, her eyes clear and bright,
and showing no signs of last night’s session with the bottle of
Balvenie DoubleWood. ‘Oh, I thought for a minute you might
be Mr Brannan,’ she said. ‘He laid out breakfast, such as it is.
Some cold meat and a few slices of cheese. But there’s no
sign of him.’
The young man rose quickly to his feet and Brodie saw that
he was in uniform beneath his reflective waterproof jacket.
His peaked, chequered cap lay on the table, and he seemed
uncertain for a moment as to whether or not he should put it
on.
‘Constable Robert Sinclair, sir,’ he said, extending a hand.
They shook, and Brodie saw that he was a handsome
young man. Blue eyes in a fresh, clean-shaven face. A fine,
well-defined jawline and an easy smile. Built, too. A good two
to three inches taller than Brodie. So this was the man his
girl had married. He cast critical eyes over him and said, ‘I’m
told you’re known by everyone as Robbie.’
Robbie seemed momentarily discomposed, a flush of
embarrassment on his cheek. ‘That’s what folk call me, yes,
sir. We’re very informal here.’
‘Good. Most folk call me Cammie.’
 ‘Yes, sir,’ Robbie said, without a moment’s hesitation. And
it was clear that sir was the only form of address he would be
likely to use. He waved a hand towards the table. ‘I brought
a flask of hot coffee. We’ve got an ancient wee camping gas
stove at home, and a little gas left in the bottle. I knew they
were all electric up here and you would probably be wanting
something hot to drink.’
We, Brodie thought, was Robbie and Addie. But all he said
was, ‘That’s very thoughtful, Robbie, thank you.’ He pulled
up a chair and sat down to pour himself a cup from the flask,
and Robbie took that as a signal he could resume his seat.
Sita looked at Brodie. ‘Are you not going to eat anything?’
He glanced at the cold meat and the slices of processed
cheese curling around the edges. ‘Not hungry,’ he said.
She grinned. ‘Don’t blame you.’
Robbie said, ‘We’ve set up one of the surgeries down at the
health centre for the PM. Still no power, though.’
Brodie looked at Sita. ‘Do you need power for the autopsy?’
‘Just a healthy dose of daylight and the power of my
elbow,’ she said.
‘Good. The sooner we get this underway, the better.’
Brodie drained his cup and stood up. ‘You got a body bag?’
‘With my kit.’
‘We’d better go get it, then, and move the body to the
health centre.’ He turned to Robbie. ‘We got transport?’
‘We’ve got my SUV, sir.’
‘Let’s do it, then.’

They drove to the football field in Robbie’s SUV. The eVTOL

stood mid-pitch where they had left it, heaped with a
covering of snow. At the gate, Brodie said suddenly, ‘Stop!’
Robbie brought the vehicle to a slithering halt.
‘What is it?’ Sita was alarmed.
‘Footprints. Someone’s been having a good look at Eve.
Wait here.’ He jumped down into the snow. A single set of
footprints approached the gate from among the trees and
tracked off in a determinedly straight line towards the e-
chopper. Brodie followed them and saw that whoever had
come to take a look at the flying machine had circled it a
couple of times, stopping at the doors on each side, perhaps
trying to get in. Then they tracked away again towards the
far side of the field, and he saw there was a pedestrian gate
leading out to a path that headed down towards the river.
He turned and waved to Robbie, and the SUV approached
slowly across the pitch. When it reached the eVTOL, the
other two jumped out into the snow.
‘Was it our intruder from last night, do you think?’ Sita
said.
Robbie frowned. ‘Intruder? What intruder?’
‘We had an unannounced visitor at the hotel last night,’
Brodie said. ‘Came in through the dining room. We were in
the bar, and I think he probably stood in the hall listening to
us. But he broke a glass on the way out, and that’s what
alerted us. I followed his footprints as far as the trees but
lost him there.’
Robbie was still frowning. ‘I don’t understand. Why would
anyone want to listen to you talking?’
‘Good question,’ Brodie said. He turned to Sita. ‘And in
answer to yours, yes, I think it probably was our intruder,
coming to give Eve the once-over.’
Sita said, ‘Should we get her charging?’
Brodie smiled. ‘No power, Sita, remember?’
She tutted and raised her eyes to the heavens. ‘Too much
bloody whisky last night.’ And there was, perhaps, just a
moment between them when each remembered the things
that the other had confided in vino veritas. ‘Let’s get my kit.’
They returned to the hotel, taking a black body bag from
Sita’s Storm case into the kitchen. There still wasn’t any sign
of Brannan. Brodie called up the stairs but got no reply.
Private quarters at the back of the hotel were not locked, but
Brannan was not there either.
Robbie said, ‘There were tyre tracks on the drive when I
arrived. Must have been Brannan’s four-by-four. Maybe he’s
gone into the village for provisions.’
Brodie shrugged. ‘Then we’ll just have to do what we have
to do without his permission.’
They wheeled the cake cabinet from the anteroom into the
kitchen and laid out the open body bag on the stainless steel
island beneath all the pots and pans and cooking utensils.
Brodie lifted the glass lid of the cabinet and glanced at
Robbie. ‘You okay to do this?’
Robbie nodded, and between them they lifted the dead
weight from the cold cabinet to lay along the length of the
body bag. The colour of the corpse had changed, even since
last night, when it had looked pink and almost fresh. The
cake chiller had kept the body frozen to an extent, but in just
twelve hours without power it had begun to decompose, skin
colour morphing from red-grey to grey-green.
Sita said, ‘For some reason, bodies that have been frozen,
then thawed, decompose faster than if they’d never been
frozen at all.’
‘If he’d never been frozen at all, there wouldn’t have been
much of him left after three months,’ Brodie said. He had
seen many dead people over the years, but the tiny smile of
serenity on Mel’s face was the memory that obliterated all
the rest. As if she had somehow found peace in death.
Conversely, the look on Younger’s face suggested fear, or
pain, in the moment of dying. The open eyes, the gaping
mouth. The skin of his face was broken and contused. If he
had been wearing gloves on the climb, they were nowhere in
evidence, and the skin of his hands was marbling, as if the
blood were leaking from every vein and spreading out
beneath the epidermis.
‘It was a helluva job getting him into the cabinet when we
brought him down off the mountain,’ Robbie said. ‘I thought
it was rigor mortis, but I guess he was just frozen.’
Sita said, ‘Rigor only lasts for around three days. You’re
right, he’d have been frozen solid, stiff as a board, entombed
like that in the ice for three months.’ She zipped up the body
bag and Younger vanished into his now accustomed
darkness.
Brodie turned to Robbie. ‘You were with the group that
brought him down?’
‘Yeah, I’m a member of the mountain rescue team. There
were a dozen of us went up to get him. Had to chip him out
of the ice with our axes. Wasn’t easy, lying on your back
hacking away at ice just above your head in limited space,
being careful not to damage a corpse. Worse, because
there’s a dead guy staring down at you the whole time. We
took it in turns. Then strapped him to a litter and lowered
him on ropes, little by little, till it was possible to carry him.’
Brodie nodded. He could imagine just how difficult, and
stressful, that must have been. It would be easier getting
him into the back of the SUV. ‘Let’s get him down to the
surgery.’

The Kinlochleven Medical Practice stood in a jumble of

buildings in Kearan Road, on the far side of the street from
the police station, and a prayer away from St Paul’s Episcopal
Church at the end of the road. The original building had been
expanded several times over the last fifty years.
The streets around it were empty, only a handful of tyre
tracks in evidence, but Brodie was aware of curtains
twitching, and eyes on them as they carried the body bag
into the room that had been prepared for them at the back of
the building. There was a strange still in the air, thick snow
all around absorbing every sound, smothering it in tenebrous
silence. A sense here of being shut out from the rest of the
world, long mountain shadows casting their gloom on the
water, while revealing tantalising glimpses of the world
beyond in the ring of sunlight that illuminated the peaks and
set them sharp and clear against the blue of the sky.
Brodie was sweating by the time they laid the body on the
examination table and unzipped the body bag.
 ‘Just leave him in the bag,’ Sita said. ‘It’ll contain the
fluids. Don’t want to make a mess on the floor if we can help
it.’
She had opened up her Storm case on a table pushed
against the far wall, and was slipping into green scrubs. She
donned a heavy apron and pushed her dark, wiry hair into
what looked for all the world like a plastic shower cap.
Brodie glanced into her case and saw scalpels, a 35-
centimetres chef’s knife, forceps, scissors, a ladle, needles,
syringes, and a selection of Vacutainers and sealable plastic
bags. There were jars of formalin, and paper and plastic
evidence bags. Twine and needle. For sewing up the body
afterwards, Brodie assumed. He was not looking forward to
the flight back to Glasgow, sharing the tiny cabin of the
eVTOL with a decaying corpse.
‘What else do you have in there?’ he said.
‘Oh, a veritable Aladdin’s cave of goodies. A camera.’ She
lifted it out. ‘You’ll be handling that.’ And she took out a
torch. ‘Could have done with this last night. I’ll use it to light
whatever we need to photograph.’ She thrust it at Brodie.
‘Also have a handheld X-ray machine. It can do arms and
legs and heads. Not big enough for the torso, though.’ She
pulled on plastic shoe covers and snapped her hands into
latex gloves.
‘You come well equipped. No wonder this thing was heavy.’
‘Got to think of everything.’ She grinned as she lifted out a
surgical handsaw. ‘In the absence of electricity, we’re going
to have to open up the skull the old-fashioned way.’ She
turned towards Robbie, who was standing by the door
looking pale. ‘I’m going to cut him out of his clothes first, and
you two can lay them out on the table over there. There’s a
roll of paper in my case that you can spread out on it.’
‘Me?’ Robbie seemed shocked.
‘You are staying for the PM, aren’t you?’
‘Well, I . . . I hadn’t really thought . . .’
Brodie said, ‘First one, son?’
 Robbie’s eyes darted self-consciously in his direction and
he nodded.
Sita laughed and said, ‘Well, it probably won’t be your last.
Got to start somewhere.’ She stopped and thought for a
moment. ‘Something useful you can do. Go home and bring
me a plastic bucket for the excess fluids. And a stainless
steel bowl if you have such a thing. I need something to put
the organs into before I dissect them. Oh, and if you’ve any
gas left in that old stove of yours, you could heat me up
some water. I’m going to need to thaw out my hands from
time to time.’ She turned towards the body. ‘This fella’s still
going to be pretty damned cold inside.’
Brodie caught Robbie’s arm as he turned to go. ‘I believe it
was your wife who found the body,’ he said. Robbie nodded.
‘I’m going to need to talk to her. And I’m going to need
somebody to take me up to the snow patch where it was
found.’
‘Oh, Addie’ll do that. She’s scheduled to go up again
anyway for a routine maintenance check on the weather
station after the storm. I’ll speak to her when I go over to
the house. She can come across when the post-mortem’s
finished.’
Brodie nodded, and felt his heart rate rise.

Younger’s clothes, all laid out now on the table, were torn in
places, badly abraded in others. An anorak over a fleece. Ski
pants. His leather boots were badly lacerated, the uppers on
one of them ripped completely free of the sole. Sita held the
torch as Brodie photographed them.
She packed towels around the body, and got Brodie to
photograph it as well. She was particularly interested in the
face. ‘Look at these,’ she said, running a latexed finger over
irregular-shaped random contusions and abrasions. Most
were broad brush-type abrasions, several of them appearing
over the prominences of the face, around the eye sockets
and high parts of the cheeks. Similar injuries were in
evidence, too, around the rest of his body, but less severe
where he had been protected by his clothes.
Brodie nodded. ‘Injuries from a fall?’
‘Looks like it.’
‘An accident, then?’
‘Not so fast. Look closer.’ As Brodie leaned in to examine
Younger’s face, she said, ‘See? There are multiple blunt force
injuries, different from the others. Look at the left cheek.
There are seven sets of patterned injuries consisting of four
short, parallel abraded contusions, about 3.8 centimetres in
length and 0.4 millimetres apart. And check out the single
faint linear contusion running perpendicular to the groups.’
Brodie could see that the injuries she was describing
formed some kind of a pattern. ‘What do they mean? How
did he get those?’
She looked up and smiled from behind her mask. ‘Someone
hit him, Mr Brodie. Punched him. Someone wearing a very
distinctive pair of gloves. Gloves with some kind of protective
reinforcement along the backs of the fingers, notched with
four horizontal niches at each knuckle to allow the fingers to
flex, and a raised ledge running along the length of each
finger.’ She moved her fingertips to Younger’s forehead. ‘Two
more here as well. And another along the right jawline.’
‘Is that what killed him?’
‘I doubt it. Enough to knock him off his feet, though. Cause
him to fall, which would be consistent with his other injuries.’
Robbie came in with a basin of steaming hot water. ‘This’ll
be too hot to put your hands in just yet.’
‘Put it on the table over there. I won’t need it till I cut him
open.’ She lifted one of Younger’s hands and examined it
closely, turning it this way and that, then fetched a tiny
scalpel and a piece of paper torn from a notebook, before
gently scraping residue from beneath the fingernails of the
right hand to collect on the paper. ‘I think,’ she said, ‘we’ll
find that this is skin. Almost certainly harvested from his
attacker’s face or neck. I’d say our man put up a bit of a
fight. He’ll have left his mark.’ She let the scrapings slide
from the paper into a plastic sample bag and sealed it.
Brodie said, ‘You’ll get DNA from that?’
‘We will.’
‘How soon?’
‘As soon as we get power. The wonders of technology. We
have a very smart little piece of kit these days that can do
on-site DNA analysis. And assuming we have power, then
we’ll also have internet access, and I can run it through the
database.’
‘And cause of death?’
‘You know as well as I do, Detective Inspector, that no
pathologist worth her salt is going to speculate on that until
the autopsy is complete.’ She turned towards Robbie. ‘Do
you have that bucket and stainless steel dish?’
‘I’ll just dash back across the road and get them.’ He
hurried to the door and paused there. ‘My wife will be over in
about an hour, sir, if that suits.’
He nodded. ‘Sure.’ And he turned away quickly to focus on
Sita’s scalpel as she made her Y-incision in the body, cutting
from each shoulder to the breastbone and then all the way
down to the pubis. Although he was losing the hair on his
head, Younger had plenty of it on his body, a tangle of wiry
fair pubic hair on his chest and belly and back, and the fluids
of his autopsy ran freely through it.
It took Sita the best part of three-quarters of an hour to
open him up and remove his organs one by one, transferring
them to the stainless steel bowl that Robbie had brought to
an adjoining table, where she carefully bread-loafed each
one. After Robbie returned, he had stood at the far side of
the room watching at a distance, white face tinged now with
green.
Sita asked the two men to leave the room while she cut
around the skull with her handsaw. ‘We don’t want to be
breathing in any particulates, now, do we?’ she said, double-
layering her own surgical mask and slipping on a pair of
goggles.
Brodie and the young constable stood outside for some
time, stamping their feet to keep warm. ‘Do you want to
come across to the station for a coffee?’ Robbie asked him
eventually.
Brodie shook his head. ‘Better stay around in case I’m
needed.’
Robbie nodded and they stood in awkward silence for some
more minutes.
Then Brodie said, ‘How long have you been here?’
‘Since I was twenty-three. So about seven years, I guess. I
was at Inverness before. Then this posting came up, and I
thought, why the hell not? I grew up myself in a village near
Fort William. I like the informality of village life.’ He
shrugged. ‘Lifestyle’s much more important to me than
career. I mean, I guess I might have thought about moving
on, climbing the ladder, but then I met Addie.’ He allowed
himself a fond laugh. ‘And, well, here I still am. Got a young
kid now, too, so that makes a difference. You got family?’
Brodie couldn’t meet his eye. He just nodded, and breathed
out slowly. ‘Yeah.’
Robbie waited for Brodie to tell him more, but when no
further elucidation was forthcoming, they fell into an
awkward silence, and Brodie was relieved ten minutes later
to hear Sita calling from the surgery. They went back in.
She was peeling off her latex gloves and freeing her hair
from its plastic protection, shaking it free to tumble over her
shoulders. On the table behind her stood an array of jars and
plastic bags with all the samples she would take back with
her for laboratory analysis. The body was all sewn up, the
skull cap replaced, and Younger looked as if he had just been
carried off the set of the latest Frankenstein movie.
Finally she broke the silence she had maintained
throughout most of the post-mortem. Ready to pronounce on
cause of death. ‘Disarticulated vertebrae in the neck,’ she
said. ‘Cut the spinal cord clean through. That would certainly
have killed him, even if the multiple fractures of his skull
hadn’t. Both forearms broken, right tibia. It was quite a fall, I
think.’
‘As a result of the blows struck by his attacker?’ Brodie
said.
‘Well, we can speculate on that. But all I can say for certain
is that he was in a heck of a fight before the fall.’ She started
to remove her apron, then paused. ‘There’s some other stuff,
though. Weird stuff that I can’t quite explain.’
‘Weird in what way?’
‘It might not even be related.’ She thought about it some
more. ‘There was sloughing off of the gut mucosa. With a fair
bit of inflammation. In the lungs, too. I mean, with a big fall
like he had, pulmonary contusion would be possible.’ She
paused to explain. ‘Lung bruising. But because he died pretty
quickly, there wouldn’t have been any accompanying
inflammation. I sampled some random areas of the lung for
microscopic examination. And there was plenty of
haemorrhaging and inflammation, which I really wouldn’t
have expected to see. It doesn’t fit with trauma, or being
frozen.’ She shrugged and smiled. ‘Can’t know everything.
But I’ll get some detailed analysis done on the samples.’
A tentative knock at the door brought colour to Brodie’s
face, and his heart beat faster.
A young woman’s voice called, ‘Are you finished in there?’
Robbie turned towards the open body bag. ‘Can we . . . ?’
‘Of course,’ Sita said, and zipped it up to conceal Younger
from innocent eyes.
Robbie crossed the room to open the door and Addie
stepped in. She seemed hesitant. Her smile was uncertain.
She said, ‘Hi.’
Addie had barely changed in all the years since Brodie had
last set eyes on her. A little older. The faintest evidence of
crow’s feet at the corners of her eyes. She was carrying a
little more weight. But then, she’d had a baby. She still
looked fit, though. All that climbing up and down Binnein
Mòr, and the other mountains in the Mamores where she had
installed her weather stations. Her hair was the same silky
chestnut brown falling to fine, square shoulders. Her eyes
and mouth were still Mel’s. He had always seen more of her
mother in her than himself. If she had inherited anything of
him, it was his temper.
She looked around the room, nodding acknowledgement to
Sita, and then her eyes fell on her father. He saw the
momentary confusion in them as she processed disbelief,
which morphed to realisation, and then to anger. It didn’t
take long.
‘What the fuck . . . ?’ An almost involuntary exclamation
under her breath. Then the explosion. ‘What the hell are you
doing here?’
Robbie was startled. ‘Addie!’
But like a terrier following a scent and deaf to its owner’s
calls, she ignored him, focused entirely on her father. She
was shaking her head. ‘This can’t be a coincidence. You must
have known. You planned this, didn’t you?’
Brodie was surprised by the calm he heard in his own
voice. ‘Nobody plans for murder, Addie.’
Robbie cut in, perplexed. ‘Wait a minute. You two know
each other?’
Addie still wasn’t listening, but was deflected by the word
murder. She flashed a look at Sita. ‘Murder? That man I
found was murdered?’
Sita was startled by this unexpected turn of events, and
nodded mutely.
Addie was stopped momentarily in her tracks. But it didn’t
last. She freed herself of the thought and turned blazing eyes
back on her father. ‘Why? Why now, after all these years?
What did you think? That I was going to throw my arms
around your neck, and say, Daddy, everything’s forgiven?’
Robbie dragged his gaze away from his wife and turned it
towards Brodie with incredulity. ‘You’re her father?’
Brodie was embarrassed. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘I should
have told you.’
But nothing was going to stop Addie. ‘Oh, yes, sorry! That’s
you all over, isn’t it? Always sorry.’
Robbie stepped in firmly, embarrassment giving way to
anger. ‘Addie, stop it!’ He took her by the shoulders, but
pulled up short of shaking them. ‘I don’t know what’s going
on between you two.’ He drew a sharp breath. ‘Because, let’s
face it, you’ve always told me that both your parents were
dead.’
She tore her eyes away from Brodie, and a fleeting
moment of guilt diluted the anger in them.
Robbie said, ‘This is a murder investigation, for Christ’s
sake. You’re a material witness. And like it or not, you’re
going to have to take your father up the mountain to show
him where you found the body. Now, I suggest you get a
hold of yourself, go home and get changed for the climb.’
She glared at him with naked hostility. ‘Whose side are you
on?’
‘I’m on the side of the law, Addie.’ He made a determined
effort to lower the pitch of his voice. ‘Now go and get
changed.’ He let go of her shoulders.
She stood trembling with anger and humiliation. Then
turned her eyes beyond her husband to settle again on her
father. ‘See?’ she said. ‘All these years I’ve been happy
without you. You’re back in my life for two minutes and
causing conflict already.’
As she turned to the door, one of the gloves she’d been
clutching and twisting in her hands fell to the floor. But she
wasn’t about to ruin her exit, and ignored it as she stomped
off through the snow. Robbie was too embarrassed to notice.
He half turned towards Brodie, barely able to meet his eye.
‘I’m sorry about that,’ he said. ‘I’ll speak to her.’ And he
hurried out into the chill of the morning in pursuit of his
inexplicably hostile wife.
Brodie stepped to the door and stooped to pick up the
glove. Soft, hand-sewn lambskin, turned over at the wrist. It
was still warm, and for a moment it felt like holding her
hand. He raised it to his face and breathed in her scent
deeply before closing the door. Then he turned to find Sita
staring at him. Concern was etched deeply in the lines
around her mouth, and reflected in the light that diffused the
darkness of her eyes. ‘Your daughter? Really?’ She hesitated.
‘Of course, you knew?’
He nodded and she closed her eyes.
‘For God’s sake, Brodie. I mean, she’s right. What on earth
did you hope to achieve?’
He hadn’t achieved it yet, and he wasn’t about to tell her.
‘Do they know? In Glasgow, I mean. Your bosses?’
He shook his head. ‘No.’
She sighed in frustration. ‘They would never have sent you
if they had. And you should never have volunteered, if that’s
what you did. Your daughter found the body. She’s a
potential suspect.’
‘Addie didn’t kill anybody.’
‘You don’t know that. No one knows that.’
‘You think she’s big enough and strong enough to punch a
man the size of Younger off the top of a mountain?’
‘No, of course not. But that’s not the point.’
‘What is?’
‘That you should not be involved with this investigation in
any way. You have to declare a family interest. They’ll send
someone else.’
‘We have no power, remember. No comms. No way to
contact HQ. So I’m just going to have to make the best of it.’
She stared at him for a long time, the slightest shaking of
her head. ‘Why did you come?’
‘There are matters I need to settle before . . .’ His voice
tailed away. ‘Just things I need to settle.’
The slightest cant of her head, the faintest narrowing of her
eyes, posed a question that she didn’t frame in words.
Perhaps suspecting that there would be no answer
forthcoming.
 Brodie looked at Addie’s glove in his hands and said, ‘I’ve
heard that sometimes gloves can be a good source of DNA. A
tear in the cuticle, a spot of blood dried into the lining.’ He
looked up. ‘Is that right?’
She frowned. ‘It’s been known.’
He took a step towards her and held out the glove. ‘Any
chance you could look for a sample in this?’
Now she was incredulous. She took the glove. ‘You just told
me there’s no way you think she’s involved in Younger’s
murder.’
He scoffed. ‘Of course she’s not.’ He crossed the room to
where he had draped his parka over the back of a chair, and
turned the hood inside out. There were quite a number of
hairs trapped in the fleece from a time before his razor cut,
when his hair had been longer. He teased some of it free and
held it out to her. ‘If you find some, maybe you could check
it against mine. See if there’s a familial match.’
‘You think there might not be?’
‘I’d just be grateful if you could do that for me.’ He paused.
‘Can you?’
She took the hair and slipped it into a resealable evidence
bag. ‘You sure you want to know?’
He pursed his lips, and she saw the sadness in his eyes as
he nodded, almost imperceptibly.
 CHAPTER TWELVE
Brodie walked back to the hotel, following the tyre tracks on
the B863. He crossed the bridge spanning the stream they
called Allt Coire na Bà, where it ran in spate down from Grey
Mare’s Waterfall before joining the River Leven as it
debouched into the loch. Across the valley, the windows of
the school simmered darkly. Absent of the sound of children’s
voices. There were no footprints breaking the surface of the
freshly fallen snow on the school playing field. No power, so
no school. Frustrated schoolkids no doubt sitting at home
staring at blank TV screens, unable even to fire up games on
their PlayStation Fifteens. No evidence, either, of them
playing outside. Perhaps they had forgotten how.
Robbie had told him he would bring Sita and the body, and
all her kit and samples, back to the hotel once she had
cleaned up. Brodie wanted to get up on to the mountain
before the light began to fade.
Brannan’s four-by-four was nowhere in evidence when
Brodie reached the International. He pushed open the main
door, kicked the snow off his boots, and walked into the
hallway. It was silent as the grave in there. Gloomy without
any direct sunlight spilling through windows. He called out,
but there was no response. He was hungry, but there was no
time to go foraging for food. Instead, he climbed the stairs
and went into his room to prepare for the mountain.
He pulled on elasticated stretch pants over his long johns,
and a microfleece top over a synthetic base layer. The
weather was dry, with no imminent risk of further snow, so
he would wear his down-filled North Face parka on top of
that.
He sat on the bed to pull on a pair of stiff-soled B2-rated
mountaineering boots, and attach the snow gaiters that
would keep his lower legs dry. His articulated C2 crampons
lay on the duvet. He would put them in his pack and attach
them to his boots when they emerged from the woods to
begin the climb up through the snow.
His gloves, which extended to cover his forearms, were a
halfway house between a glove and a mitten, with separate
sheaths for thumb and forefinger. He stuffed them in his
pack, and before pulling on his woollen hat to cover his ears,
caught sight of himself in the mirror above the sink.
Unshaven, complexion like putty, salt-and-pepper silver
stubbled hair. The face with which he had greeted his
daughter for the first time in ten years. And he thought how
old he looked, and weary. And in that brief encounter had felt
how much she hated him still.
Robbie had promised that Addie would meet him at the
Grey Mare’s car park. He half expected she wouldn’t be
there, and half hoped he might be right. He was, he realised,
dreading the climb with her. He had no idea what he was
going to say. Had rehearsed nothing. Taken the decision to
come on the spur of the moment, and like a marriage made
in haste, was regretting it at leisure. But he also had a job to
do. A man had been murdered. Outside help was not an
option, since he had no way of contacting Glasgow. So he
was on his own. In more ways than one.
He was in the downstairs hall when the power came back
on. Lights flickered to life in the dining room, and he heard
the refrigeration units in the kitchen kick in. He checked the
time. It was approaching midday. He swithered briefly about
whether or not to check in with Glasgow and report Sita’s
findings. Instinctively, he touched his breast pocket to check
that his iCom glasses in their protective case were still there.
He decided against making the call. It would only delay him.
And complicate things. He needed the time with Addie that
the climb would give him, and would call when he got back.
He left the hotel and made his way through the trees to the
football field. Now that the power was back on, he could get
the eVTOL charging for the return journey. As he walked
through the gate on to the pitch, he stopped. There were
more tracks now than previously. Robbie’s tyre tracks had
obliterated the initial single set of footprints leading out to
the e-chopper that they had spotted earlier. He could see
where the three of them had got out of the vehicle to recover
Sita’s Storm case. And the original set of prints that had
circled Eve before heading off to the smaller gate on the far
side of the field. Now a second set of prints came from that
same gate and circled the chopper before disappearing
among the tyre tracks towards the pavilion outside the main
gate. Perfectly possible, of course, that it was just some
curious local, though Brodie reflected he had seen precious
few folk out and about on this morning after the storm. He
circled the eVTOL himself to check for damage, or any sign of
forced entry. But there was nothing.
He sighed and opened the hatch to access the charging
cable, and tracked off with it across the field towards the
pavilion. There he found the charging hub and plugged it in.
It seemed like an archaic process, but he figured it was
probably just as efficient as wireless charging. Lights on the
reader attached to the plug unit flashed green, which
satisfied him that Eve was taking a charge. And piercing
unbroken snow with the point of his walker’s ice axe, he set
off with nervous trepidation for the rendezvous with his
daughter.

Addie was waiting impatiently in the car park, stamping her

feet to keep warm. She was wearing blue ski pants and a
bright yellow parka and woolly hat, hair spilling out from
beneath it, almost red in the early afternoon light. Her
daypack looked like it wouldn’t have much more in it than
her crampons, and maybe a flask of something hot. Her ice
axe dangled by a strap from her wrist, and from the black
look on her face as she saw him coming, Brodie thought that
she was probably fighting the urge to bury it in his chest.
 But she was accompanied by a group of men in climbing
gear clustering around a minibus, laughing and stamping
their feet also, breath billowing around their heads in the icy
air. Too many witnesses for murder, he thought wryly. They
turned to look with interest as Brodie approached. He
nodded. ‘Gentlemen.’ They murmured uncertain greetings in
response. He turned to Addie. ‘We’re all going up?’
‘No,’ she said quickly. ‘I get an allowance from the SMO to
pay locals to check on the other weather stations along the
Mamores when I can’t do them all. And we have a very
narrow weather window today.’
‘So this is your dad, then?’ An older man with a leathery,
wind-burned face looked at Brodie with curiosity, and Brodie
thought how fast word travelled in a small community.
‘Yes, Archie, it is.’ Addie looked as if each word was leaving
a bad taste in her mouth. Then she turned to Brodie. ‘Archie
leads the mountain rescue team.’
Brodie leaned forward to shake his hand. ‘So, Mr . . . ?’
‘McKay.’
‘You were in the group that brought Mr Younger’s body
down from the mountain?’
‘I was that,’ Archie said. ‘Most of us here were. Fucking
idiot. Took the hard way up when I clearly told him it was not
a route for beginners.’
Brodie frowned. ‘I understood no one knew where he had
gone.’
Archie looked uncomfortable. ‘Well, I didn’t know that’s
where he’d gone the day he went missing. I spoke to him the
day before. It was Mike Brannan up at the International who
sent him to me for advice. Not that he was inclined to take
it.’
‘So how do you know which way he went up?’
He coloured a little. ‘Well, I don’t. But he told me the easy
way would take too long. If he went up at all.’ He paused.
‘It’s no wonder he fell.’
Brodie said, ‘He didn’t fall, Mr McKay. Someone punched
his lights out and pushed him off the summit. It’s a murder
I’m investigating here.’
An almost audible sense of shock rippled through the small
group of climbers.
‘Who do you think did it?’ another of the men asked.
‘That’s what I hope to find out. But we have a sample of
the killer’s DNA. So it probably won’t be too long before we
do.’
Archie said, ‘How does that help? I mean, what if the
killer’s not on a database somewhere.’
Brodie raised an eyebrow. ‘You seem to know a lot about it,
Mr McKay.’
Archie shrugged. ‘I read detective books like everyone else,
Mr Brodie.’
‘Then you’ll know that if he’s not on the database, we’ll
have to DNA test every male in the village.’
One of the younger men said, ‘And if someone doesn’t
agree to that?’
Brodie looked at him. ‘And you are?’
‘He’s my boy,’ Archie said defensively.
‘And presumably he has a name. And a tongue in his head
to answer for himself.’
Archie swallowed his annoyance.
‘Tam,’ the boy said.
‘Well, then, in answer to your question, Tam, he’ll be
arrested for obstruction.’
Addie intervened for the first time. ‘How do you know it
wasn’t a woman?’
Brodie turned towards his daughter. ‘I don’t. But Younger
wasn’t a small man, and his killer gave him a bit of a hiding
before he fell into the corrie. It would need to be a pretty
powerful woman.’
The group of climbers shuffled uncertainly in the sunshine
until Archie said gruffly, ‘We’d better be going if we want this
done before sunset.’ He turned towards Addie, ignoring her
father. ‘See you later, lass.’
 And Brodie had the impression that all of them were glad
to escape the moment, clambering into their minibus before
heading off to climb their allocated peaks in the Mamores. He
watched thoughtfully as the vehicle set off along the B863,
but when he turned back towards Addie, found her glaring at
him with unconcealed loathing. She’d had time to process his
arrival. Time to let her anger build. He braced himself for the
storm.
‘You selfish fucker! What on earth did you think you could
achieve by coming here like this? I’m sure they didn’t send
you. Not if they’d known. They wouldn’t. You must have
volunteered.’
Brodie tried to maintain a semblance of calm. ‘Addie . . .’
But she cut him off. ‘Don’t use my fucking name. Don’t you
dare. Did you think for one minute how I would feel? Did
you? Why I haven’t spoken to you in all this time? Of course
not. Because the only person you ever think about is you.
And you never were good on consequences, were you? Mum
would still have been here otherwise.’ She paused to draw a
quivering breath. ‘You make me sick!’
And she turned to stride off up the path and into the
woods. At a pace he knew he was going to have trouble
matching.

They passed signposts for Spean Bridge and Corrour station,

and she turned left where the path split at a T-junction, then
forked right on to a rougher path up steps. The snow was
sparser here beneath the trees, and slippy underfoot.
The path climbed steeply through the woods and she kept
up an unrelenting pace, not looking back once. She forked
left across a burn and pushed on up through more deciduous
woodland. She had an easy, loping stride, and he saw her
breath condensing in the sunlight ahead of him.
He paused to catch his own breath, hearing it rasp in his
chest, and looked back the way they had come. Already they
had achieved a considerable elevation, and a spectacular
view of the village and the loch lay spread out below them,
blue water zigzagging off between snow-covered peaks
towards a sea lost somewhere in the misted distance.
Addie’s voice rang out in the cold from up ahead. ‘What’s
wrong, old man? Can’t hack it any more?’
He turned to see her glaring down at him through the trees
and he sighed, and started off again, following in her
footsteps. She stood watching him for a few moments.
‘You need to keep up if we’re going to beat the light,’ she
said. ‘When the sun starts to go down, it goes down fast.’
Again, she didn’t wait for him, turning to push on through
the trees along some old stalker’s path. It wasn’t long before
they left the woods behind, and undulating moorland opened
up before them. Brodie stopped again, this time to attach his
crampons for better grip in the snow, and when he looked for
her up ahead saw that she had done the same, her eyes
hidden now behind dark glasses. He took off his gloves to
fumble in his pocket for the case that held his iCom glasses,
and slipped them on. ‘iCom, shade my lenses,’ he said, and
felt foolish, as if talking to himself. But the lenses
immediately cut the glare of the snow. ‘Darker,’ he said, and
now he could see without screwing up his eyes. He pulled on
his gloves and set off after her once more.
They crossed a stream, Addie still a good fifty yards ahead
of him, then turned up the far bank before climbing around
the southern flank of Sgùrr Èilde Beag. Away to their right,
sunlight reflected in diamond clusters on the dark waters of
Loch Èilde Mòr. It wasn’t long before he realised that he was
starting to gain on her, as if the pace that she had set to
defeat him was too much for her. And he was getting his
second wind.
They were cutting diagonally across the steep slope of the
hill, the odd copse of fir trees breaking the monotony of the
snowy wastes. And finally he was at her side, matching her
stride for stride. He heard her laboured breathing, though
whether it was from exertion or anger he couldn’t tell.
 He swung his gaze around what was an almost featureless
landscape and said, ‘How do you know where we’re going?’
She took a moment or two to respond. ‘I’ve walked this so
many times in all seasons, following the same stalker’s trails.
I know every feature of this land by heart.’ Then, as if
annoyed with herself for even speaking to him, she stopped
abruptly, turning in anger. ‘Why are you here? Really? And
don’t tell me it’s your fucking job.’ He almost smiled at her
propensity for cursing, just like his own. ‘I mean, what can
you possibly hope to achieve?’
‘We need to talk, Addie.’
‘No, we don’t! I haven’t needed to talk to you for ten years,
and I’ve no intention of starting now.’
‘Please, just hear me out.’
‘No! And don’t you dare tell me that somehow I owe it to
you. I owe you nothing. Betrayal doesn’t deserve
forgiveness. Because that’s what you did, you know.
Betrayed us. Both of us. With that . . .’ She searched for a
word that would give full force to her contempt and loathing,
but came up short. ‘How could you bring her to the funeral,
how could you?’
‘Addie, it wasn’t like that. She was my partner at work. She
was only there for moral support.’
‘And you’re going to tell me that you didn’t have a
relationship with her?’
He let his head fall. ‘Only afterwards. And that was a
mistake.’
Addie was scathing. ‘Oh, so you didn’t live happily ever
after, then?’
He looked up to meet her eyes, but they were hidden
behind the lenses of her sunglasses. ‘No, we didn’t. Jenny
wanted it, but I couldn’t. She moved in, but it didn’t last six
months. When she left, she said there was no way she could
compete with a dead woman.’
For a moment Addie was at a loss for words.
‘I could never be free of Mel. Or my guilt.’
 And his daughter’s defiance returned. She removed her
sunglasses to glare at him. ‘So if you weren’t having an
affair, what did you have to feel guilty about? I mean, what
are you saying? That my mother’s last words were a lie?’
It was almost painful to look at her. As if it was Mel
standing there on the side of a mountain railing at him. Her
eyes, her mouth. His temper. He wanted so much to take her
in his arms and tell her he was sorry. But sorry, he knew,
wouldn’t cut it with Addie, so he kept it to himself. And she
turned abruptly, replacing her sunglasses and pressing on up
the slope. She was the one who had the second wind now.
As the slope grew steeper, they began to zigzag until they
reached a ridge just short of the first minor peak of Sgùrr
Èilde Beag. Brodie stopped to catch his breath and take in
the view. Already it felt like they were approaching the roof
of the world. The land around them rose and fell in snow-
covered splendour as far as the eye could see. Directly across
from them, Sgùrr Èilde Mòr rose to its majestic summit, and
sunlight glanced off the deep blue of the loch far below.
Addie paused, too. Though she must have seen them many
times, he saw the wonder in her gaze as she cast it across
the mountaintops. ‘Always takes my breath away,’ she said,
forgetting for a moment that she was talking to him. And
then, self-consciously, she turned to press on along the line
of the ridge.
Steep, snow-covered slopes dropped away left and right
now, the ridge itself still rising and running out to Binnein
Mòr. In the distance stood Ben Nevis, and they saw the
shadows that cast themselves in deep, dark blue to the east
and north of the Grey Corries.
The land dipped away slightly to a bealach, a mountain
pass, before rising again along the narrowest of ridges that
curved around to the peak, the gradients on either side of
them falling almost sheer away. Brodie was glad of the
crampons that bit into the crusted surface of the snow, and
he allowed himself to tip a little of his weight on to his
walker’s ice axe to keep his balance and fight off the
temptations of vertigo.
He loved the mountains for their sense of solitude, and the
context they gave to the problems of his life, which seemed
so much smaller up here than when he returned to the
turmoil of life below. But he was unaccustomed to having
company, and for the first time, it felt like he had brought
those problems with him, and somehow the presence of his
daughter was magnifying that.
A strong breeze blew in their faces now. The icy breath of
the Arctic. His eyes watered and his face grew stiff from the
cold. He was glad when finally they reached the weather
station and he could stop to regain some equilibrium in his
breathing and let his legs recover a little. Right now they felt
like jelly, and he wondered how they were going to carry him
back down the nearly four thousand feet of this highest
mountain in the Mamores range.
He was surprised how small the installation was – a flimsy
tripod bolted to the rock, sprouting sensors and solar panels
and aerials. He watched her remove her sunglasses, then
kneel down to clear away the snow and check its components
carefully. ‘How in God’s name does that survive up here?’
‘It’s based on the one they built for Everest. So Binnein
Mòr’s a doddle.’
‘And you were up here checking on it the day you found
the body?’
‘That’s right.’
‘And there’s another four or five of them that you check on
across the range? The ones your helpers are doing today?’
She kept her focus on what she was doing. ‘Six in total. Did
you read that in your briefing notes?’
He squatted down on his haunches. ‘You’d be surprised
how much I know about you.’
Her fingers froze for a moment on the lid of the box she
had opened to check on the battery, and she cast him a
sideways glance. ‘Oh?’ She closed the lid. ‘Like what?’
 ‘I know you quit Glasgow University after six months. A
sudden change of mind. Went to Edinburgh instead. Did an
honours degree in meteorology. Then got a job at the
Scottish Met Office.’
She turned to look at him directly now. If anything, it
seemed that the hostility in her gaze had intensified. He was
almost discomposed by it, but pressed on.
‘You came up here, leading a team to install these weather
stations along the Mamores. Which is when you met Robbie.
The local cop. And fell for him.’ And he added wryly, ‘Not, I’m
quite sure, as the result of any kind of father fixation.’
She stared at him in silence for what felt like a very long
time. ‘So you’ve been spying on me. Like some kind of
stalker.’
‘Is it wrong for a father to take an interest in his own
daughter? Especially when she’s never going to tell him
anything about her life herself? A daughter who never invited
him to her wedding. Didn’t even tell him she was getting
married.’
‘But you knew anyway.’
He nodded, and returned the intensity of her gaze. ‘What I
didn’t know was that you’d given up full-time work to have a
kid.’ And he saw anger flare in her eyes.
‘So that’s why you’re here?’
He shook his head. ‘No.’
But she didn’t want to hear it and was back on her feet in
an instant. ‘You have no claim on my son. I don’t want you
anywhere near him. He doesn’t even know he has a maternal
grandfather.’
The hurt must have shown on his face, for there was a
fleeting moment of regret in hers. To cover it, she swung her
pack off her back and delved inside for a flask and two tin
cups. She pushed the cups into the snow to stop them from
blowing away and poured hot, milky coffee into each.
Without a word, she held one out towards him.
He took it gratefully and felt the hot liquid warming his
insides. He stood up to stop his legs from cramping and
nodded towards another installation perhaps fifty metres
further along the ridge. ‘Another one of yours?’
She turned to look. It was smaller than her weather
station. Anchored in a similar way, with some kind of sensor
on top of a tall pole to which there were two large solar
panels attached above a battery box and reader. ‘No. That’s
a GDN field installation.’
He shrugged, none the wiser. ‘Which is what?’
‘GDN. Gamma Detection Network. There’s a ring of about
sixteen of these things set up in a ten- to fifteen-mile radius
of the power plant at Ballachulish A. They monitor radiation
levels. Nothing to do with me. Someone’s probably already
been up from the plant to check on it after the storm.’ She
drained her coffee and stuffed the cup back in her pack, and
held out her hand for his. He finished the last of his coffee
and passed it to her. She said, ‘It’s time we went down into
the corrie.’

They stood on the lip of the drop into the Corrie of the Two
Lochans and felt how the wind had picked up. Brodie planted
his legs well apart to keep his balance.
Addie braced herself too, but shook her head as she gazed
down into the deep hollowed cavity on the north side of the
mountain. ‘There’s been so much snow in the last few days,’
she said. ‘I can’t even see the ice tunnel now. I don’t know if
I’ll be able to find it again.’
There were two ridges flanking the corrie, and they took
the one on the west side. It was steep, very nearly sheer in
places, and their descent was slow and careful, leaning
towards the perpendicular using their crampons for grip and
their ice axes for balance.
As they descended into the shadow on the north side of the
mountain, they felt the temperature drop, and Brodie
paused, bracing himself against the angle, to remove his
iCom glasses and slip them back into their protective case.
When he looked up again, he saw Addie watching him.
She turned away quickly and they slithered down the side
of the ridge and into the corrie itself, to traverse the snow
that had gathered thickly in the hollow. Breathlessly, Addie
said, ‘It was somewhere over here. Right in the deepest
part.’ She stopped to scan the contour of the slope. ‘You
know, thirty years ago, snow hunters used to scour the
mountains for snow patches that survived throughout the
year.’
‘Why would they do that?’
She shrugged. ‘Who knows? To note and monitor them for
posterity, I guess. The thing is, there were precious few of
them around back then. And as global temperatures rose,
they vanished altogether. Gone by the late spring. Now
there’s hundreds of them all over the mountains, lying in
deep corries just like this one all year round.’
Brodie squatted in the snow, using his ice axe to keep his
balance. Her change towards him was small, and subtle, but
hadn’t gone unnoticed. At least she was talking to him.
‘That’s something I’ve never really understood,’ he said. ‘How
it got cold here and hotter nearly everywhere else.’
Her look was scathing. ‘Probably because, like everyone
else, you just weren’t paying attention.’ He felt the sting of
her rebuke. But she wasn’t finished. ‘Bet you didn’t even care
to know. Certainly didn’t care enough to do anything about
it.’
‘Maybe you’d like to explain it to me, then. Since you’re the
one with the degree.’
She detected and reacted to his sarcasm. ‘It’s perfectly
simple. Simple enough even for you to understand. You’ve
heard of the Gulf Stream, I suppose.’
‘Of course.’
‘Yeah, well, it pretty much doesn’t exist any more. It
brought warm water from the Gulf of Mexico north-east
across the Atlantic. The whole of western Europe was warmer
as a result. Particularly Scotland. I mean, if you look at other
countries on the same latitude as Scotland, you’d see that
snow and ice are the norm. Basically we line up with the
whole of the Alaskan panhandle.’
She exhaled through pursed lips, and Brodie saw that there
was an anger simmering deep inside her.
‘When the Greenland ice sheet started melting, all that
freezing meltwater plunged south and basically stopped the
Gulf Stream in its tracks.’ She paused. ‘It got colder. And
then there’s the jet stream. I suppose you know what that is,
too?’
‘I’ve heard of it.’
‘A stream of air circling the northern hemisphere. Caused
by warm air rising from the equator, meeting cold air
dropping from the Arctic. It used to be that if the jet stream
sat higher than usual, we would have a good summer. Lower,
and it would be crap. But when global temperatures started
rising, the air from the equator got hotter and disrupted the
flow of it. Deforming it into peaks and troughs. The peaks
drew up even hotter air, and the troughs pulled cold air down
from the Arctic, from a circulation up there called the Arctic
vortex. Put everything together, and suddenly Scotland’s got
the climate of northern Norway, and the equator’s so fucking
hot, no one can live there any more.’
She took a deep breath as if to try and calm the passion
that was the cause of her agitation. And she turned further
recrimination towards her father.
‘That’s what happens when you don’t fucking listen. That’s
the legacy your generation left mine.’
Brodie stood up as he felt anger spike through him. The
temper that he had passed on to his daughter. ‘Oh, I was
listening. Like everyone else. It was practically all you ever
fucking heard about. Climate change. Global warming. How
we all had to do our bit. And a lot of us did. But the big boys
didn’t, did they? China, India, Russia, America. The economic
imperative or something, they called it. The need to keep on
sucking fossil fuels from the ground and burning the fucking
stuff, because too many people were making too much
money doing just that.’ He waved his ice axe towards the
heavens. ‘And what could ordinary folk like me or you do
about it? Fuck all. It’s like when they tell us we’re going to
war. Or they’re going to spent billions on nuclear weapons.
Or refuse entry to starving immigrants. Whether we agree
with any of it or not.’
‘You could have taken to the streets.’
He breathed his scorn into the wind. ‘Oh, yeah, that works.
Disrupt the flow of daily life and people get pissed off with
you. Protest in sufficient numbers and the authorities send in
the riot police. You get one chance to change things, Addie.
Once every four years. You put the other lot in, and it turns
out they’re just the same.’ He rammed the point of his ice
axe into the snow. ‘In the end, that’s why I stopped listening.
Stopped caring. And it doesn’t matter what generation you
belong to, nothing changes. It’s the same people abusing the
same power, and making the same money.’
He found that he was breathing hard now, shocked by a
passion he didn’t know he possessed. She was staring at
him. But it wasn’t hate he saw there. She was startled. He
grew suddenly self-conscious and tried a smile that didn’t
quite work.
‘Don’t know where that came from.’
She stood staring at him for a moment longer, then turned
away suddenly. ‘I’ll see if I can find that ice tunnel.’

It was a depression at the bottom end of it that gave away

its location. Buried under fresh snowfall, it still presented a
slightly raised profile at the upper end, which fell away
sharply where the entrance to the tunnel had caused the
wind to eddy and scoop out a hollow in the snow.
‘This has got to be it.’ Addie started dragging snow away
with her gloved hands, and Brodie crouched down to join her,
scraping the top layer away until the snow above them slid
off the mound, and suddenly the entrance to the ice tunnel
was revealed.
Brodie fished out the headlight from his pack and shone it
through the hole into the tunnel. He was amazed by the
almost perfect arch it presented, evenly dimpled as if by
some intelligent design. The area hewn out of it by the
mountain rescue team to recover the body was clearly
visible. Shards of broken ice lay in piles all around. Charles
Younger’s last but one resting place.
‘I’m going in,’ he told her.
‘Be careful,’ Addie said, before she realised she wasn’t
supposed to care. Then added lamely, ‘The weight of all that
snow on it. It might collapse.’
He scraped away more snow and divested himself of his
backpack before stretching the elastic of his headlight around
his woollen hat. Addie took his ice axe as he lay on his back
and slid himself slowly up into the tunnel. Light from the LED
in his torch reflected back at him off every dimpled surface,
almost blinding him. He heard more than felt the ice
chippings grinding beneath him as he dug in his heels to
push himself further inside.
Now he was on a level with the area above him where
Younger had been hacked out of the ice. A large concave
excavation corresponding very roughly to the shape of a
man. Only now did Brodie fully appreciate what a difficult
task it must have been to free the corpse from its upside-
down grave. He turned his head, directing his light as far as
he could above and below, looking for anything that the
mountain rescue team might have missed. After all, theirs
had been a mission of recovery, not the investigation of a
crime scene. And he doubted very much that Robbie’s
experience would have extended to the latter.
Nothing caught his attention, and he lay still for several
minutes, breathing hard, trying to think how Younger’s body
might have come to be entombed in the ice like this. ‘Can
you hear me?’ he called, and he heard Addie’s voice come
distantly from the outside.
 ‘Just.’
‘What happened here, do you think? I mean, how did he
get into the ice?’
‘You’re the cop.’
‘Thank you, that’s helpful.’
Several long moments of silence followed, and he wasn’t
sure if she was thinking or just ignoring him. Then her voice
came again. ‘What did the pathologist say happened to him?’
‘Someone attacked him, probably on the peak directly
above here, and he fell. Broke his neck, fractured his skull
and several limbs.’
‘Okay,’ she said. ‘So it was August. No snow on the
mountain, except for long-lying patches in the east- and
north-facing corries, like this one. Lots of walkers and
climbers at that time of year. The body would have been
found pretty quickly.’
‘So he had to hide it.’
‘He must have climbed down and hollowed out a rough
grave on the top of the snow patch. Then covered over the
body with whatever he’d dug out and more snow from
around it. Even in August, temperatures can get down below
freezing overnight, but it’s warm enough during the day to
melt the snow patch just a little. Enough, anyway, for the
body to sink down into it, then freeze over again at night. In
time, these snow patches become as hard as ice.’
Brodie closed his eyes and saw just how that could happen.
A process that would repeat again and again, until the body
was subsumed and permanently locked into the ice. But
whoever killed him hadn’t reckoned on an autumn thaw that
would send meltwater running beneath the snow patch,
carving out a snow tunnel over the course of several weeks,
exposing the body from below.
Almost as if he had spoken his thoughts aloud, she said,
‘Then the meltwater exposed him from underneath. Which is
when I found him.’ And he felt a surging moment of pride in
the child he had fathered. There was more of him in her than
he had ever realised.
He was about to push himself back out of the tunnel, when
the light of his torch caught a fleeting shadow in the ice
above him. He stopped and turned his head, raking torchlight
among the shattered dimples until he found it again.
Something black, the size of a credit card, locked in the ice
above his head. He reached an arm towards the tunnel
entrance and called, ‘Addie, pass me my axe.’ And he felt the
haft of it pushed into his open hand. He grasped it and pulled
it in, lifting it up so that the adze was level with his head.
There was very little room to manoeuvre, and it took nearly
five minutes of short, repeated hacking movements, ice
splintering all around his head, eyes screwed almost shut, to
reach the elusive object. He removed his gloves, and with
warm fingers melting ice, eventually managed to prise it free.
He held it up to the light of his torch, and stared at it,
puzzled, for several long moments. It was exactly like a
credit card. Black, and completely blank. There was no chip
or magnetic strip or engraving of any kind. He frowned, and
then it dawned on him what it was.
He thrust his axe back towards Addie and shouted, ‘I’m
coming out.’
He wriggled his way back out of the tunnel with difficulty,
then sat up in the snow piled all around him at the entrance.
He held up the card between his thumb and forefinger and
Addie looked at it quizzically.
‘A credit card?’
‘No. It’s a keycard with an RFID chip in it.’
‘RFID?’
‘Radio frequency identification. For opening his car door,
maybe. They gave me one just like it for locking and
unlocking the eVTOL.’
Addie frowned. ‘I don’t remember Robbie saying anything
about a car.’
‘That’s because they never found one. But he must have
had a vehicle to get here.’
 ‘So where is it?’
He closed his fingers around the card. ‘Good question.’ He
unzipped a pocket in his North Face and slipped it safely
inside before getting stiffly back to his feet. He wasn’t
finished yet with this crime scene and looked up at the steep
snow-covered slope of the corrie above him. The fall from the
summit must have been a hundred and fifty to two hundred
feet. Not a sheer drop, but enough to have inflicted the
damage that Sita had found during her autopsy. The top end
of the ice tunnel was lost under the recent snowfall, but he
wanted to see if he could find it and make his way down
through the tunnel from the top end. It would be easier than
trying to slide up backwards from below.
He pocketed his headlight and said, ‘Wait here. I’m going
to try and come through from the top.’ And with the help of
his ice axe, he began the steep ascent up the corrie. He had
covered maybe twelve or thirteen metres before he realized
he had lost the profile of the old snow patch. It took several
minutes of scouring the slope with trained eyes before he
finally resigned himself to the fact that it was probably going
to remain buried forever. Or at least until next summer.
He sunk his axe into the snow to begin the process of
backing down the way he had come. There was the strangest
cracking sound that echoed all around the mountain, and he
watched a line from the head of his axe extend left and right
across maybe two hundred metres. A vast slab of snow
beneath his feet began to slide, and he instantly lost his
balance, falling backwards as a sound like the roar of a jet
engine filled his ears. Almost the last thing he heard above it,
before being submerged by the snow, was Addie screaming.
Now his sense of orientation was gone as once soft snow
battered and pummelled him like blocks of concrete, carrying
him tumbling down the slope. Without any idea why, he
found himself trying to swim through the chaos, arms and
legs kicking, as if fighting against the force of giant waves. It
seemed to last an eternity. An eternity in which he was
strangely conscious of every little thing happening around
him. Losing his axe, his gloves, his hat, ragged chunks of ice
tearing at his parka, smashing into his face.
And still his instincts were pushing him to swim against the
tide of it. Gasping for breath, hearing the grunt of his own
voice as the weight of snow forced the air from his lungs.
Fragments of blue sky flashed through his field of vision
before being lost again in the maelstrom.
Then, almost as quickly as it had begun, it came to an end.
He felt himself being dragged down, like a drowning man,
and he curled up into a ball, raising both arms in front of his
face in the hope of creating an air pocket. Enough oxygen at
least to fuel his attempt to get back to the surface.
Silence returned, although his ears were still ringing from
the jet-engine roar, and he found himself on his back, one
leg apparently clear of the snow above him, the other folded
painfully into his chest. His mouth was full of snow, and his
teeth hurt from the cold of it. But there was space around his
head. He coughed and spat and gasped for air, and heard
Addie’s muffled voice coming from somewhere distantly
above him.
‘Dad! Dad!’
Then, unexpected light almost blinded him, and her voice
came loud and clear.
‘Are you okay?’
And he wondered what primal instincts had been at work
that caused him to fight for his life. After all, he was a dead
man walking, wasn’t he? Wouldn’t it have been easier just to
surrender and let the avalanche take his life? That would
have been an end to it.
But he hadn’t wanted to go. Not yet. Not like this. There
was stuff that needed to be said first.
He felt Addie’s hand grasp his and pull, and he fought to
disengage himself from the great chunks of frozen snow that
had carried him almost two hundred feet down the corrie.
And finally he was free of it, lying on his back, ice-cold air
tearing at his lungs, staring up into the sky he had never
expected to see again. Everything still seemed to work. He
could move both arms, both legs.
Addie was crouched over him, her face etched with
concern. ‘Fuck,’ she said.
He smiled. ‘Yeah, fuck!’
And for the first time in more than ten years, he saw her
laugh. Something he thought he would never witness again.
And he laughed too. And when they stopped laughing,
neither of them knew what to say. Each overcome by their
own sense of self-consciousness.
Finally she said, ‘I thought you were gone.’
He wondered why she would care. But all he said was, ‘An
avalanche? In November?’
She shrugged. ‘Changed days. It was a slab avalanche.
Happens when a south-westerly wind blows snow over the
summits and into the north-facing slopes. It builds up but
doesn’t consolidate. Then, if the temperature drops between
falls and the snow freezes, like it did late yesterday during
the ice storm, the next snowfall will land on the frozen
surface and be very unstable.’
He found himself impressed that his little girl even knew
such things. He said, ‘How come you’re okay?’
She smiled. ‘I sheltered in the ice tunnel. I really thought it
was going to collapse on me. Thankfully it didn’t.’
She turned her face to the west. ‘Sun’s going down. We’d
better get off the mountain.’

Without gloves or hat, he felt himself growing colder as Addie

helped him down to the foot of the corrie. He remembered
that he had left his pack by the entrance to the ice tunnel. A
favourite old pack, lost forever. But the keycard for Younger’s
car was still safe in his pocket, as were his iCom glasses. He
put icy fingers to his ears and felt that the iCom earbuds
were still there too. A minor miracle.
As they headed west-south-west, down a steep gradient
liberally strewn with boulders half-buried in the snow, they
were presented with the most stunning of sunset views along
the length of the loch below. Snowy peaks glowing pink,
flanking a fjord that looked as if it was on fire. Without a
word passing between them, they stopped to take it in.
Deep, flowing currents and eddies in the waters of the loch
burned orange through scarlet, and the last glimpse of the
sun slid from view beyond the far mountaintops.
Although the sky was still blue, the first stars were
appearing overhead and Brodie thought this is what he would
miss the most. That, and knowing that the aching beauty of
the country which had nurtured him would still be here long
after he had gone. As if his short, unhappy existence in this
world had made not one jot of difference. Which, of course,
he knew it had not. Addie was his parting gift. The only piece
of him that would remain. The only part of him that was any
good.
He turned and saw the light of the dying day in her eyes
and remembered that she too had a gift to leave the world.
He said, ‘What’s he called? Your boy.’
And he watched the light in her eyes die too. Her jaw
clenched. ‘That’s really none of your business.’
They walked the rest of the way in silence, skirting a deer
fence before passing the now derelict and slightly sinister
faux-Gothic Mamore Lodge, and down a path that led to a
footbridge near the Grey Mare’s Tail.
When they got to the village, they stopped at the top of
Kearan Road, lights twinkling in the houses around them, but
not a soul stirring in the fading evening light. Brodie saw
lights on, too, in the medical centre and wondered if Sita
might still be there.
He turned to his daughter. ‘Thank you,’ he said, and meant
it.
She inclined her head a little, without meeting his eye, but
had nothing to say.
‘Well . . . see you, then.’
 ‘Unlikely,’ she said, and turned up the path to the door of
the police station. Slabs of yellow light fell from several
windows, extending across the snow that lay thickly in the
garden. There was something warm and welcoming about it.
A family. A home. A life. Something he hadn’t known for
years. He turned wearily to cross the road to the medical
centre.
The duty doctor there seemed surprised to see him. ‘Dr
Roy left some hours ago with the body,’ he said. ‘Robbie
drove them round to the hotel. I saw him coming back a little
later.’ He frowned at the bruises and grazing on Brodie’s
face. ‘Are you alright?’ he asked, and Brodie raised cold
fingers to his face, realising that his battered features must
reflect the ravages of his brush with death.
‘I’m okay,’ he said. ‘Had a bit of a fall up on the mountain.’
It felt like a long hike back round the road to the
International, with heavy legs and a head that seemed likely
to split itself open at any moment. Apart from a couple of
coffees, he’d had nothing to eat all day. His stomach was
growling and he felt almost faint from hunger.
As he walked up through the trees, he saw that there were
no lights on in the hotel, its sprawling silhouette standing
dark against a starry sky. It was all he could do to drag
himself up the front steps and into the hall. He stood for a
moment, letting his eyes accustom themselves to the dark,
though there was almost no light here to see by, and he
fumbled along the wall searching for switches. When
eventually he found them, a bleak yellow light filled the hall.
At least it was warm in here.
He pushed open the door to the Bothy Bar, but it was
empty, brooding in darkness. He turned back into the hall
and called out, ‘Hello? Anyone at home?’, only to receive a
resounding silence in response.
Wearily he climbed the stairs to the bedrooms, thinking
that perhaps Sita had gone for a lie-down, and irritated by
the apparently perpetual absence of the hotel’s owner. He
knocked on her door, and when there was no response, tried
the handle. It opened into darkness. He found a switch and
blinked in the sudden light. Her personal Storm case sat open
on the bed, a handful of clothes laid out on the duvet. But
there was no sign of her kit, just her torch lying on the bed
next to her case. He breathed his annoyance into the empty
room. Where the hell was she? And where was all her stuff?
Maybe she and Robbie had already loaded her kit on to the
eVTOL. He lifted the torch and headed back down the stairs.
He was halfway to the football field when he remembered
that Eve was locked, and that he had the only key. But he
decided to check on the aircraft anyway. From what he could
see by the light of Sita’s torch, there were more fresh
footprints in the snow, but it wasn’t clear whose they were or
from which direction they had come.
The eVTOL sat squarely in the middle of the snowy playing
field, where she had landed. And was locked, as he had
expected. Brodie fished out his RFID card and opened the
right-hand door. It was icy inside, and there was nothing of
Sita’s in evidence. He decided to check the battery level.
‘Eve, what is your current state of charge?’
Eve remained stubbornly mute.
‘Eve?’
Nothing. Brodie frowned and slipped back out into the
snow, closing the door behind him. He crossed to the pavilion
to check that the eVTOL was still plugged in. It was, but
there were no green lights flashing now on the reader
attached to the plug unit. He glanced around. Through the
trees, he could see that street lights were still burning in the
village, lights twinkling in the windows of dozens of homes
huddled around the head of the loch. So there was no power
cut.
It was only as he made his way back to the eVTOL that he
noticed another sets of prints in the snow. They came from
the pavilion, stopping halfway, then turned to make the
return trip. There was quite a mess in the snow where they
had made that turn. Brodie crouched to shine the light of his
torch on the disturbance, and saw that the charging cable
had been neatly severed.
 CHAPTER THIRTEEN
An icy wind advanced up the loch now, leading a legion of
thick black clouds to scrape mountaintops and banish what
little light had earlier been offered by the stars. Brodie’s
parka was zipped up to his throat, its hood pulled around his
head, hands thrust deep in his pockets for warmth as he
stumbled back around the road to the village.
The cutting of the cable feeding power to the eVTOL was no
random act of vandalism. More like a deliberate attempt to
stop them from leaving. And he had a dark sense of
foreboding about Sita. If she wasn’t at the hotel, where was
she?
Every muscle in his body was stiffening up from the cold,
and from the pummelling he had taken in the avalanche. His
eyes felt gritty, his mouth dry, and he could barely swallow.
He hesitated for a long time at the garden gate of the
police station. The same warm light as earlier spilled from
the same windows. On the walk round, he had tried,
unsuccessfully, to make a call to police HQ in Glasgow, but
his iCom had been unresponsive, and he was starting to
think that it had been damaged in the violence of the
avalanche after all. There was nowhere else he could go for
help.
The gate creaked as he pushed it open and walked up to
the annexe adjoining the house. A blue police sign above the
door glowed in the dark. A notice on the door itself read
Knock and Enter. He did as instructed and the door opened
into the warm light of a tiny police office with a public
counter and a small waiting area that boasted a couple of
scuffed plastic chairs. Robbie sat in a pool of light from an
angled desk lamp at a desk on the other side of the counter.
A computer screen reflected blue on his face. The clack of his
fingers on the keyboard filled the tiny space. He turned,
surprised, as the door opened, and the beginnings of a smile
vanished quickly, to be replaced by concern. ‘What the hell
happened to your face? Sir.’ The sir came almost as an
afterthought.
‘Didn’t Addie tell you?’
He frowned. ‘I haven’t had a chance to speak to her since
she got back. What happened?’
‘We got caught in an avalanche.’
‘Jesus!’ He stood up. ‘Is she alright?’
‘She’s fine. It was me that took the brunt of it.’
Robbie ran a hand back through thick, dark hair. ‘I’m sorry
I wasn’t around when you got back. You probably know
already, but all the comms are down. Mobile phones, the
police 15G network, the internet. I’ve been talking to
Ballachulish A on short-wave. Old technology, I know, but
still good in an emergency. They figure last night’s power cut
sent a surge down the line that blew the transmitters and the
telephone exchange. It’s happened before. They’ll have sent
teams out to get them online again, but who knows how long
that’ll take.’ He pulled a face. ‘And there’s more snow
forecast.’ He paused. ‘You find anything up there?’
Brodie fumbled in his breast pocket to retrieve the black
RFID card and held it up.
Robbie squinted at it. ‘What is it?’
‘Younger’s car key, I figure.’
Robbie was puzzled. ‘What car? Brannan didn’t think he
had one, and there certainly wasn’t one in the car park.’
‘Then how did he get here?’
Robbie shrugged and made a face. ‘There is a bus.’ But he
didn’t sound convinced.
Brodie shook his head. ‘We can talk about it later. Right
now I’m more concerned about Sita.’
A frown furrowed Robbie’s brows. ‘What about her?’
‘I can’t find her.’
Robbie advanced to the counter and placed his hands flat
on top of it. ‘Isn’t she at the hotel?’
‘No, she’s not. Her personal stuff’s in her room, but there’s
no sign of the Storm trunk with her kit and all her samples.’
Robbie extended his hands to either side, perplexed. ‘I
dropped her off at the hotel this afternoon, along with her kit
and everything else. We put Younger in his body bag back in
the cold cabinet until you were ready to leave.’
Brodie said, ‘Was Brannan there when you dropped her
off?’
‘No, he wasn’t. Why?’
‘He hasn’t been around all day. And wherever he went, he’s
still not back.’
Robbie scratched his head. ‘Well, he can’t have gone far.
The road at Glencoe was impassable this morning – though I
guess the snow ploughs will have cleared it by now. They’ve
got to keep access to the nuclear plant open at all times.’
Brodie pushed back his hood and opened up his parka at
the neck. Now he was too warm, his fingers tingling as they
transitioned from ice-cold to blood temperature. ‘Something
else,’ he said. ‘Someone cut the cable between the eVTOL
and the charging hub at the pavilion. Eve has zero charge.’
‘You’re kidding!’ Robbie’s face creased with
incomprehension. ‘Why would anyone do that?’
‘To stop us leaving?’
‘But who? And why?’
Brodie shrugged. ‘Younger’s killer, perhaps. Maybe
something he thought Sita would find during the PM. Or
maybe he was afraid of something I might discover up on the
mountain.’ He sighed. ‘To be honest, I have no fucking idea.’
Robbie laughed. ‘You know what? It was probably some kid
who thought it would be a laugh. I know, misplaced sense of
humour. But you know what kids are like. And Dr Roy
probably walked into the village to get something to eat.
There’s a couple of pubs that serve food. If Brannan’s been
gone all day, she wouldn’t have got anything at the hotel.’
He snatched his parka and cap from a coat stand and
rounded the counter. ‘Listen, I know a guy who can repair or
replace your cable first thing tomorrow. But right now, let’s
go and find Dr Roy. If she’s not back at the hotel, we’ll do a
round of the pubs.’
Brodie felt strangely comforted by the fact that Robbie was
taking charge, even though he was very much the junior
officer. Brodie was fatigued to the point of exhaustion, and
probably not thinking straight. Robbie’s suggested
explanations for the severed cable and the missing
pathologist seemed reasonable, and Brodie was suffused with
a welcome sense of relief.
Robbie was reaching for the door handle to go out when
the door from the house swung open, and the smell of
cooking wafted in. A young boy stood framed in the doorway,
a look of consternation writ large all over his face. ‘Dad, why
can I not get my PlayStation to work?’
‘Because the internet’s still off, son. Nothing I can do about
that.’
But the boy had already lost interest in his non-functioning
PlayStation, distracted by the stranger standing by the door
with his father. He stared at Brodie with unabashed curiosity.
‘Who’s this?’
‘A police officer from Glasgow, Cameron. Mr Brodie. He’s
here to help your dad sort out a few problems.’
Brodie was stunned. The skin prickled all over his scalp.
The boy had Mel’s elfin face, her eyes and nose and mouth.
And it was Mel’s straight, silky, mouse-brown hair that fell
carelessly over his forehead. He had, it seemed, nothing of
his grandfather about him, except his name. And that was a
shock. Brodie flicked an awkward glance at the boy’s father.
‘Cameron?’
Robbie seemed embarrassed. ‘His mother’s choice.’
‘What problems?’ Cameron said.
‘Police problems,’ Robbie told him.
‘You mean the body Mum found on the hill?’
Robbie was apologetic. He half smiled at the man he now
had to reconsider as his father-in-law. ‘Village life. Can’t keep
secrets in a place this size.’
Addie appeared slowly out of the gloom in the hallway
behind the boy and slid protective hands over his shoulders,
pulling him against her legs. Her eyes were fixed on her
father. The silence between them lasted no more than a
second or two, but felt like a lifetime to Brodie. He said, ‘You
called him Cameron.’
And the colour rose almost imperceptibly on her cheeks. ‘I
always liked the name.’
Brodie attempted a smile. ‘It means “crooked nose”,
apparently. From the Gaelic. Doesn’t apply to this handsome
lad, though.’
‘He gets his good looks from his grandmother.’
Cameron lifted his face towards his mother in surprise. ‘I
have a granny? Where is she?’
Addie took a moment to compose herself. ‘She’s in heaven,
Cam.’
‘And a grampa?’
Addie’s eyes never left Brodie’s. ‘Yes.’
‘Where is he?’
‘The other place,’ she said.
Robbie intervened to break the moment by opening the
outside door to let in a gust of ice-cold air and a scattering of
snowflakes. ‘We’d better be going,’ he said. And to Addie, ‘I
shouldn’t be too long.’
Cameron still had fascinated eyes fixed on the man he
didn’t know was his grandfather. ‘What happened to your
face?’
Brodie raised self-conscious fingers to his cheek. ‘I had a
fall.’
‘Will you be eating with us tonight?’
Brodie lifted his eyes to meet Addie’s. ‘I doubt if there’ll be
time for that, Cameron.’ Almost willing her to contradict him.
‘No,’ Addie said. ‘There won’t.’
By the time they were on the road back round to the
International, the snow had begun to fall in earnest, flying
into Robbie’s headlights like warp speed in an old Star Trek
movie. It was wet snow, slapping against the windscreen and
gathering in drifts where it was swept aside by the wipers.
Tyre tracks in the hotel drive from earlier in the day had
been reduced to mere impressions by the newly falling snow,
so Brannan had not yet returned. The only light spilling into
the dark came from the hallway beyond the front door. Lights
that Brodie had turned on himself just half an hour earlier.
He saw that there were no fresh footprints on the stairs as
they climbed them. In the hall, Robbie called out, ‘Dr Roy?
Hello, Dr Roy? You back?’ He opened the door to the bar,
then looked into the dining room, turning on lights as he
went. And Brodie remembered Sita’s words when they first
arrived – was it really only twenty-four hours ago? – I feel
like I’ve just walked on to the set of The Shining.
Everything about the place felt just very slightly off.
Nothing that Brodie could put his finger on. The brightness of
the lights. The smell of damp that lingered on warm air. The
worn tartan of the carpet. The flock wallpaper on the stairs.
The invasive silence. And perhaps, above all, Brannan
himself. His very absence lending him an odd presence.
Brodie said, ‘She’s not here.’
Robbie was scowling. ‘I’ll check her room.’ And he took the
stairs to the first floor two at a time. Brodie stood impotently
in the hall, melting snow dripping on the carpet. His earlier
foreboding had returned. He looked up when Robbie came
down again, but the young constable just shook his head. ‘I
see her stuff still on the bed,’ he said. ‘We left the big trunk
in the room off the kitchen, next to the chill cabinet. Let’s
just make sure it’s still there.’
Brodie followed him into the kitchen. Shadows lurked
among the pots and pans dangling above the stainless steel
where just that morning they had laid Charles Younger out in
a black body bag. Robbie found the light switch, but the
disquiet that simmered in the dark was not dispelled by the
sudden light reflecting back at them from every shining
surface. He pushed open the door into the anteroom and
stopped in the door frame, his shadow thrown across the
floor and the far wall by the light behind him. ‘Jesus.’ Brodie
barely heard his whispered oath. ‘It’s not here.’
He reached for a light switch and they both screwed up
their eyes against the glare of it.
‘We left her case right there next to the cold cabinet. She
put her samples in a bag next to the body to keep them
cool.’ He lifted the misted glass top, and both men found
themselves caught in the sightless stare of Sita’s dark, dead
eyes gazing up at them from the ice-cold interior of the cake
cabinet.
 CHAPTER FOURTEEN
Brodie sat alone in the dark at the table where he and Sita
had exchanged confidences in the bar the night before. To
occupy his mind and stop himself from thinking, he had spent
five minutes crouched before the hearth, setting and lighting
a fire that now sent flickering shadows around the barroom.
The crackle of it created the illusion of life beyond the sense
of his own faltering existence. But nothing could dispel the
deep, deep depression that had settled on him like snow.
Sita’s body had been locked in rigor mortis, lying on her
back, knees drawn up to her chest, arms folded with her fists
at her face, like some bizarre female pugilist. Her killer had
clearly experienced difficulty getting her into the cabinet,
manhandling her into this strangely unnatural position in
order to get the lid shut. It would be hours before rigor wore
off and Brodie could remove her from it, to lay her out with
dignity.
But perhaps even more bizarrely, the body that hers had
replaced was gone. Charles Younger’s autopsied corpse in its
black body bag had vanished.
Peering in at the dead pathologist, Brodie had seen
petechial haemorrhaging around her once beautiful eyes, and
a slightly protruding blue-black tongue. There was bruising
around her neck. So she had been strangled. It was
impossible to tell what other injuries she might have
suffered.
Robbie had pulled a chair up to the table in the kitchen and
sat with his head in his hands. Face chalk-white. ‘I should
have stayed with her,’ he had said. ‘And none of this would
have happened.’
But Brodie just shook his head and told him, ‘You had no
reason to stay, Robbie. No reason to believe she was in
danger.’
The young policeman had wanted to remain with him at the
hotel, at least until Brannan returned. But Brodie insisted
that he go. Robbie’s first responsibility was to the safety and
well-being of his family. There was nothing more to be done
here until communications were restored and they could call
for back-up.
It was snowing heavily outside, big wet flakes crushing
against the black of the window, blocking any possibility of a
view out to the loch, where the lights of the village would be
reflected in dark water. He had raided the bar, ripping an
almost empty bottle of Glenlivet single malt from an optic to
fill his glass. He had been shaking, unable to hold his hands
steady in front of him. And the whisky only made him feel
nauseous.
For some reason, he couldn’t rid himself of the image of
the pathologist sitting across from him last night. Her smile,
her laughter, her tears. Those dark eyes, and her crinkled
black hair drawn back from a handsome face. How unfair it
was. After all, he was the one who was dying. The one
without a future. Sita had two children who relied on her.
And she was still young, with her life lying, in large part,
ahead of her. And yet she was the one who lay dead in the
kitchen. Crammed unceremoniously into a chill cabinet for
cakes and desserts, while he had escaped death just hours
earlier in an avalanche. And he couldn’t help but feel guilty.
Not, for once, as the result of something he had done, or
said. But just for being. For surviving.
He should never have come here. Addie had created a life
for herself. A family. He had no right to come barging in to
ruin yet more lives. He was just a selfish bastard. He was the
one who deserved to die. Not poor Sita, leaving her children
to the fate of orphans. Tears filled his eyes, and he blinked
furiously as they left shiny tracks down his cheeks.
He took a deep breath and screwed his eyes shut, and felt
the silence of the International Hotel weigh down on him like
a reproach. A log shifted in the fire and sent sparks spiralling
up the chimney. A slight blowback produced a small puff of
smoke that rose to the ceiling. He could smell it above the
damp and the perfume of stale alcohol.
When he opened his eyes again, he saw Addie in his
reflection in the glass. He’d had the chance to break his
silence when they were on the mountain this afternoon. But
he had flunked it, knowing she wasn’t ready to listen. Not
yet. And even if one day she was, he wondered if he would
ever have the courage to tell her the truth.
He closed his eyes again to shut her out, and remember . .
.
 CHAPTER FIFTEEN
2023
I suppose you might call it an obsession. I couldn’t get her
out of my mind. She was in my thoughts all day, in my
dreams at night. I’m sure that even then, Tiny must have
guessed I was smitten. I mean, I never said anything to him,
but he knew me well enough to know that I wasn’t right.
Couldn’t concentrate on anything.
I would go home after my shift and watch some streaming
movie, and see her face in every actress with long hair. And
when I woke up in the morning, I would find myself
wondering if she was awake yet, and if he’d hit her the night
before. It drove me mad. Until I couldn’t stick it any longer.
I had a couple of days off at the end of that week, and I
drove across the city to Cranhill on the first afternoon. From
a parking spot next to the Cranhill Community Centre on the
edge of the park, I could see up Soutra Place to the tower
block where she lived with Jardine. I knew which was his car,
because I’d checked it out on the police computer earlier in
the week. A pillar-box red Mazda MX-5 two-seater roadster.
He liked his cars, did Jardine. Worked at a bookie’s in town,
so he couldn’t have been earning that much. But the Mazda
was brand new, just a couple of months old, so it was well
seen where his financial priorities lay. The year before, he
had lost his licence for twelve months for drink driving, so I
figured he was being careful not to get into the Mazda if he’d
a drink in him. Which must have been hard for an alkie.
Because I’d no doubt that’s what he was. Just shows what
you can do when you’ve a mind to.
Anyway, it was sitting there in the parking slots for the
tower, and I settled down to wait. It was after two when I
saw him walking to his car from the entrance, wearing a
duffle coat and jeans, and white sneakers. His face was
pasty-white beneath that black hair of his, and he’d probably
have described the unshaven state of his face as designer
stubble. But to me, he looked like he’d just got out of bed.
I heard him pump the accelerator to make the engine
growl. I figured he liked that sound, cos he did it several
times before putting her into gear and reversing out into
Soutra Place at speed. Into first then, and he accelerated
hard to the give-way lines at Bellrock Street, barely pausing
to look before turning right and powering away up the hill. I
almost ducked, afraid he would see me, but he never gave
my motor a second glance, and I sat for a good ten minutes
after that before turning the key in my ignition and cruising
slowly up Soutra Place to park a few slots away from where
Jardine left his Mazda.
The lift was working again, and I rode it up to the fifteenth
floor accompanied by the smell of urine. I saw the shock in
Mel’s face when she opened the door to me. And then panic,
as she leaned past me to squint down the hall.
‘What are you doing here?’
‘Just checking that you’re okay.’
‘Come in,’ she said quickly, and took another glance along
the hall to make sure nobody had seen me. She shut the
door and pressed herself back against it. She was wearing a
towelling robe, and her hair hung in wet ropes over her
shoulders. I reckoned she was just out the shower and naked
under that robe. My mouth was dry and I was as nervous as
she was. ‘He’ll kill you if he comes back and finds you here.’
‘He’d not get away with assaulting a police officer a second
time.’
She looked me up and down. ‘You here officially, then?’
The absence of the uniform kind of gave the game away.
‘No.’ Wasn’t any point in lying about it. ‘Anyway, he’s gone to
work, hasn’t he? Won’t be back for hours.’
‘No guarantee of that.’ She pushed past me into the sitting
room. It was a good deal tidier than when I’d last seen it. I
followed her in and saw her face clearly then in the light from
the window. The bruising was mostly gone, just the faintest
hint of a scab where he had split her lip. She ran both hands
through her wet hair to draw it back from her face. Then
stood defiantly, hands on hips, glaring at me. ‘Why are you
really here?’
‘I told you.’
‘Why would you even care?’
I hesitated. To tell her would be to make myself hopelessly
vulnerable. But I wanted her. Had known it from that first
time I set eyes on her. ‘You’ve been on my mind,’ I said.
‘Every waking minute of every day. When I think about what
he did to you, what he might do to you again.’
For a moment, I don’t believe she knew quite how to react.
But I saw the colour rise on her cheeks, and I wasn’t sure
whether it was from pleasure or embarrassment. ‘He hasn’t
touched me since that night.’
‘Good.’
‘So . . .’
‘So, what?’
‘So, there’s no reason for you to worry.’
I reached out to touch her face. I know I shouldn’t have,
but I didn’t have the words, really, to express how I was
feeling. She didn’t flinch, or move away, her eyes still fixed
on me. ‘I want to see you, Mel.’
There was something strangely intimate about using her
name, as if we knew each other well. I think she felt it too.
But she reached up and took my hand away from her face.
‘That would be dangerous.’
‘I can deal with Jardine.’
‘For me,’ she said.
And I knew she was right. If Jardine found out I was here,
if I were to see her again, it would be Mel he’d take it out on.
I said, ‘If you tell me you don’t want me to come, I’ll walk
out that door and you’ll never see me again.’ Which was
wrong of me. I was putting it all on her. Removing any of the
responsibility from me.
Still her stare was unwavering. And eventually she said, in
a wee small voice, ‘He works Tuesday to Saturday, three till
ten.’

So every day off, every night shift, I went up in the

afternoon. We didn’t do anything except talk. She made
coffee, and we would sit on the settee together, just
blethering. It was funny, I mean we barely knew each other,
but within a short time, it’s like we had known each other all
our lives. Talk was easy, laughter easier. She told me how
she’d never known her dad. She figured her mum never
really knew who he was.
There’d been a procession of men who’d come and gone at
their two-bedroom tenement flat in Tantallon Road.
Sometimes they brought Mel presents. Just to shut her up,
she thought, to get her out of the way. There had never been
any affection. Except from her mum. ‘You know when
someone loves you,’ Mel said. ‘They don’t even have to tell
you. It’s just how they are with you. You feel it.’ And she
glanced at me, a funny little sideways look that made me
blush.
And then I went and spoiled the moment by saying, ‘Do
you feel that with him?’ I couldn’t even bring myself to use
Jardine’s name, and she turned her head away quickly, rising
then from the settee to head for the kitchen.
‘Another coffee?’
I could have bitten my tongue out.
The turning point in our relationship, I guess, came one
Tuesday afternoon. I could see immediately that there’d been
violence over the weekend. She’d always said that he stayed
off the booze during the week, but made up for it Friday and
Saturday nights. She’d tried to cover the bruises with make-
up, but the damage was still plain to see.
As soon as I got in, I turned her face to the light. ‘He
fucking hit you again.’
She tried to laugh it off. ‘Witch hazel’s not working, then?’
It made me so mad. I was physically shaking. If Jardine
had been within striking distance in that moment, I’d have
fucking killed him. ‘Mel, this can’t go on.’
She pointed at her face. ‘You mean this?’ And hesitated.
‘Or us?’
I knew there was no us. Not really. I mean, we hadn’t even
kissed, for God’s sake. Not that it would have made the
slightest difference to Jardine if he knew I’d been coming to
the flat. I took her by the shoulders and said, ‘I can’t let him
go on hitting you.’
But she pulled away. ‘I can take care of myself, Cammie. I
can. I wouldn’t have survived this long if I couldn’t.’
‘Leave him.’
‘No.’
‘Why not?’
‘You know why.’
I didn’t, not really. Couldn’t understand for the life of me
why she would stay with a man who beat her. It made no
sense. I’d have taken her away from all that shit in a
heartbeat. I’m sure she knew that. But he had some kind of
hold on her. Something I can’t even begin to explain.
She had walked away to the window, and was staring out
into the wet afternoon. And suddenly she gasped. ‘Oh, my
God! He’s back! Oh, my God, Cammie, you’ve got to go.’ She
turned to face me with real fear in her eyes.
I didn’t want to go. I wanted to stay there and have it out
with him, but she was very nearly hysterical. In the end I
just walked out. Slammed the door behind me. By the time I
got to the end of the hall, I could hear the elevator coming. I
hesitated for a very long moment. I knew I could take him.
But I knew, too, that it could only end badly for me. An off-
duty cop beating up the abusive boyfriend of the woman he
was in love with. It didn’t matter how platonic my
relationship with Mel had been so far, it would not play out
well.
Reluctantly I slipped into the stairwell as the lift doors slid
open. I stood there listening as he went down the hall. The
door of the flat opening. Then silence, before I heard raised
voices. I closed my eyes and breathed deeply. It took a
major effort of will to stop myself from going after him,
banging on that door, and beating the crap out of him when
he opened it. In the end, I just turned away and began the
long descent down the stairs from the fifteenth floor.
I didn’t go back for a whole week. I don’t know who I was
punishing more – me or her. The only winner was Jardine. I
felt Tiny’s eyes on me when we were on shift together. You
know, kind of . . . appraising. We’d never talked about Mel or
Jardine since that first encounter. But somehow he knew.
Finally, he said, ‘Are you seeing that girl?’
‘What girl?’
He made a face. ‘Don’t come it, Cammie. It’s me you’re
talking to, and you know who I mean.’
I refused to meet his eye. ‘No,’ I said, and because I wasn’t
seeing her right then, it didn’t feel like a lie.
He gave a little snort of exasperation and turned away, and
he never mentioned her again. Until that day in the locker
room.

I went back at the end of the week. Absolutely crapping it, in

case she told me to sling my hook. I’d watched Jardine roar
away in his fucking Mazda, and after riding the pissy elevator
to the fifteenth floor, I almost didn’t have the courage to
knock on her door.
My heart was in my mouth when she opened it. She stood
staring at me for a long minute before she nodded towards
the open sitting-room door and I went through. I heard the
front door shut behind me, and as I turned, she threw her
arms around me and buried her face in my chest. I didn’t
know what to do straight away, I was so taken aback. Then I
put my arms around her, too, and felt her whole body
quivering. We’d never been this close before. I’d never felt
her body against mine. It was electric.
‘I thought you’d given up on me,’ she said.
I made her stand back from me, and took her head in my
hands, smearing away her tears with my thumbs. ‘I’ll never
give up on you, Mel. Never.’ And I never did.
She tried to control her breathing between sobs. ‘You can’t
come back here, though. You can’t. I’m sure he suspects. I’ll
meet you somewhere. Somewhere in town where he’s never
likely to see us together.’
Which is when we started meeting at the Cafe21 in
Merchant City. It was one of those cafés that was all wood
and brick and steel on the inside, and glass and marble
outside. Typical Glasgow, they put cane tables and chairs out
on the pavement, more in hope that it wouldn’t rain than in
any expectation of sunshine. You could try all you like to
pretend it was Paris, but in Glasgow that never really
washed.
The Merchant City was one of the oldest parts of the town.
It’s where all the wealthy merchants from the days of empire
had their warehouses, shipping tobacco and sugar and tea.
Then later it was home to the city’s fruit and vegetable and
cheese markets. By the time me and Mel were meeting at the
Cafe21, it had become the in-place for posh folk who didn’t
mind spending a bit of cash in the boutiques and gourmet
restaurants. Not a place Jardine or any of his cohorts would
ever be seen dead in.
We always took a table up on the mezzanine. Mostly we
just had cappuccinos, but sometimes we would get stuff off
the menu if we were hungry, or they were busy and we
wanted to keep our table. They had wraps, and toasties, and
nachos, as well as pizzas and stuff. It was okay, but it wasn’t
cheap.
I didn’t care, though. I was with Mel, and we weren’t
worrying every minute of our time together if Jardine was
going to come back unexpectedly and catch us.
 I remember those days with such an aching fondness.
Away from that flat in Soutra Place, she was a different
person. Relaxed, so quick to laugh, interested in every little
thing about me.
I told her how my mum died when I was young, and really
it was my dad who brought me up, in a single end in
Clydebank. He’d been an apprentice welder in the shipyards
when he was young. Though, even then, there weren’t that
many shipbuilders left on the Clyde, and when the yard
where he worked closed down, it had been almost impossible
for him to find another job.
‘There was a time,’ I said, ‘when he really thought about us
emigrating to Australia.’
Quite impulsively, she reached across the table to grab my
hand. ‘Oh, I’m glad you didn’t.’ And the touch of her hand on
mine suffused me with such warmth, I find it hard to
describe. I put my other hand over hers and hoped,
somehow, that everything I was feeling would be transmitted
from my heart to hers through our touching hands.
I laughed. ‘Well, he’d never have taken me hillwalking if we
had. I don’t know if there are any mountains in Australia, but
I’d have missed bagging all those Munros.’
She frowned. ‘Munros?’
And I explained to her what a Munro was, and that they
were named after some toff called Munro who’d made a list
of them all.
‘I’ll take you with me some time,’ I said. ‘When you get up
there among the peaks, it’s like you’re on top of the world.
Puts everything into perspective, and you realise how small
your problems are by comparison.’
‘I’d like that,’ she said, then laughed. ‘But I’d probably
have to go into training for six months first.’

I’d been meeting her at the Cafe21 for maybe six months.
Sometimes there was bruising. Sometimes there wasn’t. I
never mentioned it when there was. And she never once
talked about her life with Jardine. It was like, you know, a cat
that hides its head beneath a cushion and thinks if it can’t
see you, you can’t see it. We were just pretending we had a
life together. If we didn’t talk about the rest of it, then it
didn’t exist.
It was one early spring day when we met in the late
afternoon and she told me she wouldn’t have to be home till
late that night. Jardine thought she was going on a girls’
night out, and wasn’t expecting her to be there when he got
in from work.
I remember thinking I could take her to a movie, or out for
a meal somewhere. Maybe even take in a show in town. I
made a couple of suggestions, and she sat there looking at
her hands folded in her lap. Then she raised her eyes to mine
and said, ‘Maybe we could just go to your place.’
My heart kind of thundered around in my chest for a
minute before pushing up into my throat and damn near
choking me. I knew this was what they called a watershed
moment. The direction of our relationship was about to
change course. And if we went with the flow, there would be
no way back.
We took a taxi to my place at Maryhill. Sitting in the back
saying nothing. But we held hands for the first time. I mean,
it was really no big deal. But it kind of was. I was so nervous.
It wasn’t like I’d never slept with a girl before. There’d been
a few. But this was different. I wanted it to be amazing. The
best ever. And I was scared it wouldn’t be.
I thought maybe she felt that way, too. But when we got
back to the flat, she was all over me the minute the door was
closed. Hungry for me, like she hadn’t eaten in a month. And
all my fears fell away, like the trail of clothes we left on the
floor on the way to the bedroom. Jesus! And it was amazing.
Better than I could ever have hoped. Better than I could ever
have imagined. I was so lost in her, so blind to the future,
that I couldn’t see how impossible it all would become.
Addie was conceived that night, though I didn’t know that
till much later. But I told Mel for the first time that I loved
her. First time, actually, that I ever told anyone that. I’d
never had the faintest idea what love was, or how it was
supposed to feel. But I did now, even if I couldn’t put it into
words.
We lay together afterwards, till it got dark and street lamps
sent their orange light through the window in long boxes
deformed by the tangle of quilt on the bed. We said nothing
in all that time, till finally it was Mel who broke the silence.
And she said, quite simply, ‘Cammie, I’m scared.’

It was strange how our meetings at the Cafe21 were never

quite the same after that. Like they weren’t enough now. We
both wanted more and better, but the opportunity simply
wasn’t there. I’d never had any control over when, or for how
long, we could meet. And before the night at Maryhill, I’d
been able to thole that. Just. Now, I couldn’t. And while
everything had changed for us, really nothing had, and I was
just about demented.
Then fate intervened, in a way that neither of us could
have foreseen. I’d met Mel briefly at Merchant City that
Saturday afternoon. She’d been depressed. The weekend
always did that to her. Jardine had been drinking the night
before, and he’d be drinking again tonight. She always faced
it with a kind of stoic endurance, but I was finding it harder
and harder to take. I tried again to persuade her to leave
him, and the shutters came down, just as they always did.
She wouldn’t even discuss it. We had words. I gave her an
ultimatum. As I had done several times before. But she knew
they were just empty words. That I’d never give up on her.
Because I’d told her that, hadn’t I? I didn’t ever want to lose
her. And she knew it.
So we parted on bad terms that night, and I was feeling
particularly low when I started on the early shift Sunday
morning. I was getting changed in the locker room when Tiny
came in and sat down beside me on the bench. He looked
grim. ‘Got some news for you, pal.’
I couldn’t conceive of news, good or bad, being of any
interest at all to me right then. I just grunted and said, ‘That
right?’ and bent over to tie my laces.
Tiny said, ‘I know you’ve been seeing that girl.’ And when I
straightened up to deny it, he put a hand on my arm and
said, ‘I know you have, mate. And I’m figuring the only
reason you’re not an item is cos she won’t leave him. Am I
right?’
I tried to stare him down, but I couldn’t, and finally went
back to tying my shoelaces.
‘He’s in the slammer.’
And I straightened up again so fast I almost slid off the
bench. ‘Who?’
‘Jardine.’
Now I was alarmed. ‘What did he do to her?’
‘Nothing. He was out in that flash red sports car last night
with a bucketload of booze in him. Over on the south side.
Mosspark Boulevard. Doing upwards of ninety by all
accounts. Lost control and slammed into an oncoming
vehicle. A family SUV with a mother and two kids in it.’ He
paused and pressed his lips together in a grim line. ‘All dead.’
‘And Jardine?’
‘A few bumps and bruises. Always the way of it, isn’t it?’ He
shook his head. ‘Fucking horrible thing to happen. But, mate,
he’s going down for a long time.’
To be honest, I couldn’t think of anything other than that
poor woman and her two kids being dead, and that cunt still
walking this earth. Maybe if I’d taken him on. Maybe if I’d
given him the hiding he deserved and taken Mel away, things
would have turned out different.
I put my elbows on my thighs and buried my face in my
hands.
Tiny was concerned. ‘You alright, Cammie?’
I sat up and shook my head. ‘No. I should have fucking
killed him when I had the chance.’
 ‘Then you’d be the one getting sent down.’ He put an arm
around my shoulder. ‘Mate, things just happen. Some of
them you can control, most of them you can’t. I don’t know
how things’ll be for you and that lassie now. And I have to
admit I’ve never really understood what it is you see in her.
Only you know that. But one thing’s for sure – Jardine’ll no’
be an issue now.’

Jardine’s case wasn’t in the system for as long as you might

have expected. He pleaded guilty at his first appearance,
when it is usual to make no plea or declaration. Maybe his
lawyers told him that he’d get a lighter sentence if he didn’t
put the court to the trouble and cost of a trial. The Scottish
Government had just passed a law increasing the sentence
for causing death by careless driving under the influence of
drink or drugs to life imprisonment. Or maybe Jardine just
wanted it over and done with. At any rate, I was in the
courtroom the day he was sentenced, just to show support
for Mel. Even though we sat well apart. There were some
unsavoury relatives of Jardine’s on the public benches, too. A
hard-faced sister. An aunt and a couple of sketchy cousins.
As well as what I would have described as several
acquaintances of dubious character. Other than that, the
public benches were largely empty. Nobody was much
interested in the fate of Lee Alexander Jardine.
He stood in the dock flanked by a couple of uniformed
officers. He seemed unrepentant, and I figured that the social
work reports that the judge had received probably made
pretty grim reading. When asked if he had anything to say,
he just shook his head.
‘Speak up for the record,’ the judge told him.
‘No comment, Your Honour.’
Twenty years was the decision. Some in the court might
have thought that harsh. Personally, I thought life would
have been too fucking short.
Jardine himself showed no emotion. Just before they led
him down to the cells, he turned and scanned the benches
behind him. His gaze fell on me, and lingered there for a
moment. I had no idea how much he knew about me and
Mel, if anything, but for those brief seconds I felt bathed in
his hatred, before he glanced at Mel, and a sick, sad smile
washed momentarily across his face.

I was parked on the other side of the river, and sat waiting
there for Mel for nearly half an hour after the sentencing was
over. I was beginning to think she’d stood me up when I saw
her trauchling across the Albert Bridge. She looked like she
had the weight of the world on her shoulders, and there was
something infinitely sad about the way she held herself.
I’d seen her only a couple of times, and briefly, since the
crash. I had no idea what she’d had to deal with, what kind
of relationship she had with Jardine’s relatives, or the friends
who had probably come to Soutra Place to offer comfort and
who knew what else. I was sure she must have been to visit
Jardine in the remand wing at Barlinnie. All of which meant I
had no real idea where we stood now. And, in all likelihood,
no say in where we went from here.
She slipped into the passenger seat and sat gazing out the
windscreen, back across the river towards the High Court. I
couldn’t even bring myself to speak. Afraid that, whatever I
said, it would be the wrong thing. I saw a single tear track its
way slowly down her cheek. She said, ‘My mother had a
weakness for the horses. Had an account with the local
bookie. Sometimes she’d place her bet by phone. But more
often than not, she went to the bookie’s in person. They
always made a fuss of her there. And quite often she’d take
me. Showing me off. She was still a good-looking woman
then and liked folk to think we were sisters. I was probably
only fifteen when I first met Lee there.’
She glanced at me. She knew I didn’t like her to talk about
him, so this was the first time I’d heard how they met.
‘He had a sort of wide-boy charm, you know. My mum was
a good bit older than him, of course, but I think he quite
fancied her. He could make her laugh, and he worked hard at
it.’ She paused, lost in wordless recollection. ‘I was eighteen
when my mum OD’d. The guys from the bookie’s all came to
the funeral, and it was Lee who took me home after.’ She
shrugged. ‘That was the start of it, I suppose.’
And I had the first inkling of what it was that drew her to
him like a moth to the flame. He was more than a lover. He
was the father figure she’d never known. No matter how
abusive he got, he was some kind of anchor. Gave her life
shape and stability, even if the only predictability in it was
that he would get drunk every weekend and raise his fists to
her. I remembered her telling me that first time we met how
he’d bring her flowers and chocolates, and take her out to
nice restaurants after the violence. His way of showing
penitence for the way he was when he drank.
I said, ‘It’s over, Mel. You’re free of him.’
She turned and looked at me. ‘Free?’
‘To start a new life. Build a future that doesn’t include
violence and abuse.’
She nodded and wiped away that single tear. ‘I’m
pregnant, Cam.’
I was so shocked, at first I couldn’t even speak. I was
scared to ask, but I had to know. ‘Is it . . . mine?’
She nodded.
‘How can you be sure?’
And she raised her voice, just a little, to lend it certainty.
‘Because I am.’ She looked at me so directly then that I very
nearly had to look away. ‘That new future you see for me,
Cam: it won’t be anything if it doesn’t include the father of
my child.’ As if she thought for one moment that I would let
her go. Either of them.

It took her less than a month to settle affairs at Soutra Place

and move in with me at Maryhill. Free of Jardine, she seemed
like a different person, and there was no impediment to our
relationship being whatever we wanted it to be.
Some nights we sat up in bed watching TV, eating ice
cream from a local deli and drinking port. Well, I drank the
port. Mel wouldn’t touch alcohol till after the birth. We made
love at any time of the day or night. Whenever the notion
took us.
She wasn’t much of a cook, so we lived mostly on carry-out
pizza, or Indian or Chinese. We ate out a lot, and she made
me take her to the ballet at the Theatre Royal. She’d always
wanted to go, she said. I suppose all little girls are drawn to
the ballet for some reason. We sat in the front seats. Close
enough to hear the thumping and grunting, and smell the
elephant odour of straining bodies sweating in nylon. She
loved it. I hated it. And we laughed about it long and hard in
the pub afterwards.
Mel was presenting quite a bump when we got married six
months into her pregnancy. It was a dead simple affair at the
registry office in Martha Street. Tiny was my best man. His
Sheila was Mel’s best maid. They met for the first time on the
street outside. Witnesses, the registrar called them. And they
were, indeed, the only folk to witness the short ceremony.
We had an awkward biryani afterwards at their favourite
Indian in Shawlands, and me and Mel were just happy to get
home and carefully consummate our new-found status as
man and wife. God, how I loved that girl!
Three months later, Addie came into our lives and we
moved to a semi in a south-side suburb with a wee pocket-
handkerchief square of garden at the back. I built Addie a
swing, and a see-saw. I taught her to ride a bike, how to
swim. I adored that wee girl, and she loved her daddy.
In the years that followed, Tiny and I sat and passed all
our exams and moved up the ladder. CID, plain clothes,
working now out of the new HQ at Pacific Quay. Tiny and I
were still pals, though me and Mel hardly ever saw him and
Sheila as a couple. Sheila still didn’t like me much, and the
feeling was still mutual. And I’m sure she disapproved of Mel.
 Where do the years go? I mean, it seemed like no time
since me and Mel were meeting secretly at the Cafe21. And
now Addie was in her teens, all hormonal and awkward and
doing her best to piss me off at every turn. I think, maybe,
she was closer to her mum in those years. But we were a
family, even if Mel never did get pregnant again, and there
was a lot of love there. We’d moved into a red sandstone
semi in Pollokshields by then, and Addie had not long turned
seventeen the day I logged in at Pacific Quay to find Tiny
sitting at my desk in the detectives’ office. He was swivelling
back and forth in my chair, legs akimbo, sucking on the rim
of a disposable coffee cup.
In my usual polite way, I told him to fuck off out of my
chair. But he didn’t budge, just sat there staring at me
thoughtfully. Then he said, ‘You heard?’
‘Heard what?’
He hesitated for just a moment. ‘Lee Alexander Jardine is
out on licence.’
 CHAPTER SIXTEEN
2051
A muffled thud from somewhere deep in the hotel startled
him.
The fire he had lit earlier was a faint glow as the last of its
embers turned to ash. The snow outside was still blowing
hard against the window, even wetter now, and running
down it in sleety rivulets. A few moments before, he had
forced himself to drain his glass. There was no real escape in
the drink, he knew that. There never had been. He had
learned long ago that no matter how much you drank,
everything that made you seek refuge in it was still there in
the morning, when you woke with a splitting head and a
mouth so dry it was an effort to peel your tongue off the roof
of it. But as his old history teacher had been fond of saying,
the only thing we learn from history is that we never learn
from history.
Now he sat up, heart pounding, blinking hard to try and
clear the fog of grief and alcohol from his brain. There was
someone else in the hotel.
Brodie got to his feet and crossed to the fireplace. From the
selection of fire irons, he picked out a wrought-iron poker
with a viciously curling log hook. He hefted it in his hand to
feel the weight of it. It would do some damage to anyone on
the receiving end. Then he turned to face the door.
He had been in and out of that door to the bar several
times over the last twenty-four hours, and never noticed the
noise of its hinges. Now they screamed in the dark, like poor
Sita’s lost ghost. He was sure he had left the lights on in the
hall. But it was pitch-dark beyond the bar now. He stepped
cautiously on to the tartan carpet and waited for his eyes to
accustom themselves to the lack of light, his breath coming
in short, sharp rasps.
Another noise set him on edge. A clatter this time. And it
seemed much closer. Beneath the door leading towards the
rear of the hotel, he now saw the faintest line of light. He
stood listening intently, but could hear nothing above the
rush of blood in his ears. As he advanced towards the door,
there was more clattering beyond it. He pushed it open, and
saw a hard line of bright, clear light beneath the kitchen
door. A shadow moved about behind it, breaking the line of
light. Brodie braced himself and ran at the door. It flung itself
open with the force of his shoulder and he was momentarily
blinded by the kitchen lights.
Brannan turned, startled, from the stove. Steam rose from
a pot on the rings. His eyes were wide and frightened as he
took in the figure of Brodie brandishing a poker. He raised a
hand, as if that might protect him from the blow if Brodie
were to attack. ‘Jesus Christ, Mr Brodie! What are you doing?
You just about gave me a heart attack.’
Brodie stood staring at him, half in relief, half in anger.
‘Where the fuck have you been, Brannan?’
If anything, Brannan was even more startled by his tone.
‘What do you mean?’
‘You have guests in your hotel and you haven’t been here
all day. And there’s been murder committed under your roof.
Where the fuck have you been?’ It was in danger of
becoming a refrain.
Whatever was in the pan on Brannan’s stove began to boil
over and he turned quickly to remove it from the ring. He
was pink-faced and flustered. ‘I had to go to a funeral this
morning. Other side of Ballachulish. There was a meal. And
then, you know, things carried on into the afternoon. The
wake and everything.’ He paused, as if Brodie’s words had
only now fully sunk in. ‘Murder?’
He cowered as Brodie strode across the kitchen and
grabbed him by the arm, propelling him towards the
anteroom door and kicking it open. Brannan staggered as
Brodie pushed him inside. He waved his poker towards the
cold cabinet. ‘Open it!’
There was something very close to panic in Brannan’s eyes.
‘Why?’
‘Fucking open it!’ Brodie’s voice resounded around the
enclosed space as he pushed Brannan towards the cabinet.
Brannan steadied himself, breathing rapidly, and lifted the
lid, almost afraid to look inside. When he did, he emitted a
strange half-strangled cry, and staggered backwards, as if
pushed, crashing into the shelves on the wall behind him,
sending cans of peas and asparagus and jars of preserve
clattering away across the floor in the semi-dark. He glanced
towards Brodie, naked fear replacing panic. He was so
breathless his voice came in a whisper. ‘It’s Dr Roy!’
Brodie took a step towards him and pushed the point of his
poker into Brannan’s throat, the log hook curling around the
line of his neck. ‘There was no funeral on the other side of
Ballachulish this morning,’ he said. ‘The road was closed
because of snow.’
Brannan recoiled from Brodie’s breath in his face. ‘You . . .
you’ve been drinking,’ he said.
‘Your finest Glenlivet. And even if I’d put away a whole
bottle of it, Sita would still be dead. So now you’re going to
tell me where the fuck you were, or so help me, I’ll rip your
fucking throat out.’
And Brannan had no doubt that he meant it. ‘Okay, okay.’
And very gingerly, with thumb and forefinger, he took the
end of the poker and drew it away from his neck. ‘Can we go
back to the kitchen, please?’
Brodie glared at him a moment longer, then stepped away
to allow Brannan to pass before following him into the
kitchen. Brannan stood under the glare of the lights, trying to
catch his breath and his composure before turning to face
Brodie.
‘I could do with a drink.’
 ‘So could I.’
Brannan canted his head quizzically and said, ‘Do you not
think you’ve had enough?’
‘There’s never enough,’ Brodie growled.
Brannan said, ‘When did you last eat?’
‘What do you care?’
‘I’m hungry. I’ll make us both some supper.’

There had been a residual warmth in the bar from Brodie’s

fire before Brannan took the poker carefully from Brodie’s
grasp and stoked the embers. The couple of logs he’d thrown
in were crackling now. They sat at a table together, forking
mouthfuls of spaghetti carbonara into their faces. Brannan’s
panic had subsided, but his face was sheet-white, and his
hand trembled as he wielded his fork. He was reluctant to
meet Brodie’s hostile eye.
‘I went to the 3D houses to talk to Charles Younger’s
source at Ballachulish A,’ he said.
Brodie’s eyes crinkled in confusion. ‘Source?’
‘He wasn’t there. He was on night shift at the plant. And his
wife said he’d be back early afternoon, once the road was
cleared. She told me I could wait, and she offered me lunch.’
Brodie shook his head. ‘What do you mean, source?’
‘Joe Jackson. He’s a reactor operator at the nuclear power
plant. He’d not long started at the plant and was living at the
hotel when I bought it. Then they allocated him one of the
3D houses this autumn, and he was able to bring his family
up to join him. I got to know him quite well. Nice guy.’
Brodie banged his fist on the table and Brannan jumped.
‘You’re not making any sense to me, Brannan.’
Brannan swallowed over a mouthful of carbonara. ‘When
Charles Younger was staying here, I saw the two of them in
the bar one night. Huddled together in a corner just over
there.’ He waved vaguely towards a dark corner beyond the
pool table. ‘It was busy. I didn’t think anything of it. But then
they were there again the next night. And the next. It was all
tourists here in August, so no one knew who they were. But I
just happened to mention one day when Joe was leaving for
work that he seemed pretty friendly with the journalist. It
was like I’d stuck a firework up his arse. He physically
jumped. Told me he didn’t know him at all. They’d had a few
drinks together, nothing more.’
‘And?’
‘Well, I thought it was a pretty strange sort of reaction. I
mean, a couple of guys having a drink together in the bar.
What’s to get jumpy about?’ He drained his glass and refilled
it as he spoke. ‘Anyway, when Younger went missing, Joe
was all in a panic. Pulled me aside and pleaded with me not
to mention to Robbie that he and Younger had been drinking
together. He was really spooked.’
‘And it never occurred to you that Joe might have been
responsible for Younger’s disappearance?’
‘Hell, no! He’s not that kind of guy. He’s more . . . cerebral,
if you know what I mean. No way would he have been
involved in whatever happened to Younger.’
‘Well, let me tell you what happened to Younger. He was
murdered, Brannan. Someone attacked and assaulted him at
the summit of Binnein Mòr and pushed him into the Corrie of
the Two Lochans, where he broke his neck in the fall. And
something Sita found during the post-mortem made her a
target, too.’
‘Well, whoever killed Dr Roy, it couldn’t have been Joe. He
didn’t get back from the plant till after two, and I’ve been
with him all afternoon and half the night.’
‘Why?’
Brannan sighed deeply. ‘Trying to persuade him to talk to
you.’
‘Why?’ Brodie was insistent.
‘Because he’s probably got a good idea why Younger
disappeared.’ He paused and rephrased. ‘Why Younger was
murdered. But we didn’t know that this afternoon.’
‘Why would he know anything about Younger’s
disappearance? And why would you think he did?’
‘Well, like I said, it was obvious that Joe was some kind of
source.’
‘Source of what?’
‘Information.’
Brodie was losing patience. ‘Information about what, for
God’s sake?’ His raised voice echoed around the bar.
Brannan shrugged hopelessly. ‘I don’t know. About the
plant, I suppose.’
‘Ballachulish A?’
‘Well, what else would he know about?’
‘So he was some kind of whistle-blower?’
‘I wouldn’t know. I really wouldn’t.’
‘So what did he say during all those hours you were with
him today?’
‘Just that he didn’t want to get involved. He was scared.
Rabbiting on about the safety of his family. His future. I just
about got his whole life story.’ He took a mouthful of
spaghetti and chewed on it for a few moments. ‘Look, Mr
Brodie, I went out on a limb here. I don’t want my hotel
dragged into this. But ever since they found Younger’s body,
I knew there had to be more to it. That Joe must know
something. And I’m sure he does. But he’s just so . . . so
scared.’
Brodie finished the last of his carbonara, then leaned
across the table towards Brannan. His voice was low and
dangerous. ‘Well, you tell your friend that if he doesn’t talk to
me and come clean, I’ll be going after him. Hard. Okay?’
‘Okay, okay. I’ll talk to him again. First thing tomorrow. I
promise.’
 CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
A soft knocking at the door slowly penetrated the layers of
fatigue that had wrapped themselves around his
consciousness. Like a man rising from the deep, he broke the
surface and opened his eyes to be greeted by a grey light
that filled the room. He turned his head a little to the side.
Through the window he could see low-lying clouds, bruised
and battered, hanging from a turbulent sky, and big white
flakes of snow drifting down beyond the glass.
For the second night he had slept in his clothes. He
scratched the whiskers that bristled across his unshaven face
and blinked the sleep from his eyes.
The knocking at the door came again. Louder this time.
And a voice from the other side of it called, ‘Mr Brodie?’ A
voice he didn’t recognise. He sat up too quickly and felt
momentarily giddy.
‘Just a minute,’ he growled.
Slowly he swung his legs around to put his feet on the floor
and stood up. He crossed to the sink and sluiced his face with
cold water, then lifted his head to see the wreck of the man
he’d become staring back at him from the mirror with
bloodshot eyes.
He opened the door to find a short, thick-set man with a
silvering beard standing in the hall. A blue fleece was
dragged over a green chequered shirt. He was almost
completely bald, and clutched a patterned woollen hat in his
hands. Brodie could see the shock in wide-set blue eyes as
he took in the state of the police officer who opened the
door. Behind his embarrassment, a smile returned to friendly
eyes. ‘Mr Brodie.’ Not a question. He thrust his right hand
towards the policeman. ‘Calum McLeish.’ Brodie shook it. ‘I’m
on the mountain rescue team with Robbie. Electrical
engineer. Work up at the hydro plant. Robbie asked me to
come over to see if I could repair a severed charging cable.’
Brodie had forgotten all about it. ‘Give me two minutes,’ he
said, and closed the door in the other man’s face.

They drove around to the football pitch in McLeish’s dark blue

pickup truck, making fresh tracks in thick, wet snow. The sky
hung low, still spitting snowflakes into the chill morning air
and obscuring the peaks that surrounded them. Through
snow-laden trees, he saw the houses of the village grouped
around the head of the loch, reflecting in slate-grey water.
There was barely a breath of wind to disturb its mirrored
surface. And nary a sign of life.
Brodie had tried his iCom before leaving the hotel, but
there was still no signal. McLeish had watched, fascinated.
‘New comm kit?’ he said.
Brodie nodded.
‘Very cool.’
But Brodie shook his head. ‘Not worth a damn if there’s no
signal.’
When they reached the eVTOL, McLeish jumped down into
the snow, his breath billowing about his head as he pulled on
his waterproof jacket. He leaned into the back of the truck to
retrieve a toolkit from the flatbed and heaved it up over the
side wall. Then he stood gazing admiringly at Eve. ‘She’s a
fine beast,’ he said. ‘Not ridden in one of those before.
Smooth, is it?’
‘Unless you’re flying through an ice storm.’
McLeish grinned. ‘Aye, well, that wouldn’t be very
comfortable in anything airborne. Where’s the cable?’
It was buried under the new snow. Brodie grabbed the end
at the eVTOL and started pulling it up as they headed
towards the pavilion. ‘Don’t these things usually have
contactless charging?’ McLeish said.
Brodie grunted, barely able to keep a civil tongue in his
head. ‘Do you see a contactless charger around here?’
 But McLeish maintained his good humour. ‘Good point.’
Finally the cut end of the cable pulled itself free from the
snow, and Brodie crouched down to search for the other end.
‘Is it still plugged in?’ McLeish said.
‘It was the last time I looked.’
‘I’ll go and unplug it, then. Be unfortunate if we both ended
up fried for breakfast.’
The very thought of breakfast made Brodie heave, and he
stood up, breathing deeply, as McLeish walked over to the
pavilion to unplug the cable. When he came back and
examined the cut ends, he shook his head.
‘Someone took their life in their hands cutting through this.
Must have had well-insulated wire-cutters.’ He looked up at
Brodie standing over him. ‘Why didn’t he just unplug it?’
‘Presumably so it couldn’t just be plugged in again.’
‘Aye, right enough, I suppose, if the object of the exercise
was to stop the battery from charging . . .’ He opened his
toolbox, set in the snow beside him. ‘I can do a temporary
repair to get it charging. But it’ll need to be handled with
care, and best keep it clear of the snow. Don’t want water
getting in and shorting the thing.’
Brodie stood watching as McLeish stripped back the cable
from either side of the cut ends to prepare the wires for
reconnection. ‘How long have you been on the mountain
rescue team?’ he said.
‘Since I was a teenager, Mr Brodie. My dad was the team
leader then. Taught me everything there was to know about
the mountains.’
‘So you’re from the village?’
‘Born and bred. Nowhere else I would rather live. Especially
in this day and age. I’ve seen some changes in the world in
my time, as I’m sure you have, too. Most of them for the
worse.’
Brodie nodded. ‘You were part of the team that brought
down the body, then?’
McLeish looked up from his repair. ‘I was that, Mr Brodie.
I’ve brought a few bodies down from the mountains over the
years, but never saw anything like that before. What a
helluva job it was getting him out of the ice.’
‘I don’t suppose you’d have any thoughts about what he
was doing up there?’
McLeish shook his head. ‘Not a one. And from everything I
hear, he was a rank novice. I mean, superficially he had the
right gear and everything, but from what I could see, it was
all brand new. His boots, for example. No wear on them at
all.’
Brodie crouched down beside him and watched him work
the wires for several minutes, before he said, ‘If you were
going to go up the mountain and wanted to leave your car as
close as possible to the start of the climb, where would that
be?’
McLeish looked up from his work and thought about it.
‘Depends which way you were going to go up. I mean,
there’s an easy way, and a hard way. But the easy way’s a
long trek and the hard way’s the quickest way down.’
And Brodie thought, that’s how he and Addie had done it.
The long way up, the fast way down. Faster than he’d have
liked. ‘Do you have a map?’
‘Aye, in the pickup.’
‘Could you show me?’
‘No problem.’
They returned to the truck and McLeish retrieved a map
from the glovebox, spreading it out on the passenger seat.
‘Here,’ he said, pointing out the route that Brodie and
Addie had followed up into the trees from the Grey Mare’s car
park. ‘Easy way up.’ Then traced a finger along the route that
father and daughter had taken to come down off the
mountain. ‘Hard way.’ He looked at Brodie. ‘I take it we’re
talking about Mr Younger?’
Brodie nodded acknowledgement.
‘Well, then, as a novice, it would make sense for him to
take the easy way up.’
 ‘Yes, that’s what Archie McKay said.’
‘McKay? You’ve been talking to that blowhard, have you?’
‘So had Mr Younger, apparently.’
McLeish raised an eyebrow in surprise. ‘Had he now? Archie
certainly kept that one to himself. And what advice did the
old bugger give him?’
‘Same as you, Mr McLeish. But apparently Younger told him
he didn’t have time to take the long way round. Being a
novice, maybe he didn’t realise just what a tough climb the
short route would be.’
McLeish snorted. ‘Aye, well, he wouldn’t be the first to
make that mistake.’

Back at the hotel, Brodie forced himself to eat the two fried
eggs with Lorne sausage that Brannan had prepared for
breakfast, and drank nearly a whole carton of orange juice.
Then he returned to his room to wash and change, and
gazing at his ravaged face in the mirror, decided that a shave
might make him feel better. He had just laced up his climbing
boots and was pulling on his North Face when there was a
knock at the door. He thought it was probably Brannan with
news of Joe Jackson. ‘Yeah?’
The door opened and Addie stood framed in the doorway.
For a young woman who always seemed so sure of
everything, in that moment she looked very uncertain. He
straightened up and gazed at her with an ache of regret
somewhere deep inside.
She said, ‘Robbie told me about Dr Roy. I wanted to come
last night, but he said you might not be very . . . receptive.’
He forced a smile. ‘He might have been right.’ He paused.
‘Why would you want to come anyway?’
He saw a tiny shrug of her shoulders. ‘I don’t know.
Seemed like such a shitty thing. I suppose I just wanted to
say sorry.’
‘It’s not your fault.’
‘No. I mean . . . just sorry for all that’s happened. To Dr
Roy and everything.’
He looked away. ‘She was a nice lady. Lost her husband a
while back. Had two young kids, too.’ He felt himself choking
up again. ‘She didn’t deserve that.’ He zipped up his parka. ‘I
could use your help if you have time.’
‘With what?’
‘I’m going to look for Younger’s car.’
‘You know where it is?’
‘No. But I figure he probably drove it as close to the start
of the climb as he could get. If he took the route that you
and I did, that would be the Grey Mare’s car park. And it’s
not there. So . . .’
‘He would have taken the old military road,’ Addie said, ‘if
he was going the other way.’ She paused. ‘But it would be
crazy for a beginner to attempt that route up the mountain.’
‘Aye,’ Brodie said. ‘Just the sort of thing someone who
didn’t know any better might do. But to be fair to him, he did
actually get to the summit.’
‘If he’d left his car somewhere on the road, it would have
been seen.’
‘Maybe.’ He picked McLeish’s map off the bed and traced
the line of the old military road. ‘It looks like there’s some
kind of off-road area here.’ He stabbed a finger at it. It was
well above the stream that ran down through the trees and
eventually tumbled over the rocks at Grey Mare’s Waterfall. ‘I
don’t want to have to go the long way round and follow the
road up to it. Can you guide me through the trees from
below?’
She sighed, pressing her lips together. He knew that look.
That forced concentration when she was undecided about
something.
He said, ‘One way or the other, I’m going. But it might
make things easier if . . .’ He let his voice trail away.
She gave him a hard look with her mother’s eyes. ‘Since
you never answered me the last time, I’m going to ask again.
Why are you here, Dad? Really? It’s not for this, is it?’ She
waved an arm vaguely around herself. ‘Some missing person.
A murder enquiry. I mean, do your bosses even know I’m
your daughter?’
Grudgingly he shook his head.
‘I didn’t think so.’
‘I volunteered.’
She forced a breath of deep frustration through her lips.
‘Why?’
‘There’s stuff I have to tell you.’
She shook her head vigorously. ‘I don’t want to hear it.’
‘I know you don’t. But you have to.’
‘I don’t have to hear anything from you.’
‘Yes, you do!’ His suddenly raised voice startled her. ‘Addie,
I’ve held things inside of me for the last ten years. Mostly
guilt.’
‘And now you want to offload it on to me.’
‘No.’ He was shaking his head slowly, internalising some
buried pain. ‘I’ll take my guilt with me to the grave.’ He
turned penetrating blue eyes on her. Eyes that were filled
with something she had never seen before. Something she
couldn’t define. But they were almost chilling in the way they
violated all her outer defences. ‘There are things I need to
tell you. Things you need to know.’ He hesitated. ‘And I need
to tell you now, because . . .’ He couldn’t bring himself to say
it.
Something in his desperation caused her heart to skip a
beat. ‘Because what?’ And perhaps because she feared the
answer, she provided one for herself. ‘Because it’ll make you
feel better?’
All the fight went out of him. She saw him go limp, and his
gaze drifted away to some far-off place. ‘Because if I don’t
tell you now, I never will, and you’ll never know the truth.’
Now she really was afraid to ask. Her voice was very small.
‘Why?’
His eyes flickered up to meet hers and she saw the defeat
in them. ‘I’m dying, Addie. Be lucky if I have six months.’ He
managed a sad chuckle. ‘If you can call that luck.’
The silence that lay between them was the same silence
that had remained unbridged for ten years. Addie gazed at
him for a very long time before she leaned over to pick up
the map from the bed and said, ‘Tell me on the way up.’
 CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
The woods lay silent under their thick blanket of snow. Large
snowflakes drifted down through the trees as they crossed
the stream and began the steep ascent towards the old
military road somewhere far above.
Addie made no attempt to outpace him this time, and the
only sound to disturb the still of the morning was the air they
sucked in and breathed out, and the rush of white water
somewhere nearby as it fell from Grey Mare’s Waterfall to
break over the jumble of rocks below.
They paused after a while to look back towards the village
and the loch. The hills were lost in cloud that seemed to
come down almost to the water’s edge, where reflections of
the sky were drowned in shades of grey. Brodie sat down on
a rock to catch his breath. ‘You know, I’ve been here nearly
two days now, and I’ve hardly seen a soul.’
‘The village is like a graveyard in winter,’ Addie said. ‘Not
many more than five hundred live here year-round now.
You’ll see folk at church on a Sunday, or at the Co-op when
you go for your messages. And if you head down to the pub
at night, there’s usually someone there you know. But when
the weather’s like this, people just tend to stay indoors. I
guess it was different when the smelter was still on the go,
and from all accounts it was like the gold rush when they
were building the nuclear plant. Changed days, though.’
It was as if by speaking of things inconsequential, they
might avoid addressing the elephant in the woods.
Brodie inclined his head to look up through the tall pines
towards the sky. ‘Not a breath of wind,’ he said.
She nodded. ‘The calm before the storm.’
He turned to look at her. ‘Another one?’
‘A biggie. Coming in off the Atlantic. They’re forecasting
hurricane-force winds. Rain turning to ice. And eventually to
snow. We’ll be buried in it here. And probably lose power
again. Storm Idriss, they’re calling it.’
‘We’d better move, then.’ Brodie got stiffly back to his feet,
and they started once more over rough ground. Snow lay in
patches, and winter-dead ferns bowed their heads under the
weight of it.
Without looking at him, she said, ‘So, are you going to tell
me?’
He summoned courage and strength from diminishing
reserves and after a few more steps, said, ‘You know how
your mother and I met, don’t you?’
And he heard the hint of sarcasm in her retort. ‘You
rescued her from an abusive relationship.’
Brodie was unaccountably irritated. ‘He was a drunk! And
with a drink in him, he was violent.’
She muttered under her breath so that he barely caught it,
‘Another addictive personality.’
‘What?’
She shook her head and breathed exasperation like smoke
into the cold. ‘Nothing.’ And quickly refocusing, said, ‘So you
got Mum’s drunken partner put away.’
He stopped, taken aback. ‘Is that what she told you?’
She shrugged. Neither confirmation nor denial.
He said, ‘Lee Jardine was sent down for twenty years for
drink driving.’
Addie glanced at him sideways. ‘That seems a bit extreme.’
‘He crashed his car into an SUV, killing a mother and her
two children.’
Which stopped her in her tracks. ‘Jesus,’ she said,
forgetting that she was supposed to be the sceptic here.
Then she recovered herself. ‘That must have been very
convenient for you. With the competition out of the way, my
mother was all yours.’
Brodie said, ‘Think yourself lucky, Addie. Mel would never
have left him. And she was already pregnant. So he could
have ended up being your dad. And no doubt when he got
drunk on the weekend, you’d have been on the receiving end
of his fists, too. Or worse. Your life would have been very
different.’
She stared at him, horrified by the thought, then was
struck by another. Something unthinkable. ‘I’m not . . .’ She
could hardly bring herself to give voice to it. ‘I’m not his, am
I?’
‘Your mother swore not. And I’ve never had any reason to
disbelieve her.’ Even though the tiny seed of doubt
somewhere deep inside him had never quite gone away.
But the thought clearly wouldn’t leave her, and he could
see all the uncertainty gathering like a storm behind her
eyes. She turned abruptly and started off again through the
trees, long legs powering up the incline so that he struggled
to keep up with her. Then she stopped again, turning as he
finally caught up. ‘Why are you going to die?’ she demanded.
He shrugged. ‘Does it matter?’
She thought about it, then shook her head. ‘Probably not.’
She paused. ‘Cancer, I suppose.’
‘Isn’t it always?’
She pursed her lips. ‘So what happened between you and
Mum? I want the truth. I deserve that.’
‘You do, Addie. And it’s all I’ve ever wanted to tell you.’ He
hesitated. ‘But you won’t like it.’
The storm bubbling up behind her eyes was as ominous as
the clouds gathering overhead. ‘Try me.’
He drew a deep breath, and steadied himself on the incline
with his climbing stick. ‘You were seventeen, Addie, when
Jardine got out on licence. The moment I heard about it, I
knew things would end badly. He’d had such a . . .’ He
searched for the right words. ‘Such a Svengali-like hold over
your mother . . .’
 CHAPTER NINETEEN
2040
From the moment Tiny told me about Jardine’s release, I had
this sick feeling in the pit of my stomach. Just the thought
that he was out there, walking the streets again, made my
blood run cold. I couldn’t get that old Scots aphorism out of
my head: ye’re a lang time deid. That woman he killed, and
her two children. They were still dead. They would never
walk the streets again. And here he was, out, with half a life
still ahead of him.
I should have known better, but I did everything I could to
try and keep the news of his release from Mel. I was scared
how she might react. Even after all these years, and the life
we’d made together, I was still afraid of the hold he had on
her. The hold he might still have on her.
We moved in different social circles then. We lived in
Pollokshields. Addie had gone to a good school. And she’d
just started university. It was inconceivable to me that Mel
would hear about Jardine’s release by chance. Or that we
would bump into him on some night out in town. We were
regulars at the Theatre Royal now, and the bars and
restaurants round about, which were not establishments that
a guy like Jardine was likely to frequent.
I don’t know why I didn’t think of it, but of course I should
have known that he would seek her out. And, I mean, she
wouldn’t be that hard to find.
I said nothing about Jardine, and life went on like before.
At first I thought it was all going to be okay. But gradually, I
became aware that Mel was changing. It was so subtle at
first that I didn’t notice. I can’t even remember now how long
it was before I did.
 There was an increasing lethargy about her. She became
tense and irritable. I saw that she was drinking more in the
evenings, even when I wasn’t there. She hardly ever
laughed, and I had become so accustomed over the years to
the peel of her laughter ringing out around the house. And,
even then, it didn’t occur to me why. I’m so bloody stupid!
Maybe if I’d cottoned on sooner . . .
It was pure chance in the end that I stumbled on the truth.
She’d left her phone on the kitchen table. I don’t know where
she was. Somewhere else in the house. But it chimed. You
know, that sound it makes when there’s an incoming text.
The notification appeared briefly on her welcome screen, and
I had time to read it before it vanished, lost behind a
passcode that she’d always kept from me.
Leonardo, Friday at 7. L.
I didn’t twig initially. She’d told me she was meeting a
girlfriend for drinks on Friday. Leonardo? Had to be some
kind of pub in town. Then it occurred to me that the
girlfriend’s name was Sarah. So who was L? And then it
dawned on me with an awful clarity. Lee. It was Lee! He was
meeting her at seven on Friday at somewhere called
Leonardo. I went online and googled it. The only thing I could
find was the Leonardo Inn. I knew the place. Out west on the
Great Western Road. It had been there for donkeys. In the
old days it had been known as the Pond Hotel.
I could scarcely believe it. Until I ran my mind back over
the previous few weeks. The number of times she’d been
meeting this girlfriend or that. And it felt then like my life had
just ended.
I didn’t even notice her coming back into the kitchen.
Didn’t hear her when she spoke to me. At least, not the first
time. Then I heard her saying, ‘Cam, Cam, are you with us?’
I looked up, and she had her phone in her hand. ‘Sorry,’ I
said. ‘I was away in a dwam.’ But she was the one not
listening now, as she read her text, and suddenly slipped her
phone in the back pocket of her jeans like it was burning her
fingers. I knew then that I had lost her.

She thought I was on duty Friday night. But I swapped shifts,

and I was sitting in my car at the back of the parking lot at
the Leonardo Inn for a good half hour before the seven
o’clock rendezvous.
I saw Jardine arrive first in a beat-up old Tesla. So they’d
given him his licence back, in spite of everything. Either that,
or he was driving illegally. But long gone was the flash,
expensive sports car. Which no doubt was something he
could no longer afford.
He got out of his banger and propped his arse on the
bonnet to light a cigarette and wait. She was nearly ten
minutes late, finally arriving in one of the new generation of
black e-cabs. Dressed to the nines and all made up for the
big date. Lipstick, eye shadow, the lot. As if she needed
somehow to impress him. Thirty-six years old, and she was
still a fine-looking woman. But I loved her in her baggy old
jog pants and T-shirt, without a trace of make-up.
I sat there behind the wheel of my car with tears filling my
eyes. It was loss I felt more than anger. I could never be
angry with Mel. She was so innocent. Even in her betrayal.
Jardine threw away his cigarette and when she ran to him,
they kissed. Not just a casual, ‘hi there’ sort of kiss. It was
longer than that, lips that lingered, turning the knife in me.
As if I wasn’t hurting enough. Then they laughed, and he
held her hand as they ran lightly up the steps to push open
glass doors into reception.
I sat for what must have been ten minutes or more,
knuckles turning white as I gripped the wheel in front of me.
What was I going to do? Turn around and drive away? Accept
that life with Mel as I’d known it was over? It would have
been impossible for me to pretend that I didn’t know about
her and Jardine. If I wanted to keep her, I was going to have
to fight for her.
The girl at reception was flustered when I thrust my
warrant card in her face and demanded to know the room
number of the couple who had just checked in. She wasn’t to
know that I didn’t have that authority. And she didn’t need to
check her records. She remembered it. Room 347.
I took the elevator up to the third floor, trying to not even
think about what I was doing, holding every emotion in
check. I was like some kind of container under pressure,
ready to explode. I walked along a carpeted hallway and
stopped in front of Room 347 to rap on the door. There was
no magic eye in it, so he wouldn’t be able to see me.
‘What is it?’ his voice barked from somewhere inside the
room. A gravelly, smoker’s voice grated raw by years of
alcohol abuse. I wondered how he’d managed inside, but
prison security was like Swiss cheese in those days.
I put on a posh voice. ‘Richard from reception, sir. There’s
a problem with your electrics.’
‘What the fuck?’
‘The management’s apologies, sir, but we’ll have to move
you to another room.’
I heard banging about behind the door before it flew open,
and a semi-dressed Jardine filled the frame of it. There was
no time even for surprise to register on his coupon before I
put my shoulder in his chest, and we both went barrelling
backwards into the room.
I heard Mel scream as I landed on top of him, and his foul
breath exploded in my face. Just as all my pent-up fury
exploded in the fists I slammed into his. I reckon I broke his
nose and took out a couple of teeth with the first three
blows. Then I punched him in the throat and he couldn’t
breathe. He was bucking beneath me like a demented horse,
and I kept hitting him till I couldn’t see his face for blood.
I was barely aware of Mel screaming at me, trying to pull
me off, before finally the veil of madness lifted and I got to
my feet with bruised and bleeding knuckles. Jardine lay on
the floor gasping for breath, blood bubbling from between
split lips.
 I pulled myself free of Mel’s grasp, and my eyes must have
been on fire, because she recoiled from me as if I might hit
her. As if I would. As if I ever would. Her blouse was open
and I could see the black lacy bra against the white of her
skin beneath it. Everything I didn’t want to see. I grabbed
her jacket from the bed and told her to put it on. She was
coming with me.
It was only later, I guess, that I realised I had no right.
That by removing her choice, I wasn’t treating her any better
than Jardine. I’m ashamed now of what I did. But when I
look back on it, I’m not sure I would have done anything
different. If only I could have spared Mel the hurt and
humiliation.
She snatched her bag from the dresser as I dragged her
from the room. Jardine had pulled himself up on to one elbow
by now. And I could see only murder in the eyes that blinked
away blood. ‘I’ll fucking get you, Brodie. Count on it. You’ll
fucking regret this, both of you.’
I pulled the door shut on him and hurried Mel away down
the hall to the elevator.
The girl at reception stared at us, wide-eyed, as we ran
across the lobby and out into the dying light of the day. I no
longer had to drag Mel behind me. She came without
resistance. That passive acceptance she always had of
everything that life threw at her.
We sat for a long time in the car without saying a word.
Staring sightlessly out of the windscreen, breathing hard,
filling the air with our spent oxygen and all our regrets. When
I finally turned to look at her, silent tears ran freely down her
face. She said, in a voice so brittle it damn near broke my
heart, ‘I’m so sorry, Cam. He . . . he threatened Addie if I
didn’t see him.’ And I thought there didn’t seem anything
threatening in the kiss I’d seen them exchange just fifteen
minutes earlier. Maybe she read my mind, because she said,
‘It doesn’t mean anything.’
And I closed my eyes to shut out the pain, because I knew
it meant everything.
‘I can’t even explain it . . .’ Her words came staccato
through her sobs. ‘He . . . he just has this hold on me.’
I dropped my head on to bloody hands clutching the
steering wheel. I whispered, ‘Tell me you won’t see him
again.’
‘I swear, Cammie, I swear it.’
But I knew she would.
 CHAPTER TWENTY
2051
Addie climbed now in silence, her face as white as the snow
in which she left traces, just a little colour rising in patches
high on her cheeks. She had listened to her father in silence
as they stood on the incline beneath the pines, before turning
without comment to continue the climb towards the old
military road somewhere up ahead.
Brodie felt hollowed out, as if letting go of everything he
had kept to himself all this time had left a gaping hole inside
him. Nothing rushed in to fill the void. Not even regret. And
he wondered how something as full of nothing as emptiness
could weigh so heavily.
Wearily he started off after her and they climbed in silence
for another fifteen minutes or more, before emerging finally
from the trees and on to the unbroken snow-covered military
road that cut its way around the side of the hill. It was
exposed here, and they could see all the way back down into
the valley. The mountains that rose steeply from the banks
of the loch pierced a troubled sky, and the clouds which had
earlier obscured them seemed anxious now to pass them by,
blown east on the first breath of the coming storm. Brodie
felt it, too, in his face. Like an icy hand brushing cold flesh.
‘Not far now.’
He heard Addie’s voice, and turned to see her striding off
along the road towards the corrie they had passed through
yesterday on their way down from Binnein Mòr. He hadn’t
known what to expect from her. Some reaction, at least. Not
just silence. It was as if his words had run off her like water
on wax. He had no idea whether she was in denial, or simply
processing. But her lack of response left him feeling, if
anything, emptier than before.
They walked for a good ten minutes in further silence,
Brodie trailing twenty yards behind. Until they reached an
area of unbroken snow that lay to their right. A turning or
passing area, perhaps, on this single-track road. She stopped
and waited for him to catch up.
‘This would be the last place he could leave his car without
blocking the road,’ she said.
Looking ahead, Brodie could see the road meandering up
the hill towards a hairpin that turned across the Allt Coire na
Bà, or one of the streams that fed it. Beyond this open area
on the right, the tree-covered hillside fell away steeply, and
they could hear the sound of running water from far below.
Wet snow creaked under his feet as he crossed towards the
drop, and a couple of startled ptarmigan with their pure
white mass of winter plumage clattered noisily away into the
forest.
Addie joined him on the edge as he gazed down into the
trees that sparsely covered the top part of the slope. ‘If he
had left it here, they’d have found it very quickly,’ she said.
He held out a hand towards her. ‘Help me down.’
She took it almost without thinking, and braced as he
stepped cautiously down on to the slope, to drop her hand
and wrap an arm around a gnarled pine to stop himself
slithering off towards the stream.
‘What are you doing?’ she called after him as he slid then
from one tree trunk to the next.
‘Looking for Younger’s car,’ he called back.
He stopped, crouching down beside the nearest trunk, and
ran a hand lightly over the bark near where the roots had
spread themselves out to gain a foothold on the hillside. He
turned his face back up the slope towards her.
‘White paint,’ he shouted, and heard his voice echo around
the ravine below. He stood up, supporting himself against the
trunk, and peered off into the gloom. ‘Looks like someone
might have driven it, or pushed it off down here.’ He sat
down abruptly in the snow, and braced and bent his legs in
turn to lower himself down the incline on his backside.
The noise of running water grew louder as he neared the
foot of the drop, and he saw the hulk of a white vehicle, half-
buried in snow. Its nose was sunk into the bed of the stream,
breaking the flow of water and sending it in white spate
around either side of it.
He turned, hearing Addie arrive behind him. She had
negotiated the slope much more quickly than he, and stood
breathing hard, supporting herself against the nearest trunk.
She gazed in wonder at Younger’s car, lying as it was at a
crazy angle, its rear wheels and axle completely clear of the
ground and backfilled by the snow drifting up around it.
Brodie said, ‘No one was ever likely to find it down here,
even in August. And now it’s perfectly camouflaged by the
snow.’ He moved down to place one foot in the stream. ‘Give
me a hand to clear the snow away and we’ll see if we can get
into it.’
They worked slowly, careful not to dislodge the vehicle
from its final resting place in case it fell on them. Finally,
Brodie was satisfied that the door would open clear of the
snow. He unzipped the breast pocket of his North Face and
took out the keycard he had chipped free from the ice on the
mountain.
Addie said, ‘Surely there won’t be any charge left in the
battery?’
‘Enough, hopefully, to read the card,’ he said. ‘If not, we’ll
have to smash the window.’ He laid the card against the
sensor in the column between the front and back doors, and
heard an audible click above the rush of water. He tried the
handle and the door swung open, suddenly, almost knocking
him off his feet. He recovered himself quickly to scramble
away in case the car dislodged itself. But it didn’t move. He
breathed a sigh of relief. ‘It must be wedged solid.’
He pulled himself up with one hand on the roof, and swung
himself into the driver’s seat, tipped forward against the
steering wheel. Addie slithered down to peer in beside him. It
was ice-cold and dark inside. But there was enough light to
see that a jacket tossed carelessly into the back seat had
fallen on to the floor. The mats in the front were littered with
chewing gum wrappers. A green scent diffuser in the shape
of a Christmas tree dangled at an odd angle from the rear-
view mirror, but it had long since lost its perfume. Strangely,
there was a very human smell in the car. The faint fragrance
of body odour and aftershave. The last traces that Charles
Younger had left on this earth.
Brodie tried the glovebox, but it was locked electronically,
and he thought there probably wasn’t enough charge left in
the car to boot up its computer to open it.
‘Here.’ Addie handed him a large hunting knife that she
took from her daypack. The look he gave her brought a smile
to her face. ‘I should have been in the Boy Scouts,’ she said.
But he couldn’t find a smile in return. He took her knife,
unsheathed it, and forced open the glove compartment with
a splintering of moulded fibre. Inside were maps, and some
notebooks with pages of scribbled shorthand. Brodie flipped
through a few, but the strange markings made no sense to
him. Then, beneath the car’s leather-bound instruction
manual, he found something that looked like the kind of
mobile phone that people had used around the turn of the
century. Chunky, yellow, and with a grey liquid-crystal
display screen. He took off his gloves to examine it, turning it
this way and that. ‘What the hell?’ He turned towards his
daughter. ‘Any idea what it is?’
She nodded. ‘It’s a Geiger counter.’
He frowned. ‘For measuring radioactivity?’
‘Yes.’ She paused. ‘Dad, what would he want with a Geiger
counter?’
The fact that once again she had called him Dad without
thinking stilled his heart and he couldn’t meet her eye. But
his only response was to shrug. ‘No idea, Addie.’
He unvelcroed his parka to access an inside pocket, and
zipped the Geiger counter and the notebooks safely away,
then heaved himself out.
‘Let’s try the boot.’
It took some minutes to force the lock, and when finally
they lifted the lid, they found only a spare wheel and a bag of
tools.
Brodie said, ‘There’s probably storage space under the
bonnet. But we’ll not get access to that until we can get this
thing winched out of here.’ He sat down in the snow and
rubbed his face, breathing frustration into his hands.
Addie squatted beside him. ‘So what does any of this tell
you?’
‘It tells me that whoever killed him up on the mountain
came down to get rid of his car before anyone spotted it.’
‘But how? I mean, he didn’t have a key, because that was
still up there in the ice. And if the car was in park, then he
couldn’t have pushed it over.’
Brodie stood up suddenly. ‘I wonder if Younger left it in
sentry mode.’
‘What’s that?’
‘Some cars have got a security system, Addie, that uses
the self-drive cameras. There’s usually about eight of them
around the vehicle. If you leave them on sentry mode, they’ll
record anyone or anything that moves around it.’
‘And there’ll still be a record of that?’
‘Let’s find out.’ He swung himself back into the car and
leaned across the passenger seat so that he could reach into
the back of the glovebox. Using his fingers as eyes, he felt
around until they settled on a raised area at the left rear
corner. With finger and thumb, he grasped the hard edge and
tugged it free. He brought out his hand and held the object
he had removed up to the light.
‘What is it?’ Addie peered through the gloom.
‘An SD card. If Younger’s car had sentry mode, and it was
activated, whoever shoved it over the edge should be caught
on video. And it’ll be on this card.’ It was a long shot, and he
wouldn’t know if there was anything on it until he got back to
the hotel to slot it into his laptop, but it was time he had a
break. Nothing else had gone to plan so far. He secured the
card in another pocket and said, ‘Let’s get out of here.’
It was harder getting out of the gully than it had been
getting in, and it was nearly ten minutes before they were
standing in the parking area off the old military road,
breathing heavily and perspiring in the cold air. The wind was
getting up now, and Brodie felt it filling his mouth as he
fought to recover his breath.
‘We’d better get back to the village,’ he said, and they
started off back along the road until reaching the point where
they had climbed up to it from below. Overhead, the clouds
had morphed from ominous to threatening, and you could
smell the coming storm on the leading edge of the wind.
It wasn’t until they had climbed down through the trees to
where the ground levelled off and the going got easier, that
Addie formed words to express the thoughts that had been
eating away at her all this time.
‘So it was Mum who had the affair. Not you.’ She wasn’t
asking, so he assumed that she had been processing it and
was voicing it now as a statement of fact.
‘Yes.’
‘And that’s what you wanted to tell me? That’s what was so
important that you deceived your bosses to get yourself sent
up here?’
Brodie drew a deep breath. ‘It’s important enough, Addie.
But it’s still not the whole story.’
She looked at him. ‘I didn’t think it could be. Mum didn’t
kill herself just because she’d had an affair, did she?’
He shook his head. ‘No.’
‘So, are you going to tell me?’
‘I will, Addie.’ He hesitated. ‘But there are things I need to
do first. I need more time with you than we have right now.’
‘Time for what?’
‘To explain.’
 ‘How you drove Mum to suicide, you mean?’
He glanced at her, expecting to see the hatred she’d
harboured for him all this time still reflected in her face. But
her expression was blank. Eyes cold, emotionless, and
assiduously avoiding his.
‘Yes,’ he said.
They stood there for a long time listening to the wind, and
Brodie thought how his story was just like that wind. Cold
and unforgiving, and gone in the blink of an eye. Like his life.
They walked then the rest of the way in silence until they
reached the Grey Mare’s car park. And stopped at the parting
of the ways.
‘So,’ she said. ‘What now?’
‘I need to get to my laptop to see what, if anything, there
is on this card. And if the phone or internet is back up, then I
need to check in with HQ in Glasgow. We need a team up
here. There’s two people dead and a killer still on the loose.’
He closed his eyes as he felt the pressure of it all weighing
down on him. ‘I’ll have to come back to the police station
sometime this afternoon. I need to take a look at that CCTV
footage of Younger and the unidentified individual he was
talking to in the village the day he disappeared.’ He paused.
‘Maybe we could talk then.’
‘I’m not sure I want to hear what it is you have to say.
Whatever it is, maybe it’s better if it dies with you.’
She turned abruptly and walked away in the direction of
the police station.
 CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
As he climbed the slope from the football field to the hotel,
he could smell woodsmoke carried on the wind, and saw curls
of blue smoke whipped into the gathering storm from the
chimney top above the bar. Brannan’s SUV was parked at the
foot of the steps. For once, Brodie thought, there was
someone home.
He kicked the snow from his boots on the top step and
pushed open the door into the entrance hall. Brannan
emerged from the bar. He must have been watching Brodie’s
approach unseen from behind reflections on glass.
His smile was forced. ‘Internet’s back online. Mobile
phones, too.’
‘Good,’ Brodie said.
But Brannan made a face. ‘We’re not likely to have them
for long, though. Storm Idriss is scheduled to hit in a couple
of hours, and it’ll probably take everything out again.’ He
flicked his head back over his shoulder. ‘I was just trying to
build up some heat in the bar. In case we lose power again,
too.’ He laughed at his own optimism. ‘In case? I should say
“when”.’
Brodie said, ‘You’ve spoken to Jackson?’
Brannan’s face clouded. ‘I haven’t had a chance.’
Brodie’s eyes turned dangerous. ‘Oh, yeah, cos you’re so
busy here at the hotel.’
Brannan said quickly, ‘No, what I mean is, I haven’t been
able to reach him, Mr Brodie. He’s at the plant. Won’t come
off shift till six. There were no phones all morning. And it’s
hard to get a call through to him there anyway.’
‘Then try harder.’
‘I will, I will . . . But, you know, I promised Joe
confidentiality.’
 Brodie took a step towards him. ‘If there’s no rendezvous
arranged by close of play this afternoon, I’m going to arrest
you for obstruction of justice, Brannan.’ He scrutinised the
man’s frightened face. ‘Do you understand me?’
Brannan nodded.
‘Good.’ Brodie started for the stairs, then stopped and
turned. ‘One other thing.’
Brannan eyed him warily.
‘What does he look like, this Joe Jackson?’
Brannan frowned. ‘I don’t—’
Brodie cut him off. ‘Just describe him to me.’
Brannan looked perplexed, then almost pained as he tried
to pull an image to mind of the man he had spent half the
day with just yesterday. The succession of witnesses over the
years who had struggled to recall the details of events which
had unfolded in front of their eyes meant that Brodie was no
longer surprised by people’s faulty memories. ‘He . . . he’s
tall. Probably six foot. Maybe a bit more.’ He raised a hand to
his own balding head. ‘Losing his hair. Sort of gingery, going
white.’ He was warming to his memory. ‘A wiry guy, not
much meat on the bones.’
Brodie nodded. This was better than he had expected. ‘Talk
to him,’ he said, and turned to run up the stairs.

In his room, Brodie unfolded his laptop on the dresser and

booted it up. He took the SD card from his North Face and
examined it in the light. Extended capacity. Ten terabytes.
Enough for hours of 6K video. He slipped it into the card slot
on the side of the laptop and opened it up on-screen.
Younger’s housekeeping had been poor. There were hours
of recorded video that he hadn’t bothered to wipe.
Fortunately there was a date stamp, so Brodie was able to
fast-forward to the day the journalist went missing. It was 9
p.m. when the cameras on Younger’s car flickered into life
and Brodie saw a figure approaching from the rear. A man
wearing a hoodie and jeans, and to Brodie’s disappointment,
a ski mask – aware of the possibility that he was being
captured on camera. As he moved around the car, his image
segued from one camera to the next. He tried each of the
doors, but there was no way of getting into the car without
breaking a window.
A hand came into close-up as the man turned away from
the driver’s door, and Brodie stiffened. He froze the image
and zoomed in on it. It was some kind of work glove. M-Pact
Mechanix. Brown and tan, reinforced across the knuckles and
along the back of each finger. With four distinctive horizontal
slashes at each joint to allow for easy flexing. The same
pattern that, with repeated blows to Younger’s head, had
been imprinted in clear contusions in the flesh of his face.
Brodie switched applications and googled M-Pact. He found
the glove in seconds. Impact Guard™ for shock protection.
And TrekDry® material to keep hands dry. The reinforcement
was provided by thermoplastic rubber, and something called
EVA foam protected all the joints. Ideal for heavy mechanical
work. Or mountaineering.
He switched back to the video and set it to play. The
wearer of the gloves simply walked away, moving quickly out
of shot. The cameras recorded for another thirty seconds,
then stopped, and the image went black. There had to be
more. Brodie waited.
When the recording restarted, an hour had passed, and the
light had faded. The picture was grainy now. The movement
which had triggered the recording was the arrival of another
vehicle, which immediately doused its headlights. It swung
quickly into position directly behind Younger’s car, and it was
impossible to tell whether this was an SUV or a pickup. Even
the colour of it was difficult to determine. Dark blue or green.
Maybe even grey. Its driver had taken the precaution of
covering the licence plate, but there were bull bars on the
front.
Younger’s car juddered as the vehicle behind it engaged,
then began inching it forward. The wheels would have been
locked, but the superior power of the other vehicle easily
pushed them across the gravel.
Suddenly the view from the rear cameras angled towards
the sky, and all the images recording on to the SD card
became blurred as the vehicle tipped down the slope,
gathering momentum, and jarring as it struck several trees
on the way down. It seemed to take an eternity to reach the
bottom of the drop, but in fact was recorded as being fewer
than five seconds. The downward progress of the car ended
suddenly as the nose buried itself in the stream. The front
cameras registered underwater pebbles worn smooth by eons
as the cloudiness of the impact quickly washed away in the
flow of the stream. The view back to the top of the slope
revealed the distant silhouette of a man standing against the
light of the stars. He waited for only a moment before turning
away out of shot, and less than half a minute later, the
recording stopped and the picture went black. There was no
further video on the card.
Brodie was startled by a knock at the door. ‘Yes?’
It opened, and a hesitant Brannan took a couple of steps
into the room. ‘Sorry to disturb you, Mr Brodie.’ And Brodie
realised for the first time how quickly the light was fading.
The cloud was almost black beyond his window, the
afternoon light sulphurous, the wind rattling the window
frame.
‘You spoke to Jackson?’
Brannan nodded. ‘He’s agreed to meet you on the proviso
that you’ll keep his name out of it.’
‘There’s no way I can guarantee that, Brannan.’
Brannan made a face. ‘I thought that. But I’ll let you tell
him.’
‘Is he coming here?’
Brannan shook his head vigorously. ‘No. He’ll meet you
tonight. 8 p.m. On the north side of the loch. A couple of
miles short of the power plant. Down off the road there’s a
concrete bunker which provides an emergency escape from
the storage tunnels below. I can show you on the map.’
Brodie sighed. ‘I’d rather he just came here.’
‘He won’t do that, Mr Brodie. Whatever it is he knows,
whatever he told Younger, he’s scared. I mean, really
scared.’
‘And how am I supposed to get there?’
‘I’ll lend you my SUV.’
‘You could just drive me.’
Brannan shook his head. ‘I have a large party booking in
for Christmas this year, Mr Brodie. The organiser is calling
tonight with details. I need to be here to take the call.’ He
added quickly, ‘It’s only about a ten- or fifteen-minute drive.’
When Brannan had gone, Brodie sat in the gloom of his
bedroom for several minutes, turning everything over in his
mind. The autopsy, the gloves, the car in the ravine. Sita’s
murder. It pained him every time he recalled the image of
the pathologist folded into the cake chiller. Something she
had found during the post-mortem had made her a target for
the killer. Something that might reveal his identity, or the
motive for Younger’s murder. But whatever it was she’d
found, it was lost now. All her samples vanished, along with
Younger’s body.
He checked that he still had internet and slipped on his
iCom glasses. He would record his report and send it to
Pacific Quay so that he didn’t have to engage. That way he
could register every detail without interruption, right down to
and including his rendezvous later with Joe Jackson. If Storm
Idriss brought down power lines again, as Brannan predicted,
it might be the last chance he had to report in before
sometime tomorrow, or later.
 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.
 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.’
 CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
He seemed to be driving headlong into the gale. Hailstones
flew out of the darkness like sparks, deflecting off the
windscreen. The outside temperature displayed on the dash
of Brannan’s SUV was minus two. He could barely see the
road ahead of him, hail blowing around and drifting like snow
on the recently cleared tarmac.
It took him longer than the ten to fifteen minutes predicted
by Brannan. Several times he stopped to consult the map
that lay open on the passenger seat, and to try to identify
landmarks in his headlights. Finally he spotted the lay-by
that Brannan had marked with a red cross on the map, and
he pulled in off the road.
He sat for a while, steeling himself to face the storm
outside, summoning his last reserves of energy, and felt the
vehicle buffeted by the wind. The door was nearly whipped
from his grasp as he opened it, and he had to battle hard
against the wind to close it again.
He pulled up the hood of Brannan’s anorak, and slipped the
elastic of his headlight around it. Now at least he could see
where he was going, hail slicing through its beam almost
horizontally as he clambered down off the road to stumble
through trees and a tangle of dead ferns towards the loch
somewhere unseen ahead.
He very nearly ran straight into the bunker as it loomed
suddenly out of the dark – a concrete pillbox that stood
almost three metres high, just beyond the line of the trees
and within sight of the water. It was hard to imagine a more
inhospitable time and place to meet anyone. He felt his way
around the walls to the front side facing the loch. A heavy
steel door stood partially open, and electric light angled out
from behind it towards the shore.
 Brodie ducked inside, grateful to be out of the wind and the
stinging hail whipped in on its leading edge. A single round
LED light set into the roof cast a harsh yellow glow around
the concrete walls, and the closed doors of what looked like
an elevator.
He recognised Jackson immediately from Brannan’s
description. Tall, gangly, wiry ginger hair spraying out from
beneath the hood of his parka. His face was the colour of
ash, and nervous green eyes darted from Brodie, to the
outside dark and then back again.
‘Jackson?’ Brodie asked unnecessarily.
The other man nodded. ‘I don’t want to be involved in this.’
Brodie said, ‘Mr Jackson, you’re involved whether you like
it or not.’ He tipped his head towards the elevator doors.
‘Where does the lift go?’
‘More than half a kilometre down a lead-lined shaft to the
deepest level of the storage tunnels below. It’s designed for
escape rather than entry. Though those of us with security
clearance have access badges on our key rings.’
‘You didn’t come up in it, then?’
‘Good God, no. It wouldn’t be safe down there.’
‘Why not?’
Jackson rubbed his face with spindly white fingers. ‘Look, I
only ever spoke to Mr Younger on the basis of complete
anonymity.’
‘He was a journalist, Mr Jackson; I’m not. And if you don’t
want me to arrest you for his murder, I suggest you start
talking. And fast.’
Indignation exploded from wet, purple lips. ‘I didn’t kill
him! Why would I kill him? Jesus Christ, you can’t be
serious.’
‘Then who did, and why?’
‘I’ve no idea who.’ He hesitated. ‘Someone who didn’t want
him publishing his story.’
‘And what story would that be?’
Jackson shook his head in slow desperation. ‘I can’t.’
 And he wasn’t prepared for the force with which Brodie
banged him up against the wall. The policeman breathed in
his face. ‘My pathologist was murdered yesterday. And
someone tried to kill me today, Mr Jackson. If you don’t tell
me what’s going on here . . .’ He didn’t need to frame the
threat in words. Its implication was clear enough.
Jackson shook himself free of Brodie’s grasp. ‘Okay!’ He
almost shouted. He straightened his parka and breathed
deeply, trying to figure out where to begin. Finally he said,
‘Do you remember a story in the media about six months
ago? It was on the radio and TV. An earthquake in the West
Highlands.’
Brodie shrugged. ‘Vaguely.’ He thought about it. ‘But the
only reason that would have made the news is because you
hardly ever get earthquakes in Scotland. And, as I recall, this
one wouldn’t even have made rings in a cup of tea. So no
one made very much of it.’
‘No, they didn’t. But they should have.’
Brodie frowned. ‘What do you mean?’
‘It was a shifting of the tectonic plates on either side of the
Great Glen Rift. Not far north of where we are now.’
Brodie stuck out a lower lip. ‘Great Glen Rift? I’ve no idea
what that is.’
‘It runs roughly in a line from Fort William to Inverness, Mr
Brodie. Effectively along the length of the Caledonian Canal.
If you look at Scotland from space, it appears divided along
that line into two parts.’ He paused. ‘Well, actually, it is. Sort
of. And six months ago, the plates on either side of that
divide shifted sideways. It wasn’t a huge movement, and
there wasn’t that much felt above ground. But . . .’ he shook
his head in hopeless despair, ‘there were fractures in the
bedrock on both sides. Deep down.’
An unthinkable realisation began to dawn on Brodie. He
pointed towards the floor. ‘You mean down there?’
Jackson nodded. The ashen hue of his face was touched
now by a green that almost matched his eyes. It spoke more
than anything he could have put into words. He said, ‘You
know how the waste from Ballachulish A is disposed of?’
‘Not in detail. Only that tunnels were excavated five, six,
seven hundred metres down to store the stuff.’
Jackson screwed his eyes shut for a moment before
opening them again to stare wildly at Brodie. ‘We borrowed
the idea from the Fins. You drill half a mile down into the
bedrock, and excavate tunnels that fan out into a network of
galleries. Radioactive waste from the reactor is put into
boron steel canisters, which are then enclosed within
corrosion-resistant copper capsules. Individual holes are
drilled in the galleries. The capsules are placed into the holes,
and then backfilled with bentonite clay.’ He paused to draw
breath. ‘A permanent solution. The stuff is entombed forever.
No further human or mechanical intervention is required,
because the waste is now one hundred per cent inaccessible.’
Brodie thought about it. ‘There must be a limit, though, to
how much stuff you can put down there.’
‘Of course. But there’s enough capacity to store waste from
the plant until 2120, when they’ll seal it permanently and
Ballachulish A will be decommissioned.’
Brodie said, ‘And nobody foresaw the possibility of an
earthquake?’
The shaking of Jackson’s head was laden with sadness.
‘That’s just it. They did. In the early stages, the Scottish
Government commissioned a feasibility study into the whole
waste-storage plan. The final study included a report which
outlined the possibility of damage if there were any tectonic
shifts in the Great Glen Rift. It did make it clear that such a
thing was highly unlikely. The remotest of possibilities, Mr
Brodie. I mean, almost certain never to happen. But, still, in
the greater scheme of things, not impossible.’
‘And they ignored it?’
Jackson’s purple lips were tinged with white as he pressed
them together in a grim line. ‘Not exactly.’
‘Well, what exactly?’
 ‘If you look at the records in the government archive, Mr
Brodie, you’ll not find that report. It’s not there.’
Brodie let disbelief escape from his lips in a breath. ‘They
buried it.’
‘An inconvenient truth. Any further investigation into the
possibility of tectonic shifts, or the damage that might result,
would have taken years. The whole Ballachulish A project
would have been put on ice. Might never have happened.’
The silence that fell between them then was broken only by
the sounds of the storm raging outside and the wind that
whistled in the half-open door and blew about their legs. The
enormity of what Jackson had just told Brodie was slowly
sinking in. But the reactor operator wasn’t finished.
‘The energy minister responsible for driving the whole
nuclear project through the parliament in Edinburgh in the
thirties gambled everything on Ballachulish A. It was going to
be Scotland’s energy future. And it was the rock upon which
she built her whole career.’
Brodie looked at him. ‘She?’
‘The first minister. Sally Mack. Hoping now that the great
Scottish voting public are going to re-elect her, forever
grateful that power in Scotland doesn’t have to be rationed
like it is in so many other parts of the world.’
Brodie said, ‘So she doesn’t want this coming out before
the election. In, what . . .’ he checked the date on his watch,
‘less than a week from now.’
‘And with good reason. If it was revealed that she
deliberately concealed a report warning of exactly what has
happened, it would sink both her and her government.’
‘And what exactly has happened?’
Jackson’s breathing was shallow now as fear devoured
oxygen and energy. ‘No one knows for sure, Mr Brodie.’ He
steeled himself to say it. ‘But radiation is leaking from the
tunnels. A lot of it.’ He raised his eyes towards the ceiling as
if in silent prayer to make it all go away. Then refocused on
Brodie. ‘We figure that a fracture in the bedrock somewhere
down there has damaged some of the boron steel canisters.’
Brodie frowned. ‘Surely a radiation leak would trigger an
alarm system of some kind?’
‘Oh, it has. There’s a team of experts here, combing the
tunnels in radiation suits, trying to track down the source of
it. A full investigation. But it’s all hush-hush. Kept under
wraps for reasons of “national security”.’ The sarcasm with
which he imbued the words national security was not lost on
Brodie.
And Brodie said, ‘National security being another way of
saying political convenience.’
Jackson sighed heavily. ‘I don’t want to get into the politics
of it, Mr Brodie. But, well, call me a cynic. I figure that the
whole fiasco will be cloaked in national security at least until
after the election.’
Brodie said, ‘How bad is it down there?’
‘It’s bad. A large section of the tunnel network has been
sealed off to try to contain it.’ He buried his face in his hands
as if he could hide behind them. ‘Oh, God,’ he said, his voice
muffled by them. And when he took them away again, Brodie
saw tears in his green eyes. ‘It’s starting to leak out into the
environment. This whole area shows readings way above
safe levels.’
Brodie immediately thought of Addie and Cameron and felt
sick. His investigation had turned into the worst kind of
nightmare. Like a dream that haunts you during dark,
troubled nights, then lingers long after the sun has risen.
‘How was Younger going to prove all this?’ he asked.
‘I don’t know how he managed it,’ Jackson said, ‘but he’d
got hold of a copy of the disappeared report. Signed off by
Mack herself. And he wanted to take readings. God help me,
but he persuaded me to let him down into the tunnels. I told
him radiation levels were probably fatal, but he was
determined to go down anyway. He said he wouldn’t be
exposed for long. He needed the proof.’
And suddenly it dawned on Brodie what Younger was doing
on Binnein Mòr. He remembered the radiation sensor just a
little further along the ridge from Addie’s weather station.
Younger had wanted to take a reading from it. Crossing
every ‘t’ of his story. And if he had been fatally exposed to
high levels of radiation himself, that would explain why he
didn’t want to waste half a day or more taking the long way
up to the summit. Every minute counted.
‘His piece in the paper and on the internet, Mr Brodie, was
going to blow this government clean out of the water.’
The words had barely left Jackson’s mouth when Brodie
saw his head almost dissolve in an explosion of blood and
bone and brain matter, throwing his body back against the
far wall. The roar of gunfire in the confined space was
enough to burst eardrums, and Brodie could hear only a loud,
insistent ringing in his ears as he saw Jackson slide down the
wall, leaving a bloody trail on the concrete. He turned as a
shadow loomed in the doorway and caught only the briefest
glimpse of a ski mask. Pain and light filled his head, then,
consciousness sucked like matter into a black hole, and
nothing remained but darkness.

The first thing he became aware of was a sensation of slowly

sinking. Then came the return of pain filling his head, and
when finally he opened his eyes, it was to be blinded by light.
He could not immediately identify the source of the light. It
seemed hidden by the square of ceiling above his head, and
leaked out on all four sides. He was lying on a rubberised
floor, half propped up against a stainless steel wall. He
seemed surrounded, in fact, by reflective stainless steel. On
the wall opposite, at roughly chest height, two illuminated
buttons were mounted on a steel panel. The numeral ‘one’
above the numeral ‘zero’. A ring of green light surrounded
the ‘zero’ button.
Through the cloud of confusion that accompanied the pain
in his head, it very slowly dawned on him that he was in the
escape elevator, descending into the storage tunnels from
the pillbox where he had met with Jackson. The sinking
sensation was the slow downward motion of the lift. And all
he could hear above the ringing in his ears was Jackson’s
voice saying I told him radiation levels were probably fatal.
Slowly, he got first to his knees, and then, with an effort,
to his feet. He leaned a hand against one of the elevator
walls to support himself. Lead-lined, Jackson had told him.
The lift shaft was lead-lined. So for the moment he was
protected from the radiation below. He staggered to the
illuminated buttons on the far wall and jabbed his thumb at
the ‘one’ button. The elevator continued on its slow but
relentless descent. He jabbed it again, several times. Then,
just for good measure, tried the ‘zero’ button. Neither had
any effect. Panic started rising in his chest, and he pressed
himself against the back wall, willing the elevator to stop.
And still it persisted in its unrelenting downward passage. He
closed his eyes. The doctor had given him six to nine
months, which had seemed like nothing at all. And now they
seemed like an eternity, and felt like life itself. Precious.
He could hear his own breathing in the confined space.
Almost imagined he could hear the rapid beat of his heart,
but really it was just the pulsing of it in his neck.
And when the lift came to a softly juddering halt, he held
his breath, aware of the silence. It felt as though an eternity
passed before a deep clunk preceded the opening of the
doors.
He was not sure what he had expected. But death did not
rush in to greet him. At least, not that he could see. Just
warmth and light. Beyond the doors a cavernous cathedral
rough-hewn out of the bedrock opened up before him, walls
lined with pipes and trunking. It was well lit, bright lights
reflecting off a polished concrete floor. The air was suffused
with a soft electric hum, the source of which was not
immediately apparent.
Brodie stood without moving for several minutes, imagining
that his invisible enemy was killing him, even as he breathed
it in, even as it was absorbed by his skin, and entered his
body through every cut and graze. And yet he felt nothing.
Smelled nothing but the acrid dust of drilled rock. And he
wondered if the odd inflammation that Sita had found in
Younger’s lungs, and the sloughing of mucus in his intestine,
was the result of radiation sickness. The samples she took
would have revealed the truth back in the lab, but he figured
they were gone now, along with the pathologist herself.
An unexpected calm descended on him. He was going to
die anyway. And maybe those precious months would only
have been an endless cycle of chemo and radiotherapy. A
living nightmare. Better, perhaps, to die sooner. But not
before he got out of here to settle the score. To get his
daughter and grandson as far away from this place as
possible. To bring the people responsible to book. To drop
them to their fucking knees.
He pushed away from the back wall of the elevator and
stepped out into the vast arc of this underground cathedral.
The main entrance into it was closed off by a large black
door, perhaps five metres square, delineated by red light
strips that cast a faint pink glow around the whole cavernous
space. Brodie’s footsteps echoed in the softly humming
silence as he walked across the floor to examine it. There
seemed no way of opening it from the inside, and he thought
that the door itself was probably made of lead, immovable by
anything other than some very heavy industrial mechanism.
Huge tunnels fed away from the main space like spokes in a
wheel and disappeared into darkness. A number of them
were sealed. Rubber tyre tracks on the floor led off into
others.
Brodie fumbled in his pocket for Younger’s Geiger counter.
He found a switch on the side of it and turned it on. The grey
screen flickered to life, and immediately the device began to
issue a piercingly high rate of audible clicks that fired through
him like the pellets of a shotgun. Brodie had no idea exactly
what level of radiation was being registered, but he had sat
through enough movies to know that this sound was not
good. The reading on the screen meant little to him either,
and he quickly turned it off. The relief from the crackling was
instant. Better not to know, he thought, and pushed it back
into his pocket.
He looked around now. There had to be another way out.
These tunnels ran for kilometres underground. Surely there
would be another escape elevator?
He crossed the hall and entered the nearest tunnel,
reaching up to find that his headlight was still in place and
still functioning. It pierced through the darkness that lay
ahead. He saw lights running along the arc of the ceiling
overhead, but had no idea how to turn them on. He set off,
following the trunking that lined the wall to his right. Smaller
tunnels fed away to his left at regular intervals. Again, some
of them had been closed off. He passed a large electric
trolley that appeared to have been abandoned and saw a red
light somewhere up ahead. When he reached it, he realised
that it was set high on the wall above another square door
that, this time, stood open. Its delineating light strips were
powered off.
Brodie stepped through it into a larger chamber, turning his
head to direct light around its chiselled walls. It reflected
back from a sign of red letters on a white background.
EMERGENCY EXIT. And an arrow pointing off into darkness.
He pressed ahead.
He had difficulty breathing now. The heat was suffocating,
and he was perspiring down here when the world above was
being plunged into an Arctic chill by an ice storm. It was very
still in the tunnels. Almost peaceful. Why would he even want
to escape back into the raging storm? He was so tired. All he
wanted to do was sit down with his back to the wall and close
his eyes. And maybe never wake up. And then he thought of
Addie, and Cameron, and knew he had to keep going for
them.
He walked on, past yet another sign, before the dark walls
of a lead-lined shaft rose out of the floor to vanish into the
roof space above. There was a single illuminated button set
into the stainless steel to the right of the door, a ring of
green light around it. His mouth was dry. He pressed it, and
the door slid open, spilling bright yellow light into darkness.
He stepped into the light, and with a trembling finger
pushed the ‘one’ button. If it did not respond, then these
tunnels could well be his final resting place. His tomb. He
might starve to death, or die from radiation poisoning before
anyone found him.
To his relief, the door slid shut, and with the softest of
judders, the elevator set off on its long, slow climb back to
the surface.
The lift travelled at little more than walking pace, and took
nearly ten minutes to reach the surface. Brodie stood leaning
against the back wall with his eyes closed, trying not to
think. After all, he wasn’t out yet. He found himself
transported into what felt like an almost Zen state of mind.
Nothing mattered. Nothing existed beyond this space. All
anger and sadness, all emotion, left him. Like spirits escaping
after death. Minutes might have been hours, days or years.
Time was irrelevant.
Then the elevator came to a sudden halt and the doors slid
open. The cold was invisible, like the radiation, and it rushed
in as the contamination he imagined he had brought up with
him escaped. He opened his eyes, and the anger returned. A
burning, all-consuming fury. He stepped out into the ice-cold
of a concrete pillbox and put his shoulder to the bar that
released the catch on the door. Heavy as it was, the strength
of the wind outside caught it and flung it open. Brodie
staggered out in the chaos of the storm and was nearly
blown from his feet. Hail had turned to snow. Big fat flakes of
it that filled the air and stung his face.
He could just make out the trees beyond the pillbox
fibrillating wildly as they yielded to the wind. Perhaps twenty
metres off to his left, the ground sloped steeply away
towards the turbulent waters of the loch. If he kept the loch
to his left and followed the shoreline, he would surely get
back to the place he had met Jackson. He ducked his head
and leaned forward into the wind, to thrust against it, forcing
his legs to carry him through the snow, back the way he had
come down below.
It was ten or more minutes before the concrete of the first
pillbox reflected back at him from his headlight. He pressed
himself against the near wall of it, taking momentary refuge
from the power of the wind, then swung around to pull at the
steel door. It was firmly shut and wouldn’t budge. Whether
or not Jackson, or what was left of him, was still in there was
moot at this point. He was dead, and there was nothing
Brodie could do to change that.
He wheeled away and staggered up through the trees, back
towards the road, hoping against hope that Brannan’s SUV
was still where he had left it. The glass of the passenger
window caught and reflected the LED of his headlight as he
scrambled up the embankment, and it was with huge relief
that he felt his way around the vehicle, pulled the door open
and almost collapsed into the driver’s seat. It took an
enormous effort to close the door again as the wind tried to
rip it from its hinges. And then he was locked away in a
bubble of comparative silence. The storm still raged beyond
the glass, but it was muted now as it vented its anger,
rocking the SUV on its wheels and obliterating its windscreen
with snow.
Brodie sat for several minutes, gasping, fighting for breath,
and when finally he took control again of his lungs, he
avoided the rear-view mirror. He had no desire to look death
in the face. He slipped the vehicle into drive, set the wipers
to fast, and as soon as he could see out, swung the wheel
hard around to head back to the village.
 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.’
 CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
The fury had returned, and Brodie felt out of control. He saw
the world through blood as he ploughed his way up the path
to the door of the little police office. The wind whipped it out
of his hand as he opened it, throwing it back to smash
against the inside wall.
Robbie looked up, startled, from his computer, his battered
face drawn and grey. His eyes opened wide as he saw Brodie
framed in the doorway, snow swirling around him in the
wind.
‘You fucker!’ Brodie shouted, and the younger man was out
of his chair and vaulting over the counter almost before
Brodie could draw another breath. The older man swung a
fist, catching Robbie high on the cheek. But it wasn’t enough
to stop the other’s momentum, and the two of them fell
backwards into the snow outside.
Brodie felt punches falling about his face and shoulder,
glancing blows struck in desperation. And he brought his
knee up sharply to catch his assailant in the sweet spot
between his legs. Robbie bellowed and rolled away, allowing
Brodie to stagger to his feet, clutching at the door frame for
support. The snow blew into his face and into the office
behind him, icy air displacing warmth from the house. But
Robbie was back on his feet, too, growling like a wounded
animal. And he charged again, sending Brodie crashing
backwards into the police office. Brodie struck the counter
hard and felt pain shoot up his spine. The strength of the
younger man pushed him backwards across the countertop,
and fingers like steel rods closed around his neck.
Brodie knew he was no match for the young policeman, but
he also knew how to fight dirty. He caught Robbie’s left ear
and pulled as hard as he could, feeling soft flesh rip in his
hand. Robbie screamed, immediately releasing his grip and
staggering back against the door. It slammed shut behind
him as he took a blood-covered hand away from his head,
and Brodie saw that his ear was dangling by no more than a
shred of skin. He propelled himself off the counter, and
smashed Robbie up against the door, punching him in the
throat, then smashing his forehead hard into Robbie’s nose.
He felt bone dissolve under the force of the blow, and warm
blood splashed over both their faces.
A shrill voice cut across the sound of battle. Piercing,
imperative. ‘Stop it! Stop!!’
Brodie stepped back and turned to find Addie standing
wild-eyed in the doorway to the house, a rifle raised to her
shoulder, the barrel of it pointed at the two combatants.
‘What the fuck?’ she shouted, and took in the damage to
Robbie’s face and the ear dangling from it. ‘Jesus Christ!
What are you doing?’ Wide eyes flashed from husband to
father, and back again.
‘Daddy!’ Cameron’s plaintive cry startled them all, as he
squeezed between his mother’s legs and the door frame and
ran to his father, sobbing and shocked by the blood and
shouting.
Before Brodie could move, Robbie had scooped his son up
into his arms, wheeling away to snatch a letter opener from
the counter. He backed up against the wall, the point of the
blade pressed to the boy’s throat.
There was a moment of incredulous silence in the tiny little
police office, broken only by Cameron’s frightened
whimpering. He clung to his father, not for a moment
believing that Robbie would do him any harm, but utterly
discomposed by the conflict.
Addie gazed in disbelief at the man who had fathered her
child. ‘Robbie . . . what are you doing?’
‘Don’t do anything stupid,’ he said. ‘Put the gun down.’
She let the rifle fall a little from her shoulder, but held it in
readiness to raise again should she need to. ‘For God’s sake,
Robbie. Stop it. You’re not going to hurt him. I can’t believe
you would hurt him.’ She turned incomprehension towards
her father. ‘Why’s he doing this?’
Brodie was still breathing hard. ‘Because he’s already killed
three people, maybe four, Addie. And he doesn’t see any way
out for himself.’
Her lips parted, but there were no words.
Brodie said, ‘He killed Younger. And he murdered Dr Roy
when he realised that the skin she recovered from beneath
the dead man’s fingernails would reveal his DNA.’ He turned
to Robbie. ‘Am I right?’
Robbie was breathing through his mouth as the blood
began to clot in his nose. ‘Couldn’t let her check it against
the database.’
‘Because all serving police officers have to give samples of
their DNA.’
Robbie swallowed.
‘You’d already tried to set poor Calum McLeish up for it,
just in case it all went pear-shaped. Doctoring the CCTV
footage to make it look like he’d done it. And what did you
do, borrow his pickup truck to push Younger’s car into the
ravine?’ Brodie glanced at Addie.
Her face had set now. Disbelief giving way to anger. She
nodded. ‘Every time we had wood to pick up.’
Brodie looked at Robbie again. ‘You knew there would
probably be traces of paint left on the bull bars. Maybe even
made sure there were. And then, of course, there were the
gloves.’ He let his eyes wander to Robbie’s hands, then back
to his face. ‘Bet you destroyed yours. So the only pair would
belong to McLeish. And if we went looking for a match . . .’
He paused. ‘So what did you do to the poor guy? Just one
more body left in your wake?’
Robbie’s face twisted itself into an ugly sneer beneath the
blood. ‘No need for a live fall guy any more, is there? Thanks
to you.’ He paused. ‘McLeish’ll burn now like everyone else.’
Brodie frowned. ‘What do you mean?’
 ‘You’ll find out.’
Brodie stared at him for a long time, before he swivelled
his head towards his daughter. ‘He tried to kill me, too, at
the hydro. And when he failed, he followed me to a meeting
with Younger’s contact from the nuclear plant. Pretty much
blew his head off. Then bundled me into an escape elevator
and sent me down into tunnels contaminated with deadly
levels of radioactivity.’ He turned back to Robbie. ‘And yes, I
probably did get a fatal dose of the stuff. I’ve no idea how
much, or how long it takes. Maybe I’ve only got a day or two,
who knows?’ He forced an angry breath through his teeth.
‘But what you didn’t know was that I’m dying anyway.
Fucking cancer. Dead man walking. All you’ve done is
accelerate the process.’
Cameron’s whimpering had subsided, and the boy clung to
his father’s neck, seemingly oblivious to the point of the
letter opener pressed to his neck, or the tiny trickle of blood
from where it had broken the skin. The child still seemed to
have unwavering trust that his father would always protect
him, no matter what.
Addie’s rifle fell away as she went limp, at first with
disbelief, and then despair. All three adults stood breathing
the same air, sharing the same space, adding loudly to the
same silence. Three lives in total disarray. Hope, belief, trust,
all gone.
Addie’s voice was very small when finally it was she who
broke the silence. ‘Why, Robbie?’
And he breathed his pain into the room, closing his eyes in
distress. ‘None of this was ever supposed to happen,’ he
said. ‘They told me all I had to do was scare him.’
Addie said, ‘Who’s they?’
He scoffed. ‘Oh, they don’t have a name, or a face, do
they? They send other people to do their dirty work. But they
were going to ruin me. God, Addie, you know what a mess
I’d got into. We were drowning in debt. They told me I would
lose my job, my home, my family. All I had to do was this
one little thing, and all my problems would go away. The
slate would be wiped clean.’
Brodie said, ‘Scare the shit out of Younger.’
He nodded.
‘Only neither you, nor they, understood that here was a
man who was prepared to risk radiation poisoning to get his
story. He wasn’t going to be deterred by a few verbals, or a
handful of punches. You were always going to have to kill
him.’
Robbie’s head dropped to his chest. ‘It all just . . .’ He
looked up. ‘Got out of control. A total fucking nightmare.’
Brodie said, ‘And there’s nothing you can do now to fix it,
Robbie. It’s over. Give it up, for God’s sake. Bring the
nightmare to an end.’
Silent tears streamed through the blood on his face. ‘An
end for you, maybe. Not for me. Not ever for me.’ He looked
at Addie, with what almost seemed like an appeal for
sympathy. ‘I’m sorry, Addie. I’m so sorry.’
But there was no forgiveness in her eyes. He was still
holding a blade to her son’s throat. ‘I never knew you at all,
did I?’ she said. ‘All these years. A fucking stranger
pretending to be someone I loved. Pretending to be someone
who loved me.’ Her eyes strayed to Cameron. ‘Pretending to
be someone who loved his son.’
‘I do!’
‘Then why are you holding a fucking knife to his throat?’
Her voice reverberated around the room in anger verging on
hysteria.
And as if he only now realised what he was doing, he
suddenly threw the letter opener away across the office and
unpeeled his son’s arms from around his neck. Cameron’s
sobs of uncertainty returned as his father held the boy out
towards Brodie. ‘Here. He’s your grandson,’ he said. ‘Take
him.’ And as Brodie clutched the boy to his chest, Robbie
turned and fled out into the night, leaving the door swinging
behind him in the wind.
 Addie leaned the rifle against the wall and took two steps
across the room to retrieve her son. Cameron flung his arms
around her, and even in the midst of his distress and
confusion, he turned his head towards Brodie and said, ‘Are
you really my grampa?’
Brodie felt his throat swell up as he fought back the tears,
and was unable to find his voice in reply. He simply nodded,
and the boy turned away again with the acceptance of a child
who has understood nothing of what has passed between his
parents and this man who was suddenly his grampa. But it
was overwhelming, and he clung desperately to his mother
and buried his face in her neck.
Addie stared in quiet desperation over her son’s head at
her father. Finally she said, ‘What’ll happen now?’
Brodie stepped across the room to close the door, then
turned to face his daughter. ‘Well, there’s no point in me
trying to go after him in the storm. He won’t make it out of
the village anyway. Not in this snow.’
She said, ‘He has two hunting rifles. There was only one in
the gun cabinet when I went to get this one.’ She inclined her
head towards the rifle leaning against the wall.
Brodie nodded grimly. ‘Then he must have the other one
stashed somewhere.’
‘What do you think he’ll do?’
‘It’s not so much a question of what he’ll do, as what he’ll
try to stop me from doing.’
‘Which is what?’
‘Leave.’
‘But you can’t. Nobody can leave in this.’ She lifted her
eyes towards the world outside.
‘No. But as soon as the storm is over, you and I and
Cameron can fly out of here in the eVTOL. My guess is he’ll
wait till we try to make it to the football field, then pick us
off.’
Addie was shaking her head, still struggling to come to
terms with it all. ‘He wouldn’t. Surely to God?’
 ‘He’s lost everything, Addie. It’s not a gamble any more.
He has nothing left to lose.’ He paused. ‘If it’s any
consolation, I don’t believe he’d hurt either of you. But he
can’t afford to let me get out of here alive. Not with
everything I know.’
She closed her eyes, as if by shutting them she could
somehow escape this waking nightmare. When she opened
them again, she said, ‘It would be crazy to try to get to the
football pitch in the dark. Even if the storm was over.’
He nodded. ‘Yes. Whatever happens, we should wait at
least until first light.’
Almost as the word light left his mouth, the light in the tiny
office was suddenly extinguished.
‘Shit.’ He heard her curse under her breath in the dark. ‘Is
that Robbie?’
‘I don’t know.’ Brodie fumbled his way to the window and
peered out into the darkness. ‘It looks like all the street lights
are out. Power lines must be down again.’
A match flared in the dark, and a flame flickered on the
wick of a candle held in Addie’s hand. Cameron sat wide-
eyed on the counter as his mother shut the drawer beneath
the counter and took him in her arms again. ‘We’re well
prepared,’ she said. ‘This happens too often.’ She handed
him the candle. ‘Come through and I’ll light a fire. It’s going
to be a long wait.’
 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.
 CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
2040
After the incident at the Leonardo Inn, I guess I was just sort
of paranoid. Couldn’t get those twin pictures out of my
head – Jardine lying there on the floor of the hotel room,
bleeding all over the carpet and swearing revenge, and Mel
sitting in my car with tears streaming down her face,
swearing she would never see him again. A lot of swearing
going on, and I wasn’t buying it.
I knew that without some kind of intervention by me, the
two of them would be drawn together again, like magnets.
Opposites attract, they say, and you couldn’t get two more
different people than Jardine and Mel. He was just a
thoroughly bad piece of work – a ruthless, bullying, self-
serving bastard. And Mel was one of the gentlest and most
thoughtful people I’d ever known. And yet she couldn’t stay
away from him. Or he from her. I’ve never understood it; I
never will.
So I set out to make sure that my worst fears would never
be realised.
I was able to access his files on the police computer, read
the reports of his parole officer. I wanted to know every last
detail about the man. Where he lived, where he worked. Who
his friends were, where he drank.
Would you believe it, he managed to get himself another
flat in the tower block at Soutra Place. He must have liked it
there. For my part, it was familiar territory. I knew where to
park my car out of sight. Watch him coming, watch him
going.
He started drinking in a pub on the south side where Celtic
football fans gathered before and after games. The Brazen
Head. He went to the home games every other Saturday. He
was still driving the same banger he’d arrived in at the
Leonardo, but he was careful never to drive when he was out
drinking. Always taking a taxi, which must have cost an arm
and a leg.
Not that money seemed to be a problem. He got his old job
back at the bookie’s, as if he’d never been away. He was
getting on with his life, without a second thought for the
mother and children he’d killed that night in Mosspark
Boulevard. The only thing missing, it seemed – the only thing
that would make his life complete – was Mel.
I don’t know how long I followed him for. Must have been
weeks. Every time I was off shift, every chance I got to head
out east. Mel was very subdued all this time, and perhaps I
should have been paying her more attention. I had no idea
what was going on in her head, what kind of turmoil she was
in. It was like when he was away in prison, he’d stopped
existing for her. But now that he was out again, it was all
that filled her waking thoughts. And maybe her dreams, too.
At least, that’s how it seemed to me. But like I said, I was
pretty paranoid.
Anyway, it soon became clear to me that Jardine’s weekly
schedule included a rendezvous on the walkway running
below the King George V Bridge. Tuesdays and Thursdays.
It’s an old bridge, the George V. Runs from Tradeston on the
south side across the Clyde to Oswald Street in the city
centre, just a spit away from the railway bridge that crosses
the river at the same place. Nobody in their right mind would
go down there at night, which is probably why it was an ideal
spot for drug dealers to do business.
So Jardine had acquired another habit. Whether it was just
dope, or something more upmarket like cocaine, I didn’t
know. I suppose I could have just tipped off the drug squad.
Given them a time and place, and Jardine would have been
caught in possession. A clear breach of his licence, and he’d
have been back inside in a heartbeat. But he’d have been out
again soon enough. Guys like him are no different from the
cockroaches in that doctor’s waiting room. Fucking hard to
get rid of.
It was raining the night I followed him down to the
walkway. Folk in the city were huddling under coats and
brollies, so it was easy to stay anonymous. I kept a good
distance, and watched him go down the steps and vanish into
the dark beneath the bridge. A train rattled past overhead,
and by its lights I saw the shadows of men moving around
below the arch. I stayed out of sight, a good hundred metres
away below the railway bridge, and watched as Jardine’s
dealers headed off in the other direction towards the
Squiggly Bridge. Maybe they figured business wouldn’t be
good on a night like this. But, at any rate, they weren’t
hanging about.
Jardine came back along the walkway and up the steps
towards me. He was walking slowly, despite the rain. He had
no brolly and was getting soaked, more intent on protecting
and checking the purchase hidden in his coat before heading
back to his car. Satisfied at last, he pushed his hands in his
pockets and began walking more briskly, almost as if he’d
just noticed it was raining.
There wasn’t another soul around. Well, there wouldn’t be
on a night like this. He was almost upon me when I stepped
out to block his path just before the railway bridge. He got a
fright, I could see that. Then, after a moment, recognition
dawned and he relaxed. A smile spread across his ugly
coupon, and I could see the gaps where I’d broken teeth, and
the crooked turn of the nose that I’d busted.
‘Well, well, well, if it isn’t Mel’s knight in shining fucking
armour. What you doing here, Brodie? Gonna bust me?
Didn’t know you’d graduated to the narcs.’
I shook my head. ‘No. Not going to bust you, Lee.’
‘Oh, Lee, is it? Very familiar. What you looking for, then? A
square go?’
I said nothing, and he must have seen the hate in my eyes
as I fixed them on him in the rain.
‘Oh, I get it. This is where you warn me never to cast a
shadow anywhere near your precious wee bitch ever again.
That it, eh? Cos, let me tell you something, pal, there is fuck
all you can do to stop me.’
Which is when something inside of me snapped. I mean,
I’d come prepared. But I never really thought I’d go through
with it.
He wasn’t expecting it. A step towards him in the dark and
the forward thrust of my right arm. I saw the surprise in his
eyes as the blade slid up between his ribs and into his heart.
But it didn’t last for more than a second or two. He would
never cast a fucking shadow anywhere ever again.
The weight of him fell forward into my arms, and I held
him in a strangely grotesque embrace as I drew the knife
away again. The lights of a train clattering south cast
themselves on the dark waters of the river as I tipped him
over the rail and watched him fall like a sack of tatties into
the west-flowing currents of the Clyde.
He was gone in a moment. The same moment in which I
realised just what it was I had done. How he had managed
somehow to drag me down to his level, and lower. I threw
the knife into the river as if the haft of it was burning my
hand, and looked quickly around. But there was no one to
witness my descent into hell. The same place to which I had
just dispatched Lee Jardine. Not a living soul in sight. Cars
rumbled by on the road bridge, headlights catching the falling
rain. Folk on their way home, or out for the night. I looked
down and saw Jardine’s blood glistening wet all over the front
of my coat. I stripped it off and rolled it up to tuck under my
arm, and started running. Back towards the lights of the city.
Back to the dark side street where I had left my car.
In preparation for the murder I never really believed I
would commit, I’d stowed a roll of bin liners and a pack of
hand wipes in the boot. I tore a bag from the roll and stuffed
my coat into it, having checked the pockets for anything
incriminating. Then I cleaned my hands on the disinfectant
wipes I tore from the packet. There didn’t seem to be any
blood on my trousers or my shoes. But I wasn’t going to take
any chances.
It took me less than fifteen minutes to drive home to
Pollokshields. I left the car in the drive and went in through
the back door. Addie was out for the evening, and Mel had
gone early to bed. I stripped off in the kitchen. Everything –
shoes, socks, trousers, underpants – and stuffed them into
another bin bag. Then I snuck upstairs to the guest shower
room and stood under steaming hot water for a good five
minutes, trying to wash away the guilt. Mel took up most of
the wardrobe space in our room, so I kept my stuff in the
guest room. I went in there to slip into clean clothes and
tiptoe back down to the kitchen.
I threw the bin bag into the boot alongside the one with
the coat and the discarded wipes, and drove west towards
Paisley. It was somewhere on the Renfrew Road that I
dropped the floor mat from the driver’s side of the car, along
with the bin bags, into a large wheely bin whose contents
would be destined for landfill. And I sat in the car, eyes
closed, drawing the breath that I had just robbed from
another human being. My heart was still hammering at my
ribs, fit to burst, and all the regrets I would carry with me for
the rest of my life came pressing in around me in the dark.
The ghosts that would haunt me all my days.

I guess Jardine would have been missed when he failed to

turn up for work the next day. Maybe he didn’t show for a
meet with his mates at the Brazen Head. But the alarm bells
wouldn’t have gone off full gong until he missed his first
appointment with the parole officer.
I didn’t know, didn’t want to seem interested. It was only
when Tiny told me one day that Jardine had gone AWOL and
there was a warrant out for his arrest that I knew it was all
going to come to a head soon enough.
 I had no idea if he and Mel had been in touch in the time
following the debacle at the Leonardo. I knew, or at least was
pretty certain, that they hadn’t met. But there must have
been some line of communication between them, because in
the weeks following that night under the George V Bridge,
she became more and more withdrawn. If she had been
expecting to hear from him, she must have wondered why he
hadn’t been in touch. Maybe she tried to contact him, I don’t
know. But the change in her was palpable.
I kept expecting to hear that they’d pulled him out of the
Clyde. But it was almost three weeks before they did. Well
downriver, near the Erskine Bridge. Of course, the body was
decayed beyond recognition by then, but DNA identified him
fast enough. The post-mortem located the fatal stab wound,
and the traces of cocaine found in the pocket of his jacket led
investigators to the conclusion that his murder was probably
the result of a drug deal gone wrong. I knew there wouldn’t
be much effort made in trying to find his killer.
I suppose I thought then that I was home free. But it didn’t
really feel like it. I would never be brought to civil justice,
perhaps, but natural justice has a way of finding you. There
were other ways I would pay for killing that man.
I never told Mel about his body being taken from the river,
or the results of the post-mortem. I was stupid to think that I
could keep it from her. And sure enough, she heard. I don’t
know where, or how, but she did. Mentioned it to me one
night at dinner, and I had to admit that I knew. I mean, she
wouldn’t have believed it if I’d claimed otherwise.
She seemed quite philosophical about it. Accepting, in that
way of hers. As if she’d just heard that he was back in the
Bar-L.
I really did think we were going to come through it, me and
Mel. Until the night I got sent home early to find the cop cars
and the ambulance in the street, and Mel dead in the bath.
 CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
2051
Addie’s face, even from behind the wash of soft warm light
that came from the wood burner, was paler than he had ever
seen it. Her eyes were wide. He could see the shock in them.
Her voice came in barely a whisper. ‘You murdered him.’
Brodie nodded, unable to maintain eye contact. He said,
‘You always blamed me for the death of your mother. And
you were right. Just not in the way that you thought.’ He
closed his eyes to focus on control of his breathing. ‘Yes, I
killed the man. And if I had my time over, God help me, I’d
probably do it again. But what I know now, that I didn’t know
then, was that in taking his life, I effectively ended Mel’s,
too. In sliding that blade between his ribs, I might just as
well have used it to cut your mother’s wrists.’
If Addie had been shocked by his confession, it was
possible that she was even more shocked now to see the
tears that coursed down his face. Silent tears, a muted
weeping that he choked back to swell in his throat and make
his head pulse. Her eyes drifted down to the piece of paper
that he had been turning over and over again in his fingers
during the telling of his story.
‘What is that?’ she demanded, and he looked down to see
how he had mangled the printout from Sita’s DNA reader. He
crumpled it up in his hand, and held it tight in his fist.
‘Dr Roy had this new piece of kit,’ he said. ‘A portable DNA
sampler capable of producing a reading at a crime scene.’ He
hesitated, his heart full of dread. ‘I asked her to sample your
DNA and mine.’
He felt her sudden fear reach out to him all the way across
the room. ‘Why?’
 ‘I wanted to know if there was a familial match.’
‘You said Mum told you—’
He cut her off. ‘She did.’
‘And you didn’t believe her?’
‘I did.’ He paused. ‘Ninety-nine per cent of me did.
Probably because it’s what I always wanted to believe.’
‘And the one per cent?’
‘Doubt. That tiny, shitty, niggling little grain of doubt that
eats away at your soul until you just have to put it to bed.
You just have to know.’
Her voice was very quiet. ‘And now you do.’
He nodded.
‘And?’
He pushed the crumpled piece of paper into his pocket and
forced himself to look at her very directly. It was almost
painful to see the dread in her eyes. He said, ‘Addie, I would
never have told you about killing Jardine if I’d believed I was
responsible for the death of both of your parents.’
 CHAPTER THIRTY
Brodie had no sense of there being a moment when he
drifted off to sleep, and he was startled to be awakened by
the sound of a door opening.
Addie stood in the hall, kitted out as if she were intent on
climbing a mountain. Her hair was tucked up under a dark
blue woollen hat, and she clutched Cameron in her arms. He
wore a parka and welly boots and mitts, and a cagoule that
folded around his neck to keep him warm, his sleepy little
face peering out from behind soft grey fabric.
Brodie blinked and realised there was light seeping in from
beyond the curtains.
‘The storm’s passed,’ Addie said. ‘It’s light enough for us to
go.’
He struggled to his feet. ‘You shouldn’t have let me sleep.’
She said, ‘Like you didn’t need it.’
He struggled into the anorak he had borrowed from
Brannan, and heaved Robbie’s old weekend pack on to his
back. He felt the weight of the laptop in there, and Sita’s
samples, and all the additional burden of responsibility that
rested on his shoulders for getting his family out of here.
Addie held out a box of cartridges. ‘Some additional rounds
in case you need them.’
He took the box and stuffed it in his pocket. He said, ‘Don’t
you think about anything except keeping Cameron safe and
getting him to the eVTOL. Let me worry about Robbie.’
Outside, the snow lay thickly over everything, deep and
unbroken, robbing the world of definition. There was light in
a clearing sky, and in the absolute stillness that settled
across the village and the mountains in the wake of the
storm, all that could be heard was the dawn chorus. Birds
emerging from wherever it was they had taken shelter, to
greet the new day. Oblivious to the fear that stalked the
streets of this tiny settlement.
Brodie stood in the doorway, clutching the rifle across his
chest, scanning the rooftops and the near horizon. But the
land rose steeply into the trees on every side, and Robbie
could have been anywhere. He must have known that with
the storm over, Brodie would take the opportunity of first
light to try to make it to the playing field. He had every
advantage.
Addie stood at her father’s back, holding Cameron. She
said, ‘We’re sticking close to you all the way. I don’t think
he’ll risk a shot if there’s a chance of hitting one of us.’
‘Don’t be stupid!’ Brodie turned and growled at her. ‘I’m
not using my own family as human shields.’
She met his eye, unflinching. ‘Dad, that’s not your decision
to make. We’re in this together, or you go on your own.’
And again he saw something of himself in her. That wilful
stubbornness that so had characterised most of his adult life.
He knew there would be no arguing with her.
The snow lay at least a metre deep, and more where it had
drifted. So they made slow progress up Lochaber Road from
the police station, huddled close, Brodie with his rifle held
ready to raise to his shoulder. He scanned north and west,
Addie raking keen eyes to the east. A plume of snow raised
itself from the road just a couple of metres ahead of them,
followed by the delayed crack of a rifle shot smothered by
the acoustic muffling of the snow. A group of startled crows
lifted black into the sky above a gathering of trees almost
directly to the north, and Brodie swung his rifle in that
direction to release a shot. He felt the kick of it against his
shoulder, knowing that there was zero chance of hitting
anything other than a tree.
Addie said, ‘He’s not that bad a shot. He’s just letting us
know he’s there.’
Brodie nodded. The real test would come when they got to
the football pitch.
 It was heavy going through the snow with legs that ached
and had to be lifted to make every step forward. Past
Lochaber Crescent on their right. Mamore Road on their left.
Not a single villager venturing forth in the aftermath of the
storm. But curtains twitched with the sound of the shots, and
unseen eyes watched them from behind glass that reflected
only the glare of the snow. Semi-detached houses with upper
dormers, and satellite dishes crusted in white. Fences barely
rising above the drift.
The banks of the Allt Coire na Bà were smothered in
shelves of compacted white crystals, the rush of black
sparkling water beneath the bridge cutting a tortuous path
beneath a skin of ice. The barrier that Brodie had clipped
with Brannan’s SUV the night before was lost beneath the
snow.
Now the trees crowded in, close to the road, and rose
steeply into the calm of the morning. It seemed inordinately
dark among them, perfect for Robbie to move unseen,
following their progress around the curve of Lochaber Road
as it headed out of the village.
They passed a cottage among the trees on the other side of
the fence to their left, snow clinging to the steep pitch of its
slate roof, insulation sealing in its warmth, so that the snow
would remain there all day, unmelted. Then, up ahead, they
saw the turn-off into the tarmac parking area in front of the
sports pavilion.
They smelled the blaze before they saw the glow of it in the
sky and the smoke rising above the trees. But it was not the
sweet smell of woodsmoke. It was the acrid stink of man-
made materials, toxic, and belching abnormally black smoke.
For a moment, Brodie thought that Robbie had somehow
managed to set the eVTOL alight. But as they reached the
turn into the football field, they saw Eve half buried under
snow in the middle of the field where she had landed. The
ground around her appeared undisturbed.
It wasn’t until they left the road behind that they saw for
the first time, beyond the trees, the flaming bulk of the
International Hotel. Across the valley, sirens were sounding
at the fire station, but it would not be a simple matter to get
here through metres of drifting snow. The flames licked high
above the treetops, and Brodie understood for the first time
what it was Robbie had meant when he’d said of Calum
McLeish, he’ll burn now like everyone else. Everything would
be destroyed in the fire. Younger’s corpse. And Sita. And
McLeish. No doubt Robbie had intended for the evidence
stored in his hut to go up in flames as well. He must have
figured that Brodie had found it by now. Another reason he
couldn’t afford to let him leave.
The glow of the fire flickered orange across the white that
lay thick on the playing field, ash falling from the sky like the
snow before it. The prevailing breeze carried the smoke
through the trees in their direction. But, even so, Brodie
knew that as they crossed the field to the eVTOL they would
be easy targets.
He glanced behind them, but there was no sign of life
among the trees on the hillside. Addie stuck close to him,
only too aware of the danger, as they ploughed across the
snow-covered tarmac to the shelter of the pavilion. Brodie
saw immediately that there was no green light on the reader
attached to the plug. Either Eve was fully charged, or the
cable had been severed again. He lifted the end of the cable,
and began pulling it up from the snow as they crossed slowly
towards the eVTOL. Halfway there, the severed end of the
cable prised itself free of the snow where McLeish’s repair
had been ripped apart.
‘Shit!’ Brodie cursed and knelt down, searching in the snow
for the other end. They couldn’t afford to leave a length of
cable dangling from the e-chopper as it took off. If it would
take off at all. He found it and ripped it up through the
crusting white snow as they started to run towards Eve.
When they reached her, he waved his RFID card at the
door and it slid open. He half turned towards Addie. ‘Get the
boy in, quick.’
Addie bundled Cameron unceremoniously into the back of
the eVTOL, the boy protesting all the while at his rough
treatment. Brodie pressed the return button inside the cable
hatch, and the remainder of the severed cable began to reel
itself in.
‘Get in,’ he shouted at Addie, almost at the same moment
as the bullet hit him somewhere high on the left side of his
chest. He spun away in a spray of blood to slam against the
open door as the crack of the rifle shot rang out across the
field. Addie saw the panic in his eyes.
This time it was she who shouted, ‘Get in!’ And she half
lifted, half pushed him into the cabin of the eVTOL, before
stooping to pick up the rifle that had fallen from his grasp.
She turned around, back to the e-chopper, as Robbie started
walking across the field towards them. The blaze of the
International lit him orange down one side, and cast a long
shadow across the snow. He had a scarf wrapped around his
head, and held his rifle at chest height as he advanced slowly
towards the aircraft. The air was filled with smoke and the
crackle of flames. A siren wailing somewhere in the distance.
Addie raised the rifle to her shoulder. ‘Don’t come any
closer.’
He stopped then. A sad smile on his face. He shook his
head. ‘Addie, you know you’re not going to shoot me. Just
like you know I’m not going to harm you or Cameron.’
‘Try me.’ Her voice sounded bolder to her than she felt.
She pressed the rifle harder into her shoulder, her finger
crooked around the trigger.
He said, ‘Addie, you don’t have it in you. And, really, I
mean you no harm.’ He paused. ‘But I can’t let your Dad
leave. I can’t.’
‘Take one step closer and I’ll drop you where you stand.’
His smile became strained. ‘There’s too much of your father
in you. Maybe I know now why you hated him so much.’
Without taking her eyes off Robbie, Addie half turned her
head towards the open door. ‘Dad, don’t let Cameron see
this.’
Inside, Brodie was almost numb with the pain. There was a
lot of blood, and he could only just see Cameron’s frightened
eyes in the gloom. ‘Come here, son,’ he said, his voice the
hoarsest of whispers. But it was invitation enough to propel
the boy into his arms, and he turned his grandson away from
the open door, wrapping himself protectively around the
child.
Robbie’s smile was gone now. ‘You’re making a mistake,
Addie.’
‘No, you’re the one making the mistake, Robbie, if you
think I’m going to let you kill my father.’
He stood for a moment, all humanity leached from his eyes
- a man who had killed too many times. He lifted his rifle in a
single, swift movement, and the shot that rang out spun him
away, his fall cushioned by the depth of the snow. He half
sunk into it, blood spreading quickly around him, rabbit fear
in his eyes. As he tried to speak, blood gurgled into his
mouth.
Addie stared in horror at what she had done. This was the
man who had changed her life, persuaded her that she
should make her future here with him, in this hidden valley.
The man who had fathered her child. She had aimed for the
largest part of the target, his chest, afraid that if she simply
tried to disable him with a shot to the leg, she would miss,
and he would shoot her instead. But, still, she felt sick to the
core.
She became aware of Brodie yanking at her hood. ‘Get in,’
he whispered, still shielding the boy from the sight of his
father lying bleeding in the snow. And as Addie climbed into
the eVTOL with leaden legs, he closed the door, summoning
all his energy to bark at Eve. ‘Eve, initiate our return
journey.’
Her voice came back to them. Low battery, Detective
Inspector. Range limited.
 ‘Just go,’ he barked. ‘As far as you can take us.’
After a moment she responded. Flight initiated. And the
rotors above them began to spin, snow flying off in all
directions, the power of the downdraft blowing it clear of the
glass. The screen at the front of the cabin displayed a battery
symbol in orange beneath the warning RANGE THIRTY
MINUTES. It didn’t matter to Brodie. He wanted to get them
away from here. And thirty minutes flying time would just
have to do.
With the gentlest lurch, Eve lifted herself up out of the
snow and wheeled away, rising over the trees and the flames
of the International Hotel. Brodie peered through the glass,
back the way they had come, and saw Robbie lying
spreadeagled in the snow. Even from here he could see the
blood.
And he saw the figure of a man running across the field to
grasp Robbie’s parka by the hood and start dragging his
prone form through the snow towards the blazing building.
Even as Brodie watched, the man turned his face up towards
them. Brannan! It was fucking Brannan! And then realisation
struck Brodie with sickening clarity. Brannan was the face of
the faceless they. He was their man here. He had been
pulling all the strings the whole time. Orchestrating
everything. And now he was pulling Robbie into the fire, so
that he too would go up in smoke.
But what made no sense is why Brannan would have let
them get away. He could have disabled the eVTOL, set fire to
it, just as he had done to his own hotel. Brodie shut his eyes
and shook his head as a surge of pain took away his breath.
Addie took Cameron from his grandfather’s grasp and held
him to her, trembling almost uncontrollably. She glanced at
her father as he eased himself forward and into the front
seats, leaving a trail of blood across the leather. An
involuntary cry of pain escaped him as he slid the weekend
pack from his back, letting it fall to the floor. He dropped into
the seat, his breathing laboured.
 Below, the dark waters of the loch swept past, the
unbroken white of the mountains rising up around them into
a clearing blue sky. And as Eve lifted still higher, the early
sun breached the peaks behind them, to send sunlight
cascading west along the fjord, and filling the cabin with a
golden light.
Still clutching Cameron, Addie manoeuvred herself into the
seat beside her father and reached over to push her hat and
gloves on to the wound beneath his anorak, pulling the
drawstrings tight to create pressure on the wad where the
bullet had entered. And another voice filled the cabin.
‘Detective Inspector Brodie, this is air traffic control at
Helensburgh. We’re going to schedule a landing for you at
Mull. You should have just about enough juice to get there.
We’ll monitor battery range remotely.’ A pause. ‘We have a
video message for you.’
They were passing Glencoe village on their left now, and
the power station at Ballachulish A two hundred feet below.
Moments later they overflew the barrier bridge at the
narrowest point of the loch and skimmed out across the open
expanse of Loch Linnhe.
The monitor flickered and the battery symbol vanished, to
be replaced by today’s date, white letters on black, that in
turn gave way to the battered face of Brodie delivering the
report he had sent the previous night. Text scrolled across
the bottom of the screen: Report by DI Cameron on the
death of Charles Younger.
Brodie listened to his voice speaking. But they were not his
words. His lips moved as if they were, but he knew he had
never spoken them.
Dr Roy’s post-mortem on Charles Younger, he said, had
returned a verdict of accidental death. An apparent fall while
climbing on Binnein Mòr. But the fire at the International
Hotel, in which the pathologist had perished today, meant
that her report and all her samples were lost.
He shouted at the screen, blood in his spittle. ‘That’s a lie!
That’s not me. I never said that. Younger was murdered.
Murdered, for fuck’s sake!’ He lashed out and struck the
windscreen of the cabin, his fist smearing blood on the glass.
Addie’s voice, right beside him, was tiny and frightened.
‘What’s happening, Dad? What does it mean?’
He turned blazing eyes on her. ‘It means I’ve been fucking
had.’ He fumbled in his pockets for his iCom glasses and
snapped them in place with blood-sticky fingers. ‘iCom, scan
the video,’ he shouted, focusing his gaze on the screen.
After a moment, his iCom returned its verdict. Video
genuine. And a green GENUINE symbol flashed in his lenses.
He yanked the glasses from his face and threw them away
across the cabin, and, with fumbling fingers, pulled the
earbuds from his ears. ‘Fuckers!’ His voice reverberated
around the cabin, his grandson shrinking into his mother,
fear in the wide-eyed stare he directed at his grandfather.
‘The software in these things isn’t the latest version. They
have the latest version.’ He tried to bring his breathing under
control. ‘Eve, place a call to DCI Maclaren at Pacific Quay.’
He listened with dismay to the silence that greeted his
request.
Addie said, ‘I don’t understand. What’s going on?’
‘That video of me . . .’ Brodie waved his hand at the
screen. ‘It’s not me. It’s a deepfake. What do they call it . . .
?’ He searched for the term. ‘Neural masking.’ He slammed
his fist down on the dashboard. ‘They’ve set me up for this.’
Eve interrupted. RANGE FIVE MINUTES. And an alarm
began to sound. A piercing, repetitive wail that filled the
aircraft. His video was replaced on-screen by a flashed
warning: BATTERY LEVEL CRITICAL. The battery symbol was
red.
They were over Mull now, and Brodie looked down in
impotent frustration as they flew over the golf course above
Tobermory, the land passing beneath them before giving way
to the Atlantic Ocean sweeping in from the west in white-
crested waves.
 ‘Why aren’t we landing?’ Addie asked, fear making her
shrill.
And he realised now why it was that Brannan had let them
go. ‘Because they’re going to drop us in the ocean,’ he said.
‘You, me, Cameron and all the evidence of government
cover-up at the nuclear plant. We’re dangerous. And
expendable.’
He stared out, wild-eyed, as they overflew the upper half of
the island of Coll, and the vast expanse of the Atlantic ahead
beckoned them to their final resting place. He had forgotten
now about his wound. The survival instinct had kicked in,
adrenaline overriding pain.
‘No! No! No!’ he bellowed. He stood up and swung a fist,
feeling bones breaking in his hand as he struck the glass and
smeared yet more blood on it. He turned to press his back to
the windscreen, arms stretched out to either side like Christ
on the cross. His mind was racing. Thoughts tumbling one
over the other in blind panic. But he knew there was
something he could do. Something just out of reach. If only
he could remember.
He looked down at daughter and grandson staring up at
him in sheer terror, and he could hardly breathe. He said,
‘Jesus Christ, Addie. I was in the delivery room when you
were born. I watched you draw your first breath. I’m not
going to watch you draw your last!’
He slumped into his seat, burying his face in his hands.
Think! Think! Think! It was so hard above the wailing of the
alarm and Eve’s constant prompting to buckle up again. And
he knew at any moment that Eve was simply going to stop
flying and drop them silently into the ocean. He tried to focus
on the day he flew downriver to pick up his flight out to Mull.
The technician in yellow oilskins who had run across the
grass from the clubhouse at Helensburgh golf course. He had
sat in beside Brodie and primed Eve for flight. Brodie screwed
up his eyes. Tiny was so much better at this than him. He
noticed things, remembered details that Brodie missed. A
visual thing, he’d said it was. You could remember images
better than words. And better still if you could link either to
something personal. Something you could relate to.
Brodie tried to replay in his mind what it was that the
technician had done. Of course! He’d tapped the screen
simultaneously with his index and middle fingers. The image
of him doing it returned from some deep memory recess that
Brodie almost never visited. Twice. He’d tapped it twice.
Brodie leaned forward to do the same, and the warning
message was wiped away, to be replaced by the eVTOL’s
original welcome page. A horribly incongruous photograph of
the aircraft taken on a sunlit day, and set against the clearest
of blue skies. Brodie could remember thinking how unlikely it
was that this photo had been taken in Scotland.
Absurdly, Eve addressed them as if for the first time.
Welcome to your Grogan Industries Mark Five eVTOL air taxi.
How had the technician responded, sitting there dripping rain
from his glistening oilskins? Something had chimed with
Brodie at the time. Something almost subliminal. The
technician had identified himself with what was certainly his
own unique code. Three letters and a three-digit number.
Brodie could very nearly hear his voice. And then it dawned
on him why the numbers had registered. His birthday. It was
his birthday! Year and month, 496. April, 1996.
‘Dad, we’re losing height!’ Addie’s voice beside him was
brittle with panic.
But he figured that had to be illusory. When Eve ran out of
battery, her rotors would simply stop, and they would drop
from the sky. He resisted the temptation to look and forced
himself to keep thinking, trying to recall the technician’s
voice. But the warning siren was still filling his ears and it
was difficult to think above it.
The man had used the NATO alphabet. Key words
representing each letter for clarity. What were they? ‘Come
on, come on,’ he urged himself, almost unaware that he was
speaking out loud. And then he remembered how Eve had
responded, calling him Zak. ‘Z-A-K,’ he said suddenly.
‘ZAK496.’
He caught his breath to try to steady his voice and speak
clearly.
‘Zebra-Alpha-Kilo-496.’ And then Zak had issued an
instruction. What exactly had he asked Eve to do? Activate
remote. That was what he had said. Brodie was sure of it.
Now he had to ask her to do the opposite. He said, ‘Eve,
deactivate remote.’
And he was astonished to hear her respond immediately to
the command. Remote deactivated. He breathed his relief,
and heard the exhalation rattle in his lungs. Now Brodie had
control. Not some bastard in a darkened room sending them
to their deaths.
He said, ‘Eve, turn around and put us down at the nearest
safe landing point.’
The sunny photograph of the eVTOL vanished from the
screen, to be replaced by a map of the Inner Hebrides. Their
route across Mull and Coll and out to sea was traced in red,
concluding in flashing circles of orange. A return route in
yellow retraced their flight to the nearest landfall. The island
of Coll, the chosen landing spot pulsing in circles of green.
They felt Eve bank left and turn through one hundred and
eighty degrees, and the distant outline of Coll swung back
into view. At the same time the eVTOL began losing height.
No question about it this time.
Brodie hardly recognised his own voice. ‘Eve, do we have
sufficient battery?’
Battery life unknown. She sounded so calm. As if her
programmers themselves had made no distinction between
life and death.
Brodie felt Addie clutch his arm as Coll grew nearer. They
were barely three metres above the waves now, fearing that
at any moment they would fall into the brine. Salt spray blew
back across the windscreen, blurring their vision. And still the
alarm sounded.
 They could see a beach, silver sands cleared of snow by an
incoming tide. Beyond it, tufted machair land, sparsely
covered by snow, was dotted with dozens of hardy, grazing,
black-faced sheep. Beyond them, a road, a collection of
huddled buildings, a farm.
And the rotors stopped turning, as silently as they had
begun. The eVTOL dropped the final metre into snow and
peat bog, landing heavily and turning on to its side, propelled
forward by its own momentum.
It was chaos in the cabin, all three flung from their seats
and sent sprawling as Eve slid across the snow on her side
for another twenty metres, before coming to an abrupt halt
against a line of broken fencing.
Cameron was wailing, in fear more than pain. Addie
clambered over the upturned seats to grasp him to her,
holding him close for just a moment before checking him for
damage. But children are far less brittle than adults, and
beyond a lump the size of an egg coming up on his temple,
he seemed unhurt.
She turned around to see Brodie slumped at an awkward
angle across the far door. He was looking at her across the
space between as if it were some eternally unbridgeable gap.
His breathing was laboured, and in his eyes she saw a look
she had seen once before, when Robbie had taken her
hunting and shot a deer. It had still been alive when they
reached it, eyes full of incomprehension, but also accepting
of death. And she had watched the light of its life die as
Robbie pulled the trigger for a second time. She had never
gone hunting with him again.
Now she scrambled across the upturned cabin, but he held
out a hand to stop her. Beyond him, through the glass, she
could see people running towards them from the farmhouse.
He said, ‘You’re going to have to do this on your own now.’
‘Don’t be silly.’
She tried to sit him up, but he pushed her away. There was
blood everywhere. ‘Addie!’ His voice was insistent. ‘They’re
going to try everything in their power to stop you.’ He fought
to get more air in his lungs. ‘So you’re going to need help.’
 CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE
Tiny sat slouched in his armchair, balancing a half-drunk beer
on the arm of it. The television was on. News coverage of a
political rally held by the Eco Party. The venue they had
chosen was far too big for the number of its supporters
crowding around the stage waving banners and saltires. The
close-up shots made it appear full. But the TV director was
showing his political bias by intercutting with wide shots
revealing the emptiness of the hall beyond. It was an
anticlimax to a bitterly fought campaign in which the
Ecologists had gained almost no ground on the ruling
Democrats, who were scheduled to hold a triumphant rally
the following night on the eve of an election they were
certain to win.
Tiny was paying it no attention. It was a distraction in the
corner of the room, like the flickering flames of the living-
room fires he remembered from his childhood. Sheila was
sitting on the settee opposite, playing some word game on
her tablet. They didn’t talk much these days, drifting apart as
they grew older, and without the glue of children to keep
them together. But they were still comfortable with each
other.
Tonight she had commented on how distant he seemed,
coming home at the end of his shift to eat a carry-out pizza
from a box on his knees. He had told her there was a lot on
his mind. Just work stuff. She had never cared for Brodie, so
he didn’t really feel like telling her that his best pal had been
killed in an air crash. It had been rumoured for a couple of
days that his eVTOL air taxi had ditched in the sea
somewhere off Mull. He had been shocked to the core to hear
it. But no one had been able to provide confirmation. Not
even the DCI. Until today. But the air taxi had not, it turned
out, ditched in the Atlantic as first reported. It had crashed
on the Isle of Coll, and they had pulled Brodie’s body from it,
killed by a bullet from a rifle. No one could quite believe it.
Tiny had spent most of the evening thinking about
Cammie, remembering all their scrapes and adventures, and
hoping against hope that somehow reports of his death had
been greatly exaggerated. He knew, of course, it was a
forlorn hope. When he’d first heard rumours about the eVTOL
going missing, he had tried calling Brodie on his iCom, but
the call had gone straight to messages. Which had not
augured well.
Now on his third beer, he was subsiding into distant
mawkish memories, and getting quietly emotional.
When the doorbell rang, it did not immediately penetrate
his thoughts. It was Sheila’s voice that woke him from his
reverie. ‘Who could that be at this time of night?’
Tiny looked up. ‘What?’
‘The doorbell.’
And right on cue, it rang again. Sheila clearly had no
intention of answering it, so Tiny heaved himself out of his
armchair to lay his beer on the coffee table before heading
out to the hall to see who was there.
He turned on the outside lamp before opening the door.
The rain that had been falling all day cut through the light it
cast upon the steps and the path beyond.
A young woman stood on the top step, long auburn hair
escaping from the hood of her parka, wet and smeared
across her face. She was holding a child in her arms. A young
boy who was fast asleep, his head resting on her shoulder.
Tiny frowned. There was something oddly familiar about
them both, but he was sure he didn’t know them. ‘Yes?’
She said simply, ‘My dad told me you would help.’
 CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO
Addie walked up Renfield Street in the rain. There was not a
breath of wind beneath a bruised and ominous sky, and the
large teeming drops raised a mist on the pavements and
filled the gutters as they ran in spate downhill towards the
river.
The city was busy, in spite of the weather. Black and red,
and blue and yellow umbrellas formed a canopy over the
heads of shoppers as they flowed like rainwater from Bath
Street and Renfield Street into the town’s most famous
shopping boulevard. Sauchiehall Street, deriving its name
from the old Scots word sauchiehaugh, which roughly
translated as willow grove. A meadow once filled with trees.
A far cry from the tall steel and brick buildings, and the few
remaining red sandstone tenements that lined it now.
Addie passed the 3D cinema complex on the corner and
glanced up for the first time towards the top of the hill, and
the glass tower at the far side of the square formed by the
buildings of the Scottish International Media Consortium. The
home of Charles Younger’s newspaper, the Scottish Herald.
Although most of its publishing these days was conducted
online, the Herald still produced a daily newspaper. Its
circulation amounted to only a few thousand, but it was read
by the country’s top business people, its politicians and
regulators, and by most in the legal profession.
She felt fear form a fist in her belly.
Robbie’s old weekend pack, which her father had been
wearing when he was shot, weighed heavily on her
shoulders, chafing at them even through the layers of her
parka. His blood stained the inside face of it, but was not
visible to the casual eye.
She could feel the temperature falling, even as she crossed
the street. It was forecast to dip below freezing, with wet
roads and pavements turning to ice in the coming hours.
The previous evening she had spoken to the newspaper’s
editor, Richard Macallan, for less than ten minutes, from one
of the few remaining public telephone booths on the south
side. The incoming call to the Herald, Tiny told her, would be
monitored. It wouldn’t take them long to trace the source of
it. But unless Macallan knew she was coming, she would
never get past security. So the phone call was necessary to
alert him. But the authorities would have been alerted, too.
And she could only stay on the line for a few minutes before
they would come looking for her.
Now, she knew, they would be waiting for her at the top of
the hill.
She skirted the traffic barrier and walked up into the tiny
square, which was more of a turning circle, built around a
unicorn raised on a tall pillar above an old stone fountain.
The unicorn: Scotland’s national, mythical, animal. A symbol
of purity and innocence. A sad irony, given Addie’s reason for
being there today.
Cars stood parked in a row along the left side, and two
men in dark suits and long raincoats emerged from a black
Merc. They strode quickly across the cobbles to intercept her.
And were exactly as Addie had imagined, living out some
comic book fantasy of their own importance.
Both men were startled by the sound of tyres skidding on
wet cobblestones, and they turned to see four marked police
vehicles speeding through the raised barrier. The cars divided
to flank the tiny group in the circle, and flak-jacketed police
officers poured out, Heckler & Koch MP5 sub-machine guns
levelled at the men in raincoats.
Almost by instinct, the two men reached for concealed
weapons beneath their coats, but stopped as a tall, plain-
clothes officer emerging from the lead car barked at them,
‘Remain perfectly still, or you will be shot where you stand.’
‘Do you have any idea what you’re doing?’ the older of the
two demanded, angry spittle gathering around his lips.
‘Yes, sir, I do,’ Tiny said. He felt the rain dripping from his
nose and chin. ‘We’re responding to a tip-off about a terrorist
attack on the offices of the Scottish Herald. Now, lay your
weapons very carefully on the ground in front of you.’ Both
men responded, gingerly removing Glock 26 pistols from
leather holsters, to place carefully on glistening wet cobbles.
One of the uniformed officers moved in to pick them up, then
retreated. ‘Now show me some ID.’
The one who had spoken reached into an inside pocket.
‘Careful!’ Tiny warned him, and the man moved more
cautiously to produce a leather wallet, which he flipped open
and held out towards the policeman. Tiny approached to take
it from him. He looked up, surprised. ‘SIA?’ And cast a
doubtful look from one to the other. ‘What are you doing
here?’
The two men exchanged glances. And after a pause, ‘Same
as you,’ said the older one.
‘Oh, aye?’ Tiny’s eyes narrowed doubtfully. ‘How come we
weren’t informed?’
The man shrugged. ‘Crossed wires, I guess.’
Tiny handed him back his wallet. ‘We’re going to have to
check you out. You’ll come with us.’ And neither of them was
going to argue with him.
As they were led to the nearest vehicle, one of them
glanced back towards the entrance to the Herald. The girl
was nowhere to be seen.

Addie stepped out of the elevator and followed the young

woman through a busy newsroom. A few heads lifted from
computer screens to glance curiously in her direction. The girl
opened a glass door into a fishbowl of an office with windows
all along the far side, and ushered Addie in.
Macallan was a man of about Brodie’s age. He had a
sculpted face with wary dark eyes, and the remains of once
fair and abundant hair gelled back across a broad skull. He
stood up from his desk and held out a bony hand, which
Addie shook tentatively. He said, ‘I watched that whole
debacle down there from the window. You must have friends
in high places.’
Addie said, ‘My father had friends who owed him a favour.’
‘What have you got for me?’
Addie swung the pack from her shoulders to set on his
desk. ‘Everything.’ She unzipped it to bring out Younger’s
laptop, his notebooks and printouts, and the report which
had sparked off his whole investigation.
Macallan lifted the A4 ring binder and flipped through the
pages of shorthand notes. He lifted a hand to wave someone
through from the newsroom and pushed all the notebooks
towards the young journalist who entered. ‘I want all this
stuff transcribed, as soon as possible. As many people on it
as it takes.’ He picked up the report then and shook his head
in wonder as he riffled through it. He looked at Addie. ‘You
know if this all holds up, it’ll bring down the government.’ He
sighed. ‘Of course, they’ll claim that any publication of
Younger’s story is in breach of standing DSMA-Notice
regulations.’
Addie said, ‘I don’t know what that is.’
‘The Defence and Security Media Advisory Committee
decides what is in the public interest, and what is a danger to
national security.’
‘They murdered my father.’ Addie stared unblinking at the
editor. ‘And your journalist.’ She delved into the pack again
and pulled out Sita’s notebook. ‘The pathologist’s notes on
his autopsy, before they murdered her, too.’
Macallan looked at his watch. ‘We’ve got ten hours to make
this stand up. And if we do, I’ll publish. Then I’ll fight them in
the courts if I have to.’ A pale smile flitted across his face.
‘Better to be forgiven than forbidden.’
 CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE
The SEC Armadillo was jam-packed. A sea of waving flags
and banners. The chanting of the crowd rising to the rafters,
reverberating throughout the auditorium.
The stage was bedecked by elongated saltires hanging
from the roof, the campaign logo of the Scottish Democratic
Party projected in blue on the screen behind the podium.
ONWARD TO VICTORY.
Sally Mack was an island of calm in the eye of the storm.
She stood at the podium smiling, facing a barrage of media
mics. She turned her head slowly from one invisible
teleprompter to the other, delivering carefully considered
words crafted by half a dozen speechwriters. Victory was
theirs. The future of Scotland assured. Tomorrow the
electorate would return to power the party that had delivered
both economically and ecologically.
She was a slim and elegant woman in her early sixties, her
calf-length blue dress emphasising both her femininity and
her power. Her carefully sculpted and dyed blond hair made
Addie think of the photographs she had seen of the first
woman to become British prime minister, Margaret Thatcher.
Her delivery had the same syrupy sense of insincerity. Here,
she told her adoring crowd, stood the woman who had
delivered energy certainty for Scotland, while most of the
rest of the world was still struggling to come to terms with
the post-fossil fuel emergency. And suffering the
consequences of their failures.
Addie and Sheila sat together on the edge of the settee,
watching the screen, taut with tension. Sally Mack’s
triumphalism was both infuriating and depressing. Addie
wanted to throw something at her. Anything. But she
contained her frustration. She was exhausted after the hours
of intensive grilling she had endured at the offices of the
Herald.
Cameron, wrapped in a blanket, was asleep in Tiny’s
armchair. Oblivious. Addie glanced away from the screen
towards her son, and her heart and soul bled for him. Just a
matter of days ago, they had been the picture-perfect family,
living the dream in one of the most beautiful parts of
Scotland, perhaps the world. And it had all been an illusion.
The dream, a nightmare just waiting for the hours of
darkness. And the darkness, when it came, had been both
bloody and profound.
Addie had barely slept since the moment of pulling the
trigger and watching the man she had once loved thrown
backwards into the snow. The same look in his eyes then as
she had seen in Brodie’s just thirty minutes later.
But she had no more tears to cry. They had spilled until
she ached, her eyes red and scratchy, burning now only with
anger.
She almost jumped at the sound of the front door opening,
and Sheila leapt immediately to her feet. Tiny appeared in
the living room door, his face grey and drawn. His overcoat
hung limp from bony shoulders, dripping rainwater on the
carpet.
‘Are you okay?’ Sheila’s voice was tentative.
Tiny sighed. ‘It’s been a long day. And I’d probably have
been in a lot more trouble if those SIA guys had been able to
claim they were there on official business.’ He slipped off his
coat to hang on the coat stand in the hall, and they heard his
voice come back to them from over his shoulder. ‘As it was,
they had to go along with our story of a terror warning to
explain why they were there.’ He came back into the room.
‘But it’s a mess. And I’m not out of the woods yet.’ He
managed a pale smile. ‘Though I think we’re going to be
okay.’
‘What’s SIA?’ Addie said.
‘Scottish Intelligence Agency, pet. Not that there was much
intelligence discernible in those guys.’ He disappeared into
the kitchen to open the fridge and grab a beer. As he came
back through to the living room, he popped the lid off the
bottle and raised it to his lips. He took a long draught. Then
he said, ‘The good news is that the Herald have published.
Simultaneously on the internet and in print.’ He mimicked the
sensational delivery of an imagined newsreader. ‘Herald
reporter murdered to cover up disastrous radiation leak at
Ballachulish A.’
He slumped into the vacant armchair.
‘Everyone’s picking up on it. It’ll be the lead story on every
news bulletin all day tomorrow, and probably for weeks to
come. Trust me, there’s not an elector in the land who won’t
have seen it before they go in to cast their vote.’
Their attention was suddenly drawn to the TV as an
announcer’s voice broke across coverage of the SDP rally at
the Armadillo. ‘We have breaking news.’ Simultaneously, a
BREAKING NEWS banner appeared, and an inset of a station
newsreader popped up in the bottom left corner of the screen
with news of the sensational story just published by the
Scottish Herald.
The director covering the rally cut to a close-up of the
podium as a po-faced man in a dark blue suit whispered into
the ear of the first minister, whose strained smile could
barely conceal her irritation at this on-stage interruption at
the climax of her speech.
But the smile very quickly vanished, and Sally Mack’s
mouth gaped just a little, initially shocked. Before fear and
realisation registered in the widening of her eyes. Game
over.
Addie punched the air in vengeful satisfaction. ‘Yes!’
 CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR
Addie walked with Cameron through the old Cathcart
Cemetery, fallen leaves crackling underfoot in the frost. Here
stood the graves of the good and the great. Impressive
headstones and mausoleums. Wonderful old trees bowed in
reverence by time and death, witness to the passing of
generations.
It was deserted on this icy December day, a pale disc of
winter sun barely rising above the southern hills of the city.
The little boy clutched his mother’s hand, swaddled in
clothes to keep him warm, red nose in a bright face beneath
his yellow woollen bunnet, talking almost incessantly about
his day out in Pollock Park just yesterday with Uncle Tony
and Auntie Sheila. They had taken him horse riding, and then
to a café for ice cream, in spite of the cold. He wasn’t
complaining. And they, Addie reflected, seemed almost
reborn. Happy to take on responsibility for a family they’d
never had. Not, she knew, just out of Tiny’s loyalty to her
dad, but because they wanted to.
Addie led Cameron down the path to Netherlee Road and
they crossed to where the cemetery had been extended into
the Linn Park. It was more open here. Less mature. And they
found her dad’s grave easily among the rows of recent
headstones. Placed in the ground close to where he had
buried his wife ten years earlier.
There was a wooden bench on the edge of the path, and
after she had laid her flowers on the grave, she lifted
Cameron on to it and sat down beside him, staring at the
simple inscription on the headstone.
Cameron Iain Brodie, 5th April 1996 to 23rd November
2051. Loving husband and father.
The time for tears was long gone, but the regret would
linger a lifetime.
Cameron said, ‘I don’t know why my grampa had to die?
Just when we found him.’ He thought about it. ‘Everyone else
has a grampa. Some of the boys at school even have two.’
His sense of wonder at this was expressed in the emphasis
he placed on the word. ‘You know what I wish, Mum?’
‘No, Cammie, what do you wish?’
‘I wish Grampa didn’t have to go to heaven.’
Addie pressed her lips together to contain her emotion. ‘Me
too, Cammie. Me too.’

THE END
 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
I would like to offer my grateful thanks to those who gave so
generously of their time and expertise during my researches
for A Winter Grave. In particular, I would like to express my
gratitude to Dr Steve Campman, medical examiner, San
Diego, California, USA, for his advice on forensics and
pathology; Mo Thomson, photographer, whose amazing still
and drone photography substituted for my eyes and ears in
Kinlochleven and on Binnein Mòr, when Covid-19 made it
difficult for me to travel. Mo’s virtual eVTOL flights from
Glasgow to Mull and through Glencoe to Loch Leven, as well
as his simulated flights to the summit of Binnein Mòr and into
the corries, provided stunning insights into the landscape;
Professor Jim Skea, co-chair of Working Group III of the
United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change
(IPCC), and member of the UK government Committee on
Climate Change for his advice on my climate change
scenario; Cameron McNeish, author, Scottish wilderness
hiker, backpacker and mountaineer for his insights on snow,
and climbing Binnein Mòr.
 Table of Contents
Also By
Title
Copyright
Dedication
CONTENTS
AUTHOR’S NOTE
PROLOGUE
CHAPTER ONE
CHAPTER TWO
CHAPTER THREE
CHAPTER FOUR
CHAPTER FIVE
CHAPTER SIX
CHAPTER SEVEN
CHAPTER EIGHT
CHAPTER NINE
CHAPTER TEN
CHAPTER ELEVEN
CHAPTER TWELVE
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
CHAPTER NINETEEN
CHAPTER TWENTY
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
CHAPTER THIRTY
CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE
CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO
CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE
CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Table of Contents
Also By
Title
Copyright
Dedication
CONTENTS
AUTHOR’S NOTE
PROLOGUE
CHAPTER ONE
CHAPTER TWO
CHAPTER THREE
CHAPTER FOUR
CHAPTER FIVE
CHAPTER SIX
CHAPTER SEVEN
CHAPTER EIGHT
CHAPTER NINE
CHAPTER TEN
CHAPTER ELEVEN
CHAPTER TWELVE
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
CHAPTER NINETEEN
CHAPTER TWENTY
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
CHAPTER THIRTY
CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE
CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO
CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE
CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS