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.