‘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.