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.’