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.