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.