‘This has got to be it.’ Addie started dragging snow away with her gloved hands, and Brodie crouched down to join her, scraping the top layer away until the snow above them slid off the mound, and suddenly the entrance to the ice tunnel was revealed.
Brodie fished out the headlight from his pack and shone it through the hole into the tunnel. He was amazed by the almost perfect arch it presented, evenly dimpled as if by some intelligent design. The area hewn out of it by the mountain rescue team to recover the body was clearly visible. Shards of broken ice lay in piles all around. Charles Younger’s last but one resting place.
‘I’m going in,’ he told her.
‘Be careful,’ Addie said, before she realised she wasn’t supposed to care. Then added lamely, ‘The weight of all that snow on it. It might collapse.’
He scraped away more snow and divested himself of his backpack before stretching the elastic of his headlight around his woollen hat. Addie took his ice axe as he lay on his back and slid himself slowly up into the tunnel. Light from the LED in his torch reflected back at him off every dimpled surface, almost blinding him. He heard more than felt the ice chippings grinding beneath him as he dug in his heels to push himself further inside.
Now he was on a level with the area above him where Younger had been hacked out of the ice. A large concave excavation corresponding very roughly to the shape of a man. Only now did Brodie fully appreciate what a difficult task it must have been to free the corpse from its upside-down grave. He turned his head, directing his light as far as he could above and below, looking for anything that the mountain rescue team might have missed. After all, theirs had been a mission of recovery, not the investigation of a crime scene. And he doubted very much that Robbie’s experience would have extended to the latter.
Nothing caught his attention, and he lay still for several minutes, breathing hard, trying to think how Younger’s body might have come to be entombed in the ice like this. ‘Can you hear me?’ he called, and he heard Addie’s voice come distantly from the outside.
‘Just.’
‘What happened here, do you think? I mean, how did he get into the ice?’
‘You’re the cop.’
‘Thank you, that’s helpful.’
Several long moments of silence followed, and he wasn’t sure if she was thinking or just ignoring him. Then her voice came again. ‘What did the pathologist say happened to him?’
‘Someone attacked him, probably on the peak directly above here, and he fell. Broke his neck, fractured his skull and several limbs.’
‘Okay,’ she said. ‘So it was August. No snow on the mountain, except for long-lying patches in the east- and north-facing corries, like this one. Lots of walkers and climbers at that time of year. The body would have been found pretty quickly.’
‘So he had to hide it.’
‘He must have climbed down and hollowed out a rough grave on the top of the snow patch. Then covered over the body with whatever he’d dug out and more snow from around it. Even in August, temperatures can get down below freezing overnight, but it’s warm enough during the day to melt the snow patch just a little. Enough, anyway, for the body to sink down into it, then freeze over again at night. In time, these snow patches become as hard as ice.’
Brodie closed his eyes and saw just how that could happen. A process that would repeat again and again, until the body was subsumed and permanently locked into the ice. But whoever killed him hadn’t reckoned on an autumn thaw that would send meltwater running beneath the snow patch, carving out a snow tunnel over the course of several weeks, exposing the body from below.
Almost as if he had spoken his thoughts aloud, she said, ‘Then the meltwater exposed him from underneath. Which is when I found him.’ And he felt a surging moment of pride in the child he had fathered. There was more of him in her than he had ever realised.
He was about to push himself back out of the tunnel, when the light of his torch caught a fleeting shadow in the ice above him. He stopped and turned his head, raking torchlight among the shattered dimples until he found it again. Something black, the size of a credit card, locked in the ice above his head. He reached an arm towards the tunnel entrance and called, ‘Addie, pass me my axe.’ And he felt the haft of it pushed into his open hand. He grasped it and pulled it in, lifting it up so that the adze was level with his head. There was very little room to manoeuvre, and it took nearly five minutes of short, repeated hacking movements, ice splintering all around his head, eyes screwed almost shut, to reach the elusive object. He removed his gloves, and with warm fingers melting ice, eventually managed to prise it free. He held it up to the light of his torch, and stared at it, puzzled, for several long moments. It was exactly like a credit card. Black, and completely blank. There was no chip or magnetic strip or engraving of any kind. He frowned, and then it dawned on him what it was.
He thrust his axe back towards Addie and shouted, ‘I’m coming out.’
He wriggled his way back out of the tunnel with difficulty, then sat up in the snow piled all around him at the entrance. He held up the card between his thumb and forefinger and Addie looked at it quizzically.
‘A credit card?’
‘No. It’s a keycard with an RFID chip in it.’
‘RFID?’
‘Radio frequency identification. For opening his car door, maybe. They gave me one just like it for locking and unlocking the eVTOL.’
Addie frowned. ‘I don’t remember Robbie saying anything about a car.’
‘That’s because they never found one. But he must have had a vehicle to get here.’
‘So where is it?’
He closed his fingers around the card. ‘Good question.’ He unzipped a pocket in his North Face and slipped it safely inside before getting stiffly back to his feet. He wasn’t finished yet with this crime scene and looked up at the steep snow-covered slope of the corrie above him. The fall from the summit must have been a hundred and fifty to two hundred feet. Not a sheer drop, but enough to have inflicted the damage that Sita had found during her autopsy. The top end of the ice tunnel was lost under the recent snowfall, but he wanted to see if he could find it and make his way down through the tunnel from the top end. It would be easier than trying to slide up backwards from below.
He pocketed his headlight and said, ‘Wait here. I’m going to try and come through from the top.’ And with the help of his ice axe, he began the steep ascent up the corrie. He had covered maybe twelve or thirteen metres before he realized he had lost the profile of the old snow patch. It took several minutes of scouring the slope with trained eyes before he finally resigned himself to the fact that it was probably going to remain buried forever. Or at least until next summer.
He sunk his axe into the snow to begin the process of backing down the way he had come. There was the strangest cracking sound that echoed all around the mountain, and he watched a line from the head of his axe extend left and right across maybe two hundred metres. A vast slab of snow beneath his feet began to slide, and he instantly lost his balance, falling backwards as a sound like the roar of a jet engine filled his ears. Almost the last thing he heard above it, before being submerged by the snow, was Addie screaming.
Now his sense of orientation was gone as once soft snow battered and pummelled him like blocks of concrete, carrying him tumbling down the slope. Without any idea why, he found himself trying to swim through the chaos, arms and legs kicking, as if fighting against the force of giant waves. It seemed to last an eternity. An eternity in which he was strangely conscious of every little thing happening around him. Losing his axe, his gloves, his hat, ragged chunks of ice tearing at his parka, smashing into his face.