Robbie was reaching for the door handle to go out when the door from the house swung open, and the smell of cooking wafted in. A young boy stood framed in the doorway, a look of consternation writ large all over his face. ‘Dad, why can I not get my PlayStation to work?’
‘Because the internet’s still off, son. Nothing I can do about that.’
But the boy had already lost interest in his non-functioning PlayStation, distracted by the stranger standing by the door with his father. He stared at Brodie with unabashed curiosity. ‘Who’s this?’
‘A police officer from Glasgow, Cameron. Mr Brodie. He’s here to help your dad sort out a few problems.’
Brodie was stunned. The skin prickled all over his scalp. The boy had Mel’s elfin face, her eyes and nose and mouth. And it was Mel’s straight, silky, mouse-brown hair that fell carelessly over his forehead. He had, it seemed, nothing of his grandfather about him, except his name. And that was a shock. Brodie flicked an awkward glance at the boy’s father. ‘Cameron?’
Robbie seemed embarrassed. ‘His mother’s choice.’
‘What problems?’ Cameron said.
‘Police problems,’ Robbie told him.
‘You mean the body Mum found on the hill?’
Robbie was apologetic. He half smiled at the man he now had to reconsider as his father-in-law. ‘Village life. Can’t keep secrets in a place this size.’
Addie appeared slowly out of the gloom in the hallway behind the boy and slid protective hands over his shoulders, pulling him against her legs. Her eyes were fixed on her father. The silence between them lasted no more than a second or two, but felt like a lifetime to Brodie. He said, ‘You called him Cameron.’
And the colour rose almost imperceptibly on her cheeks. ‘I always liked the name.’
Brodie attempted a smile. ‘It means “crooked nose”, apparently. From the Gaelic. Doesn’t apply to this handsome lad, though.’
‘He gets his good looks from his grandmother.’
Cameron lifted his face towards his mother in surprise. ‘I have a granny? Where is she?’
Addie took a moment to compose herself. ‘She’s in heaven, Cam.’
‘And a grampa?’
Addie’s eyes never left Brodie’s. ‘Yes.’
‘Where is he?’
‘The other place,’ she said.
Robbie intervened to break the moment by opening the outside door to let in a gust of ice-cold air and a scattering of snowflakes. ‘We’d better be going,’ he said. And to Addie, ‘I shouldn’t be too long.’
Cameron still had fascinated eyes fixed on the man he didn’t know was his grandfather. ‘What happened to your face?’
Brodie raised self-conscious fingers to his cheek. ‘I had a fall.’
‘Will you be eating with us tonight?’
Brodie lifted his eyes to meet Addie’s. ‘I doubt if there’ll be time for that, Cameron.’ Almost willing her to contradict him.
‘No,’ Addie said. ‘There won’t.’
By the time they were on the road back round to the International, the snow had begun to fall in earnest, flying into Robbie’s headlights like warp speed in an old Star Trek movie. It was wet snow, slapping against the windscreen and gathering in drifts where it was swept aside by the wipers.
Tyre tracks in the hotel drive from earlier in the day had been reduced to mere impressions by the newly falling snow, so Brannan had not yet returned. The only light spilling into the dark came from the hallway beyond the front door. Lights that Brodie had turned on himself just half an hour earlier.
He saw that there were no fresh footprints on the stairs as they climbed them. In the hall, Robbie called out, ‘Dr Roy? Hello, Dr Roy? You back?’ He opened the door to the bar, then looked into the dining room, turning on lights as he went. And Brodie remembered Sita’s words when they first arrived — was it really only twenty-four hours ago? — I feel like I’ve just walked on to the set of The Shining.
Everything about the place felt just very slightly off. Nothing that Brodie could put his finger on. The brightness of the lights. The smell of damp that lingered on warm air. The worn tartan of the carpet. The flock wallpaper on the stairs. The invasive silence. And perhaps, above all, Brannan himself. His very absence lending him an odd presence. Brodie said, ‘She’s not here.’
Robbie was scowling. ‘I’ll check her room.’ And he took the stairs to the first floor two at a time. Brodie stood impotently in the hall, melting snow dripping on the carpet. His earlier foreboding had returned. He looked up when Robbie came down again, but the young constable just shook his head. ‘I see her stuff still on the bed,’ he said. ‘We left the big trunk in the room off the kitchen, next to the chill cabinet. Let’s just make sure it’s still there.’
Brodie followed him into the kitchen. Shadows lurked among the pots and pans dangling above the stainless steel where just that morning they had laid Charles Younger out in a black body bag. Robbie found the light switch, but the disquiet that simmered in the dark was not dispelled by the sudden light reflecting back at them from every shining surface. He pushed open the door into the anteroom and stopped in the door frame, his shadow thrown across the floor and the far wall by the light behind him. ‘Jesus.’ Brodie barely heard his whispered oath. ‘It’s not here.’
He reached for a light switch and they both screwed up their eyes against the glare of it.
‘We left her case right there next to the cold cabinet. She put her samples in a bag next to the body to keep them cool.’ He lifted the misted glass top, and both men found themselves caught in the sightless stare of Sita’s dark, dead eyes gazing up at them from the ice-cold interior of the cake cabinet.
Chapter Fourteen
Brodie sat alone in the dark at the table where he and Sita had exchanged confidences in the bar the night before. To occupy his mind and stop himself from thinking, he had spent five minutes crouched before the hearth, setting and lighting a fire that now sent flickering shadows around the barroom. The crackle of it created the illusion of life beyond the sense of his own faltering existence. But nothing could dispel the deep, deep depression that had settled on him like snow.
Sita’s body had been locked in rigor mortis, lying on her back, knees drawn up to her chest, arms folded with her fists at her face, like some bizarre female pugilist. Her killer had clearly experienced difficulty getting her into the cabinet, manhandling her into this strangely unnatural position in order to get the lid shut. It would be hours before rigor wore off and Brodie could remove her from it, to lay her out with dignity.
But perhaps even more bizarrely, the body that hers had replaced was gone. Charles Younger’s autopsied corpse in its black body bag had vanished.
Peering in at the dead pathologist, Brodie had seen petechial haemorrhaging around her once beautiful eyes, and a slightly protruding blue-black tongue. There was bruising around her neck. So she had been strangled. It was impossible to tell what other injuries she might have suffered.
Robbie had pulled a chair up to the table in the kitchen and sat with his head in his hands. Face chalk-white. ‘I should have stayed with her,’ he had said. ‘And none of this would have happened.’
But Brodie just shook his head and told him, ‘You had no reason to stay, Robbie. No reason to believe she was in danger.’
The young policeman had wanted to remain with him at the hotel, at least until Brannan returned. But Brodie insisted that he go. Robbie’s first responsibility was to the safety and well-being of his family. There was nothing more to be done here until communications were restored and they could call for back-up.
It was snowing heavily outside, big wet flakes crushing against the black of the window, blocking any possibility of a view out to the loch, where the lights of the village would be reflected in dark water. He had raided the bar, ripping an almost empty bottle of Glenlivet single malt from an optic to fill his glass. He had been shaking, unable to hold his hands steady in front of him. And the whisky only made him feel nauseous.