They stood for a long time holding each other, buffeted by the wind, her tears soaking into his North Face, until finally she drew away and looked at him with desperation in her eyes. ‘It’s not really Robbie’s fault. He’s a victim. It’s an illness.’ And then came the hesitation. But it didn’t last long. ‘Will you speak to him?’
Brodie felt himself almost physically withdrawing. He’d have done anything to help her. But a third party intervening between husband and wife never, in his experience, turned out well. ‘It’s not my place, darling,’ he said. And saw her face harden.
‘You’re a senior officer.’
‘I have no jurisdiction over Robbie.’
‘Then as the father of his wife.’ And that came like a blow to his solar plexus.
‘Addie...’ He didn’t have to give voice to his doubts. It was in his eyes, his whole body language.
She took a step away, gazing at him with all the hatred he remembered from way back. Hostility filled her eyes along with the tears and humiliation. She didn’t even wait for him to reason with her. ‘Well, fuck you, then.’
She turned and strode off, back along Riverside Road, her hair and her open jacket billowing out behind her. He had let her down. Again. He sighed deeply and screwed up his eyes, knowing, too, that any intervention by him, professionally or personally, was not going to fix the problem. Would almost certainly make it worse. And yet hers had been a heartfelt cry for help. How could he refuse her? He opened his eyes, lifting them to the heavens, and knew that somehow he was going to have to speak to Robbie.
Chapter Twenty-Three
McLeish’s house backed on to the community fire station, a bungalow with a double garage attached. The footpath from the gate had been meticulously cleared of snow, and Brodie crunched over granite chippings to the front door. To the right of it, a light shone out from the living room window into the gathering darkness of the late afternoon. He was about to knock when he noticed that there was also light spilling from the open doors of the double garage off to the left, and he walked around the front of the house to look inside.
An old petrol-engined Porsche, a classic car from the 1970s or eighties, lay in pieces on the floor, the body of it jacked up for access underneath. A scarred wooden bench that ran along the back of the garage was strewn with tools and cans of oil and dirty rags. The wall behind it was hung with power tools and cables and saws. To the left of the Porsche lay the vacant space where McLeish clearly parked his pickup, a charging point and cable fixed to the wall next to it. It was conspicuous by its absence.
Brodie stepped over an open toolbox, careful not to stand on contents which were scattered across the floor — spanners, screwdrivers, wrenches. He walked to the bench at the rear of the garage. His eye had been drawn by the brown and tan of a pair of well-worn work gloves lying next to the vice. The fingers of each glove were curled in towards the palm, almost as if there were still hands in them trying to grasp something unseen. He lifted up the right-hand glove and read the maker’s name on the back of it. M-Pact Mechanix. And there were the four slashes in the finger reinforcements at each knuckle joint to allow for flexing. Forming the same pattern that Sita had found imprinted on Younger’s face by his attacker.
‘Can I help you?’ The woman’s voice was sharp but wary, and startled him.
He turned to find a middle-aged woman in jeans and sweatshirt standing in the frame of the open garage door. Once dark hair was streaked with grey and drawn back into a knot behind her head. He put her somewhere in her middle fifties.
He lay the glove back on the bench. ‘I was looking for Calum McLeish.’
She eyed him suspiciously. ‘And what exactly is it you would be wanting with him?’
Brodie stepped towards her. ‘I’m sorry. Mrs McLeish, is it?’
‘It is.’
He fumbled for his warrant card in an inside pocket and held it towards her. ‘Detective Inspector Brodie. Your husband helped me out with the repair of a charging cable earlier today.’
She seemed relieved. ‘Oh. Yes. He told me. He’s gone up to the hydro plant, Mr Brodie. He’s got some more tools in his workshop up there. Something he needs to put this mess back together.’ She waved a hand towards the deconstructed Porsche. ‘He wanted to get there and back again before the storm broke.’
Brodie walked back up to Lochaber Road and crossed the bridge over the Leven to the south side of the village. Most of the services were on this side of the river. The post office, the Co-op, the boat club, several hotels and guest houses, the local housing authority. But nobody was venturing out into the coming storm. Brodie reckoned most folk would be cooried down at home, bracing themselves for Idriss. It was only fools like him who were out and about at a time like this.
He turned left on to one of the many old military roads that circled the village, past the National Ice Climbing Centre in the remains of the former smelting plant, a brewery, the Salvation Army church. On the bridge over the tailrace, he stopped and gazed up the three-hundred-metre length of it as it curved away towards the hydro plant. The rush of spent water was almost deafening as it made its way along this narrow canal from the turbines it had turned to generate power. Behind him the water turned white as it spewed into the River Leven. A good three metres beneath the bridge, it passed in spate, black-streaked and unforgiving, high stone walls rising on either side. Water that had been carried by gravity through pipes all the way down from the Blackwater dam in the hills above.
Brodie followed the tyre tracks in the road that ran alongside the tailrace, past an old stone-built hostel and a row of multicoloured lodges. Beyond the fence that topped the walls of the tailrace itself, unbroken snow lay across a large tract of land where the bulk of the aluminium factory once stood. On the hill above it, a dilapidated building of square white cubes, which at one time housed workers from the smelter, nestled in stark abandonment among the winter-bare trees. A brief incarnation as a military training centre had been cut short by the Scottish Government after independence. Empty and decaying, it stood now as a monument to a golden industrial age long since passed into history.
The hydro plant stood proud on the rise above the tailrace, tall windows in a long, narrow stone building rising up the gable end to the pitch of its slate roof. A large, bright blue roller door to the left of the windows allowed access for heavy machinery. It was shut. But a small door beneath the windows stood ajar, and light fell out from the glass above it to lie in elongated squares across the snow.
McLeish’s dark blue pickup was parked outside. Brodie walked carefully around the vehicle to see what he hadn’t noticed earlier in the day: the black-painted bull bars at the front of it. He crouched down, and in the light of the windows, saw that they were scraped and scuffed, with tiny streaks of white paint still ingrained in the front edges of the top and bottom bars.
He stood up with a grim sense of foreboding. Here was a man, he had no doubt now, who had killed twice. He had everything to gain and nothing to lose from killing again. Brodie approached the open door with caution. This was an emergency door that opened out, a push bar on the inside of it. He pulled it fully open and stepped into the plant. It stretched off into darkness, where three ten-megawatt generators powered by water from the dam produced as much noise as electricity. At the near, lit end, a pickup truck and Land Rover were parked on maroon tiles, and a green-painted walkway led past them towards a row of the original one- and two-megawatt generators, which had been preserved for posterity. Overhead, a large yellow crane that ran along steel beams set high on the walls hung silent.