To the right of the vehicles, lights shone in a Portakabin that Brodie assumed was an office or workshop. He leaned in through the open door. ‘Mr McLeish?’ His voice was greeted with silence. There was nobody here. He stepped out again on to the tiles and peered up into the darkness at the far end. McLeish had to be somewhere up there.
Now he raised his voice above the roar of the generators to call into the dark, ‘Mr McLeish!’ But even if he was there, Brodie realised, he wouldn’t hear him over the thunder of the machines, and Brodie began to make his way carefully along the length of the building. The old, redundant Pelton turbines seemed almost to mock him with their silence. Ahead, great blue pipes like giant worms emerged from the working generators to burrow down below the building and feed water away to the tailrace.
He had almost reached the far end when the lights went out. Brodie froze where he stood, enveloped by sudden and absolute darkness, before what little daylight remained outside seeped in through the rows of skylights overhead to bring dark form to the shapes around him. He spun around, sensing that there was someone there, someone he wouldn’t hear above the racket of the generators. But there was no one. Just the ghost of his own insecurity, insubstantial and lost in darkness. He started back towards the door, moving as quickly as he dared in the dark.
He felt more than saw the shadow of a man emerge from among the disused turbines, and turned to raise his arm just in time to stop a monkey wrench from splitting his skull. He felt pain, like red-hot needles, shoot up his left forearm and staggered backwards, crashing against some immutable piece of machinery that jarred through his entire body. His attacker came at him again, the monkey wrench raising sparks from the stone wall behind his head as he ducked to one side and it missed him by a hair. More in hope than expectation, he swung a fist into darkness and felt it connect with flesh and bone. He heard the man’s grunt of pain, and capitalised on the moment to lunge forward, his shoulder connecting with his attacker’s chest. The momentum carried them both backwards until they lost their footing and crashed to the floor.
Brodie heard the wrench clattering away across the tiles and went for the other man’s eyes, but found instead only the smooth merino wool of a ski mask. A knee in his diaphragm took all his breath away, and he rolled over, gasping and choking back the bile rising in his throat. He heard the other man scrambling away across the tiles in search of his wrench, and with a huge effort of will, Brodie got to his feet and started running. Back the way he had come, towards the open door.
But after just a few paces, he could hear his attacker right behind him, breath rasping above the rumble of the turbines. There was no way he could outrun him, and as he staggered through the door into the cold outside air, he turned to face him. For a moment, in the dying light of the day, he saw murder in the other man’s eyes. And this time it was his attacker who had the momentum. His shoulder powered into Brodie’s chest, and both men fell backwards, locked in mortal embrace.
They crashed hard against the fence, tipping sideways over it, to fall together between iron cross-beams into the thrashing waters of the tailrace as it powered its way out of the building. The cold hit him like a physical blow, and both he and his attacker immediately released their grip on each other.
Now it was the water that held him and had all the momentum. Brodie was powerless to resist it, smashed from side to side against one stone wall then the other, swallowing huge quantities of water, choking and gasping for air. The speed with which it carried him away towards the river was relentless. His instinct, as it had been when caught in the avalanche, was to try to swim, even though the feeble thrashing of his arms and legs was worse than useless against the powerful currents of the tailrace.
His forehead struck the wall, and his head filled with light. He had lost his man, and knew he was losing his fight against the water. But this was no way for his life to end, with so much left undone, so much left unsaid. And yet the attraction of just closing his eyes and letting the cold and the water carry him off was almost irresistible.
He saw the bridge where he had stood only minutes earlier flash by overhead, and now the water turned white as its path broadened through a drop in the tree-lined riverbank and swept him into the swollen, snow-melt turbulence of the River Leven as it surged towards the head of the loch.
Suddenly he felt the depth of the water beneath him, and the unforgiving nature of its power as it swept him irresistibly towards his death. Yet still he fought for life, without understanding why, thrashing through the water as if his ebbing strength was in any way a match for it. He was numb now. All pain vanquished. He felt swollen and weighed down by his clothes, and completely at the mercy of the currents and eddies that tossed him freely this way and that. Now the water sucked him under, and for a brief moment, he believed he had drawn his last breath, the angry roar of the river still thundering in his ears. And then he broke the surface, chest heaving as he tried to get air in his lungs, and saw that the course of the river had swept him towards the far bank, where the leafless branches of trees hung down almost to the water’s edge.
He lunged towards them, his right arm thrown out beyond his head, hand grasping fresh air in a desperate last bid to catch hold of something. Anything. And he felt the rough bark of a low-hanging bough shred his palm. He closed numbed fingers around it, unaware that he had actually caught it until his shoulder was very nearly yanked from its socket. Unable to stop his forward momentum, the branch dipped and bowed as it fought against the flow of the river, and threw him sideways to smash hard into the slope of the riverbank. He let go and clutched at clumps of grass and rock embedded in the embankment. He was out of the water and trying desperately not to slide back in. His legs were like lead weights as he tried to crawl further from the torrent snapping at his heels. Until finally he felt secure enough to roll on to his back and bark at the sky, lungs desperate to fill and refill and feed oxygen to his body. He pulled himself up on to one elbow and looked back across the river. There was no sign of the masked man. He was almost certainly gone, swept out into the loch.
Now Brodie started shivering. Uncontrollably, as his body tried to generate heat. But it was a losing battle, and he knew he would never make it back to the hotel. Almost centimetre by centimetre, he dragged himself up the bank, getting finally to his knees and crawling the last metre and a half up on to Lochaber Road.
Almost immediately he was blinded by the lights of a large vehicle coming off the bridge and heading towards him. He raised a feeble hand to shade his eyes and heard the hiss of brakes as the vehicle came to a stop. Then a man was crouching beside him, strong hands helping him to his feet. Above the howl of the wind, Brodie heard his voice: ‘For Christ’s sake, man, what the hell happened? You’re soaked to the skin. You’ll freeze to death out here.’
With an arm around his shoulder, he supported Brodie’s failing legs to help him towards the passenger side of the truck. And Brodie saw then that this was a snow plough.