Addie leaned the rifle against the wall and took two steps across the room to retrieve her son. Cameron flung his arms around her, and even in the midst of his distress and confusion, he turned his head towards Brodie and said, ‘Are you really my grampa?’
Brodie felt his throat swell up as he fought back the tears, and was unable to find his voice in reply. He simply nodded, and the boy turned away again with the acceptance of a child who has understood nothing of what has passed between his parents and this man who was suddenly his grampa. But it was overwhelming, and he clung desperately to his mother and buried his face in her neck.
Addie stared in quiet desperation over her son’s head at her father. Finally she said, ‘What’ll happen now?’
Brodie stepped across the room to close the door, then turned to face his daughter. ‘Well, there’s no point in me trying to go after him in the storm. He won’t make it out of the village anyway. Not in this snow.’
She said, ‘He has two hunting rifles. There was only one in the gun cabinet when I went to get this one.’ She inclined her head towards the rifle leaning against the wall.
Brodie nodded grimly. ‘Then he must have the other one stashed somewhere.’
‘What do you think he’ll do?’
‘It’s not so much a question of what he’ll do, as what he’ll try to stop me from doing.’
‘Which is what?’
‘Leave.’
‘But you can’t. Nobody can leave in this.’ She lifted her eyes towards the world outside.
‘No. But as soon as the storm is over, you and I and Cameron can fly out of here in the eVTOL. My guess is he’ll wait till we try to make it to the football field, then pick us off.’
Addie was shaking her head, still struggling to come to terms with it all. ‘He wouldn’t. Surely to God?’
‘He’s lost everything, Addie. It’s not a gamble any more. He has nothing left to lose.’ He paused. ‘If it’s any consolation, I don’t believe he’d hurt either of you. But he can’t afford to let me get out of here alive. Not with everything I know.’
She closed her eyes, as if by shutting them she could somehow escape this waking nightmare. When she opened them again, she said, ‘It would be crazy to try to get to the football pitch in the dark. Even if the storm was over.’
He nodded. ‘Yes. Whatever happens, we should wait at least until first light.’
Almost as the word light left his mouth, the light in the tiny office was suddenly extinguished.
‘Shit.’ He heard her curse under her breath in the dark. ‘Is that Robbie?’
‘I don’t know.’ Brodie fumbled his way to the window and peered out into the darkness. ‘It looks like all the street lights are out. Power lines must be down again.’
A match flared in the dark, and a flame flickered on the wick of a candle held in Addie’s hand. Cameron sat wide-eyed on the counter as his mother shut the drawer beneath the counter and took him in her arms again. ‘We’re well prepared,’ she said. ‘This happens too often.’ She handed him the candle. ‘Come through and I’ll light a fire. It’s going to be a long wait.’
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Brodie moved around the house like a ghost, drawing the curtains in each room before searching it by torchlight. Robbie was probably somewhere out there watching. He would be cold, and in pain, increasingly desperate. All of which would only make him more dangerous.
The double bed in the couple’s bedroom was unmade, sheets and quilt tangled like detritus washed up on some barren shoreline.
This is where his little girl had spent all her sleeping hours with the man she thought she loved. Where they had made love. Where Cameron had been conceived. And he felt inestimably sad for her, knowing how it felt to be betrayed by the person you trusted most in the world. He wanted to go back downstairs and put his arms around her and tell her that everything would be alright. But he knew it wouldn’t. Her life, and Cameron’s, would never be the same again. Robbie had put an end to their future as surely as if he had put a gun to their heads and pulled the trigger.
The thought made him angry, but somewhere deep inside, he felt just a grain of empathy for the man who had done this to them. For Robbie had also done it to himself. He was a lost soul, lingering somewhere in his own self-inflicted purgatory, before taking his final steps upon the road that once no doubt was paved with good intentions.
Brodie searched the wardrobe, rifling through drawers of underwear. He checked beneath the bed. Just the fluff and dust that had gathered unseen and undisturbed through all the years of their marriage.
He moved to Cameron’s room, but found nothing there either.
In the bathroom, bottles of sedatives and painkillers crowded the shelves of a cabinet above the toilet. A jar of cotton wool balls. Flossers. Cotton buds.
Toothpaste and brushes sat in a tooth mug on a glass shelf above the sink. Used towels lay on the floor where they had been carelessly dropped by whoever last used the shower. Robbie, he thought, after dragging himself from the river, restoring life to frozen limbs by standing under hot water. Just as Brodie had done. In a laundry basket, he found all of Robbie’s wet, discarded clothes, and wondered how he would have explained them to Addie.
But mostly he just felt despondent, bearing witness to the demise of a life, a relationship, a family. He knew just how painful that loss could be, and he ached for Addie.
Downstairs he went through every cupboard in the kitchen, even checking the fridge and the freezer, struck by the banality of everything he found. An ordinary life lived in expectation of an ordinary future. More children. Grandchildren.
He turned away and went back to the sitting room. It was filled with the soft orange glow of a wood-burning stove with glass doors. Addie’s legs were tucked in beneath her as she leaned into the arm of the settee, Cameron’s head in her lap. The boy was fast asleep.
While he searched the house, Brodie had heard her crying, every sob tearing at his heart, ripping through his conscience. But she was all cried out now, and sat puffy-eyed, gazing vacantly at the flames beyond the glass. He had no idea how much radiation people living in the village had been exposed to. There was no record of the reading Younger must have taken from the GDN radiation sensor at the summit of Binnein Mòr on the day he died. How much was safe? How much was dangerous? Brodie simply didn’t know. But one thing was certain, he was not leaving here without his daughter and grandson.
He sat on the edge of the armchair opposite Addie, and vacant eyes flickered towards him. He said, ‘Where did Robbie keep his stuff? Toolbox, climbing gear, things like that. In the garage?’
She shook her head. ‘There’s a wooden hut out back. It’s pretty big. It was kind of like his den. I never went in there. Didn’t want to. I’m sure he kept a secret laptop somewhere in it so that he could go online and lose more money without me knowing.’ Her eyes filled with tears again. ‘I should have, though. For so long I just ignored it, hoping it would go away. Burn itself out.’ She scoffed at her own stupidity. ‘Of course, I was just burying my head in the sand.’ And the allusion brought back a moment of painful memory for Brodie, of his first meeting with Sita on the eVTOL. Her words filled his head. Ostriches don’t bury their heads in the sand. They don’t hide from danger, they run from it. Maybe that’s what Addie had been doing, running rather than hiding. She said, as if she could read his thoughts, ‘Maybe if I hadn’t, this would all have turned out differently.’