Brodie said, ‘You have no responsibility for any of this. You’re a victim here. You and Cameron. Just as much as any of those people Robbie murdered.’
She dropped her head into her hands, fingers spread, and held the weight of it for a moment. ‘I still find it hard to believe that he was really capable of any of this.’
In a strangely hoarse voice that made Addie look up, Brodie said, ‘We’re all capable of doing things others find hard to believe, Addie. Sometimes even ourselves.’ And he wouldn’t meet her eye.
He stood up.
‘I’m going to go and search his shed. Where will I find the key?’
‘It’s hanging beside the kitchen door.’ She hesitated. ‘What are you looking for?’
‘I’ll know when I find it.’
He felt the force of the storm the moment he opened the kitchen door. The wind drove large flakes into his face as he stepped out in the darkness, and almost blew him off the top step. He waited for some moments in the hope that his eyes would adjust themselves to the available light. But there was no light, and he knew that he would never find the hut without the torch.
He had been reluctant to use it, knowing that Robbie could well be out there somewhere, just waiting and watching. And the light of a torch would offer a tempting target, caught in the sights of a hunting rifle. But surely even a man as desperate as Robbie would have had to take shelter from this?
Brodie tensed, taking a calculated risk, and the light from his torch raked across the snow-covered wilderness that was the back garden before it alighted on the hut away to his right. He made a run for it, crouching low, hindered in his speed by the depth of the drifting snow. At the door of the shed, he fumbled to get the key in the lock, taking far too long. Just waiting for the bullet in his back. And then he was inside, slamming the door shut behind him, and breathing a deep sigh of relief.
The beam of his torch fell across a cluttered workbench. Tools and cables, a soldering iron, a vice. There were boxes lined up on the shelves above it, all marked with their contents. Screws in different sizes. Nails. Washers. Nuts and bolts. On the floor beneath the bench, large plastic containers stood side by side, different coloured lids clipped in place.
He laid his torch on the floor and crouched down to open them. In the first he found a black laptop and dozens of printed gambling receipts, some dating as far back as four years. This, then, was Robbie’s not-so-secret laptop. It was in here that he had sown the seeds of his own destruction.
In the second box Brodie found a silver laptop and a well-worn brown leather satchel. He opened up the laptop, but the battery was dead. He turned it over and saw a scuffed white sticker on the underside with Younger’s name and address handwritten on it, left over from a repair in an IT workshop somewhere. He could only imagine what secrets the computer might give up when charged.
The satchel was stuffed with laser printouts — early drafts of Younger’s story — and handwritten notes in an A4-sized ring-binder notebook. As in the notebooks he had found in Younger’s glovebox, these too were in shorthand, with scribbled figures that meant nothing to Brodie. Then, from the rear division of the satchel, he pulled out a weighty document held together with a foldback clip. It was a poor photocopy of an original, but still clearly legible. Beneath the Scottish Government crest, the title on the cover page made Brodie catch his breath. RISK FACTORS IN THE AFTERMATH OF A TECTONIC SHIFT AT THE GREAT GLEN RIFT. It had a subheading. ASSESSMENT OF POTENTIAL SEISMIC DAMAGE AT BALLACHULISH A. So this was the report that Sally Mack had buried when she was energy minister in the thirties.
Brodie wondered why Robbie had kept all of this. Insurance, maybe, against everything going wrong. Which, of course, it had.
He shone his torch around the walls and saw Robbie’s climbing gear hanging from a row of hooks. Several parkas and thermal trousers, various telescopic hiking sticks, a couple of ice axes, and three different sizes of backpack. Beneath them, on the floor, a row of hiking and climbing boots and a box full of crampons.
Brodie selected the largest of the backpacks and lifted it down to start packing it with Younger’s laptop and the satchel with its contents.
Against the far wall stood a row of cupboards with ill-fitting doors. He began pulling them open and dragging out their miscellaneous contents. Folders of old accounts, boxes of family detritus, the bits and pieces of a long-dead bicycle. And in the last of them, Sita’s missing Storm trunk. He heaved it out on to the floor and opened it with trembling fingers. All the tools of the dead pathologist’s trade, neatly packed away in fixed trays, and clips attached to the walls of the box. And in a sealed plastic bag, the jars and sachets of samples from Younger’s autopsy, along with her notes.
Brodie stuffed them into the backpack and was about to leave when he spotted Sita’s crime scene DNA analyser near the bottom of the trunk. He knelt down again to lift it out. He had no idea how it worked, and the battery seemed dead. He could get no read-out from its screen. But a paper printout, the result of her last analysis, curled out from a roll set into the back of the machine. He tore it off and straightened it out to run his eyes over the lines of print, and felt his heart push up into his throat.
When he returned to the kitchen, he slipped off Robbie’s backpack and kicked the snow from his shoes. There seemed to be no let up in either the wind or the snowfall, and he stood for a moment with his back to the door breathing hard. Then he trailed the pack through to the sitting room where the fire was dying, but the air was still warm. Addie had drifted off, and Cameron was in a deep sleep, both breathing softly in the still of the room.
Brodie laid the pack against the side of the settee, lifted the rifle from the sideboard, and sat himself down in the armchair facing Addie. He laid the rifle across his knees, and turned the printout over in his fingers again and again, gazing silently off into space. He was startled by her voice.
‘What did you find?’
He shifted focus to discover her watching him. ‘Everything the Scottish Herald will need to put together the story Charles Younger was writing.’
‘Which is what?’
And he told her what Joe Jackson had revealed to him in that cold concrete bunker on the edge of the loch. Her eyes opened wide in shock. Understanding for the first time, perhaps, the pressures that had been brought to bear on Robbie. Stakes that were too high even for him to contemplate.
They sat then for a very long time without saying anything, until at length he got up to chuck another couple of logs into the wood burner before resuming his seat. Sparks flew around inside it, funnelling fresh smoke up the chimney as the wood caught, and new flames sent light flickering around the room. He set the rifle once more across his knees.
She said very quietly, ‘I can’t imagine what it feels like knowing you are going to die.’
He glanced at her quickly, then away again. ‘We’re all going to die, Addie. Usually we don’t know when, or how. Though in the early years, I think sometimes we believe we’re going to live forever.’ He drew a reflective breath. ‘When the doctor first told me, it was like the biggest wake-up call ever. Fuck, Cammie, you’re going to die! Who knew?’ He sighed. ‘It’s a shock, and you feel sorry for yourself. Why me? Then, when that wears off, you start to get a perspective on it.’
He stared at the flames licking all around the logs.
‘The hardest thing to come to terms with is the regret. I mean, life is an opportunity. The chance to do something that maybe won’t mean much in the grand scheme of things, but will have significance in your own little universe. Which is not so little, by the way.’ He looked at her. ‘It’s everything, Addie. It’s your whole being. And my overwhelming sense of my whole being is one of failure. Of having somehow wasted my life. Thrown away that opportunity. Because, you know...’ he shook his head, ‘you always think there’ll be time. To put things right, to catch up later. And there isn’t. You waste your life on things that don’t even matter. You want things you can’t have, and dream of stuff that can never be. And all the time, your life is slipping away through your fingers, like so many finite grains of sand, squandered on... nothing. Then suddenly you’re staring down the barrel of the end of your life, and all you’re left with is the regret. The things you said, or didn’t say. The things you did or didn’t do. And it all seems like such a pointless fucking exercise.’