He stopped then. A sad smile on his face. He shook his head. ‘Addie, you know you’re not going to shoot me. Just like you know I’m not going to harm you or Cameron.’
‘Try me.’ Her voice sounded bolder to her than she felt. She pressed the rifle harder into her shoulder, her finger crooked around the trigger.
He said, ‘Addie, you don’t have it in you. And, really, I mean you no harm.’ He paused. ‘But I can’t let your Dad leave. I can’t.’
‘Take one step closer and I’ll drop you where you stand.’
His smile became strained. ‘There’s too much of your father in you. Maybe I know now why you hated him so much.’
Without taking her eyes off Robbie, Addie half turned her head towards the open door. ‘Dad, don’t let Cameron see this.’
Inside, Brodie was almost numb with the pain. There was a lot of blood, and he could only just see Cameron’s frightened eyes in the gloom. ‘Come here, son,’ he said, his voice the hoarsest of whispers. But it was invitation enough to propel the boy into his arms, and he turned his grandson away from the open door, wrapping himself protectively around the child.
Robbie’s smile was gone now. ‘You’re making a mistake, Addie.’
‘No, you’re the one making the mistake, Robbie, if you think I’m going to let you kill my father.’
He stood for a moment, all humanity leached from his eyes — a man who had killed too many times. He lifted his rifle in a single, swift movement, and the shot that rang out spun him away, his fall cushioned by the depth of the snow. He half sunk into it, blood spreading quickly around him, rabbit fear in his eyes. As he tried to speak, blood gurgled into his mouth.
Addie stared in horror at what she had done. This was the man who had changed her life, persuaded her that she should make her future here with him, in this hidden valley. The man who had fathered her child. She had aimed for the largest part of the target, his chest, afraid that if she simply tried to disable him with a shot to the leg, she would miss, and he would shoot her instead. But, still, she felt sick to the core.
She became aware of Brodie yanking at her hood. ‘Get in,’ he whispered, still shielding the boy from the sight of his father lying bleeding in the snow. And as Addie climbed into the eVTOL with leaden legs, he closed the door, summoning all his energy to bark at Eve. ‘Eve, initiate our return journey.’
Her voice came back to them. Low battery, Detective Inspector. Range limited.
‘Just go,’ he barked. ‘As far as you can take us.’
After a moment she responded. Flight initiated. And the rotors above them began to spin, snow flying off in all directions, the power of the downdraft blowing it clear of the glass. The screen at the front of the cabin displayed a battery symbol in orange beneath the warning RANGE THIRTY MINUTES. It didn’t matter to Brodie. He wanted to get them away from here. And thirty minutes flying time would just have to do.
With the gentlest lurch, Eve lifted herself up out of the snow and wheeled away, rising over the trees and the flames of the International Hotel. Brodie peered through the glass, back the way they had come, and saw Robbie lying spreadeagled in the snow. Even from here he could see the blood.
And he saw the figure of a man running across the field to grasp Robbie’s parka by the hood and start dragging his prone form through the snow towards the blazing building. Even as Brodie watched, the man turned his face up towards them. Brannan! It was fucking Brannan! And then realisation struck Brodie with sickening clarity. Brannan was the face of the faceless they. He was their man here. He had been pulling all the strings the whole time. Orchestrating everything. And now he was pulling Robbie into the fire, so that he too would go up in smoke.
But what made no sense is why Brannan would have let them get away. He could have disabled the eVTOL, set fire to it, just as he had done to his own hotel. Brodie shut his eyes and shook his head as a surge of pain took away his breath.
Addie took Cameron from his grandfather’s grasp and held him to her, trembling almost uncontrollably. She glanced at her father as he eased himself forward and into the front seats, leaving a trail of blood across the leather. An involuntary cry of pain escaped him as he slid the weekend pack from his back, letting it fall to the floor. He dropped into the seat, his breathing laboured.
Below, the dark waters of the loch swept past, the unbroken white of the mountains rising up around them into a clearing blue sky. And as Eve lifted still higher, the early sun breached the peaks behind them, to send sunlight cascading west along the fjord, and filling the cabin with a golden light.
Still clutching Cameron, Addie manoeuvred herself into the seat beside her father and reached over to push her hat and gloves on to the wound beneath his anorak, pulling the drawstrings tight to create pressure on the wad where the bullet had entered. And another voice filled the cabin.
‘Detective Inspector Brodie, this is air traffic control at Helensburgh. We’re going to schedule a landing for you at Mull. You should have just about enough juice to get there. We’ll monitor battery range remotely.’ A pause. ‘We have a video message for you.’
They were passing Glencoe village on their left now, and the power station at Ballachulish A two hundred feet below. Moments later they overflew the barrier bridge at the narrowest point of the loch and skimmed out across the open expanse of Loch Linnhe.
The monitor flickered and the battery symbol vanished, to be replaced by today’s date, white letters on black, that in turn gave way to the battered face of Brodie delivering the report he had sent the previous night. Text scrolled across the bottom of the screen: Report by DI Cameron on the death of Charles Younger.
Brodie listened to his voice speaking. But they were not his words. His lips moved as if they were, but he knew he had never spoken them.
Dr Roy’s post-mortem on Charles Younger, he said, had returned a verdict of accidental death. An apparent fall while climbing on Binnein Mòr. But the fire at the International Hotel, in which the pathologist had perished today, meant that her report and all her samples were lost.
He shouted at the screen, blood in his spittle. ‘That’s a lie! That’s not me. I never said that. Younger was murdered. Murdered, for fuck’s sake!’ He lashed out and struck the windscreen of the cabin, his fist smearing blood on the glass.
Addie’s voice, right beside him, was tiny and frightened. ‘What’s happening, Dad? What does it mean?’
He turned blazing eyes on her. ‘It means I’ve been fucking had.’ He fumbled in his pockets for his iCom glasses and snapped them in place with blood-sticky fingers. ‘iCom, scan the video,’ he shouted, focusing his gaze on the screen.
After a moment, his iCom returned its verdict. Video genuine. And a green GENUINE symbol flashed in his lenses.
He yanked the glasses from his face and threw them away across the cabin, and, with fumbling fingers, pulled the earbuds from his ears. ‘Fuckers!’ His voice reverberated around the cabin, his grandson shrinking into his mother, fear in the wide-eyed stare he directed at his grandfather. ‘The software in these things isn’t the latest version. They have the latest version.’ He tried to bring his breathing under control. ‘Eve, place a call to DCI Maclaren at Pacific Quay.’