A Winter Grave : A Novel (2023) Read online

  Also by Peter May

  FICTION

  The Lewis Trilogy

  The Blackhouse

  The Lewis Man

  The Chessmen

  The Enzo Files

  Extraordinary People

  The Critic

  Blacklight Blue

  Freeze Frame

  Blowback

  Cast Iron

  The Night Gate

  The China Thrillers

  The Firemaker

  The Fourth Sacrifice

  The Killing Room

  Snakehead

  The Runner

  Chinese Whispers

  The Ghost Marriage: A China Novella

  Stand-alone Novels

  The Man With No Face

  The Noble Path

  Entry Island

  Runaway

  Coffin Road

  I’ll Keep You Safe

  A Silent Death

  Lockdown

  NON-FICTION

  Hebrides (with David Wilson)

  This ebook published in 2023 by

  an imprint of

  Quercus Editions Ltd

  Carmelite House

  50 Victoria Embankment

  London EC4Y 0DZ

  An Hachette UK company

  Copyright © 2023 Peter May

  The moral right of Peter May to be

  identified as the author of this work has been

  asserted in accordance with the Copyright,

  Designs and Patents Act, 1988.

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication

  may be reproduced or transmitted in any form

  or by any means, electronic or mechanical,

  including photocopy, recording, or any

  information storage and retrieval system,

  without permission in writing from the publisher.

  A CIP catalogue record for this book is available

  from the British Library.

  HB ISBN 978 1 52942 848 3

  TPB ISBN 978 1 52942 849 0

  EBOOK ISBN 978 1 52942 850 6

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters,

  businesses, organisations, places and events are

  either the product of the author’s imagination

  or used fictitiously. Any resemblance to

  actual persons, living or dead, events or

  locales is entirely coincidental.

  Ebook by CC Book Production

  www.riverrunbooks.co.uk

  In memory of Stephen Penn,

  my best and oldest friend

  1951–2022

  RIP

  CONTENTS

  Also By

  Title

  Copyright

  Dedication

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  PROLOGUE

  CHAPTER ONE

  CHAPTER TWO

  CHAPTER THREE

  CHAPTER FOUR

  CHAPTER FIVE

  CHAPTER SIX

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  CHAPTER NINE

  CHAPTER TEN

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

  CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

  CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

  CHAPTER THIRTY

  CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

  CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

  CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  In 1990, as NASA’s Voyager 1 spacecraft was about to leave the solar system, Carl Sagan – a member of the mission’s imaging team – asked that the camera be turned around to take one last look back at Earth. The image it captured of our world, as a speck less than 0.12 pixels in size, became known as ‘the pale blue dot’.

  Later, when considering that speck of dust in his 1994 book Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space, he wrote: ‘There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another, and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we’ve ever known.’

  PROLOGUE

  NOVEMBER, 2051

  Little will heighten your sense of mortality more than a confrontation with death. But right now such an encounter is the furthest thing from Addie’s mind, and so she is unprepared for what is to come.

  She is conflicted. Such a day as this should lift the spirits. She is almost at the summit. The wind is cold, but the sky is a crystal-clear blue, and the winter sun lays its gold across the land below. Not all of the land. Only where it rises above the shadow cast by the peaks that surround it. The loch, at its eastern end, rarely sees the sun in this mid-November. Further west, it emerges finally into sunshine, glinting a deep cut-glass blue and spangling in coruscating flashes of light. A gossamer mist hovers above its surface, almost spectral in the angled mid-morning sunshine. Recent snowfall catches the wind and is blown like dust along the ridge serpentining to the north.

  But she is blind to it all. Distracted by a destiny she appears unable to change. Such things, she thinks, must be preordained. Unhappiness a natural state, broken only by rare moments of unanticipated pleasure.

  The wind seems to inflate her down-filled North Face parka as well as her lungs. Her daypack, with its carefully stowed flask of milky coffee and cheese sandwiches, rests lightly on her shoulders, catching the breeze a little as she turns towards the north. The peaks of the Mamores rise and fall all around her, almost every one of them a Munro, and in the distance, sunlight catches the summit of the towering Ben Nevis, the highest mountain in Scotland, the loftiest prominence in the British Isles – a little of its measured height lost now with the rise in sea levels below.

  She stops here for a moment and looks back. And down. She can no longer see the tiny arcs of housing that huddle around the head of the loch where she lives. Kin is the Gaelic for head. Hence the name of the village: Kinlochleven. The settlement at the head of Loch Leven.

  Somewhere away to her left lies the shimmering Blackwater Reservoir, the sweep of its dam, and the six huge black pipes laid side by side that zigzag their way down the valley to the hydro plant above the village. The occasional leak sends water under pressure fizzing into the air to make tiny rainbows where it catches the sunlight.

  Finally, she focuses on the purpose of her climb. An ascent she makes once a week during the fiercest weather months of the winter to check on the condition of the flimsy little weather station she installed here – she stops to think – six years ago now. Just before she got pregnant. Fifty kilograms of metal framework and components, carried on her back in three separate trips during the more clement summer months. A tripod bolted to the rock, a central pole with sensors attached. Air temperature and relative humidity. Wind speed and direction. Ultraviolet, visible and infrared radiation. Solar panels, radio antenna, a satellite communication device. A metal box that is anchored at the summit to sandstone recrystallised into white quartzite. It contains the data logger, barometric pressure sensor, radios and battery. How it all survives here, in this most inhospitable of environments, is always a source of amazement to Addie.

  It takes her less than fifteen minutes to clear the sensors of snow and ice, and to check that everything is in working order. Fifteen minutes during which she does not have to think of anything else. Fifteen minutes of escape from her depression. Fifteen minutes to forget.

  When she finishes, she squats on the metal box and delves into her pack for the sandwiches thrown together in haste, and the hot, sweet coffee that will wash them down. And she cannot stop her thoughts returning to those things that have troubled her these last months. She closes her eyes, as if that might shut them out, but she carries her depression with her like the daypack on her back. If only she could shrug it from her shoulders in the same way when she returns home.

  Eventually, she gets stiffly to her feet and turns towards the north-facing corrie that drops away from the curve of the summit. Coire an dà loch. The Corrie of the Two Lochans. She can see sunlight glinting on the two tiny lochs at the foot of the drop which give the corrie its name, and starts her way carefully down the west ridge. There is a mere skin of snow here, where the wind has blown it off into the corrie itself, rocks and vegetation breaking its surface like some kind of atopic dermatitis.

  Before the Big Change, long-lying snow patches had become increasingly rare among the higher Scottish mountains. Thirty years ago they had all but vanished. Now they linger in the north- and east-facing corries in increasing size and number all through the summer months. Melting and freezing, melting and freezing, until they become hard like ice and impervious to the diminished estival temperatures. She had watched this patch in the Coire an dà Loch both shrink and grow across the seasons, increasing in size every year. The next snowstorm will bury it, and it will likely not be visible again until late spring.

  But today there is something different about it. A yawning gap at th
e top end. Like the entrance to a hollow beneath it, disappearing into darkness. Maybe it had been there during her last visit, and she had simply not seen it. Obscured by snow, perhaps, which was then blown away by high winds. At any rate, she is intrigued. She has heard of snow tunnels. Periods of milder weather, as they have just experienced, sending meltwater down the corries to tunnel its way beneath the ice of long-lying snow patches.

  She forgets those things that have been troubling her, and slithers down the ridge and into the corrie. The snowfall that fills this narrow valley is peppered by the rocks that break its surface from the scree below, and she has to make her way carefully across it to where the snow patch it hosts lies deep in its frozen heart. Twenty metres long, seven or eight wide. Maybe two-and-a-half deep. She arrives at the lower end of it, swinging herself round to find herself gazing up into the first snow tunnel she has ever seen. It takes her breath away. A perfect cathedral arch formed in large, geometric dimples of nascent ice stalactites above the rock and the blackened vegetation beneath it. Light from the top end of the tunnel floods down like the water before it, turning the ice blue. Big enough for her to crawl into.

  She quickly removes her pack and delves into one of its pockets to retrieve her camera, then drops to her knees and climbs carefully inside. She stops several times to take photographs. Then a selfie, with the tunnel receding behind her. But she wants to capture the colour and structure of the arch, and turns on to her back so that she can shoot up and back towards the light.

  The man is almost directly overhead, encased in the ice. Fully dressed, in what occurs incongruously to Addie as wholly inadequate climbing gear. He is lying face down, arms at his side, eyes and mouth wide open, staring at her for all the world as though he were still alive. But there is neither breath in his lungs, nor sight in his eyes. And Addie’s scream can be heard echoing all around the Coire an dà Loch below.

  CHAPTER ONE

  FIVE DAYS EARLIER

  The Glasgow High Court of Justiciary was an impressive building, all the more so for being stone-cleaned in the latter part of the twentieth century. A-listed as a structure of historic importance. Very few A-listers, however, had passed through its porticoed entrance. Just a long list of mostly men, in unaccustomed suits, who had gone on to wear a very different kind of attire after sentencing by the Lord Justice General, or the Lord Justice Clerk, or, more likely, one of the thirty-five Lords Commissioners of Justiciary.

  Detective Inspector Cameron Brodie had given evidence in various of its courtrooms many times over the years. He was well used to the odour of the justice being dispensed by men and women in wigs and black gowns from lofty oak benches beneath artificial skylights. Justice, it seemed to him, smelled of cleaning fluid and urine and stale alcohol, with the occasional whiff of aftershave.

  It was cold outside in the Saltmarket, rain leaking, as it did most days, from a leaden sky. But the heat of legal argument in this courtroom, where a certain Jack Stalker, alias the Beanstalk, stood accused of first-degree murder, had warmed the air to a high level of humidity among all the rainwater trailed in on coats and umbrellas. Stalker sat in the dock, flanked by police officers, a grey man in his thirties with a deeply pockmarked face and a livid scar transecting his left eyebrow. Thinning hair was scraped back and plastered across the shallow slope of his skull with some evil-smelling oil that Brodie imagined he could detect from the witness stand, even above the odour of institutional justice.

  Stalker’s lawyer, the elderly Archibald Quayle, was well known for his defence of over five hundred murder cases, more even than the twentieth century’s legendary Joe Beltrami. And despite the sweat that gathered comically in the folds of his neck and chin, he was known by Brodie to be a formidable opponent.

  Quayle had wandered away from the big square table beneath the bench where the lawyers and their clerks sat, and now insinuated himself between the jury and the witness stand. He had the condescending air of a man supremely confident in his ability to achieve an acquittal, carrying about him a sense of absolute incredulity that this case had ever come to court.

  To Brodie, there was no question of Stalker’s guilt. He had been caught on a high-definition CCTV security camera kicking his victim to death on top of the levee on the north bank of the Clyde near the SEC conference centre.

  Quayle turned dark, penetrating eyes in Brodie’s direction. ‘What witnesses did you interview in relation to the alleged assault, Detective Inspector?’

  ‘None, sir.’

  Quayle raised both eyebrows in mock surprise. ‘And why was that?’

  ‘We were unable to find any. The incident took place in the small hours of the morning. Apparently there was no one else in the vicinity.’

  The lawyer for the defence pretended to consult his notes. ‘And what forensic evidence did you acquire that led you to suspect my client of committing this heinous crime?’

  ‘None, sir.’

  The eyebrows shot up again. ‘But your scenes of crime people must have gathered forensic traces from the victim and the crime scene.’

  ‘They did.’

  ‘Which matched nothing that you found on the accused.’ A statement, not a question.

  ‘It took us nearly two days to find Stalker. He had ample time to dispose of anything that might have linked him to the murder.’

  ‘And how did you find him?’

  ‘We asked around. He was known to us, sir.’

  Quayle frowned. ‘Known to you? How?’

  Brodie took a moment before responding. He wasn’t about to fall into Quayle’s trap. He said evenly, ‘I’m afraid that because of the Rehabilitation of Offenders Act 1974, I am unable to say how.’ Which brought smiles around the lawyers’ table, and a glare from the judge.

  Quayle was unruffled. ‘Asked around, you say. Asked who?’

  ‘Known associates.’

  ‘Friends, you mean?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘The victim, too, was a friend, wasn’t he?’

  ‘I believe they once shared the same accommodation.’

  ‘Flatmates?’ Quayle asked disingenuously.

  Brodie paused once more. ‘You might say that; I couldn’t possibly comment.’

  Quayle ignored the detective’s flippancy and strode confidently towards his chair. ‘So the only evidence you have against the accused is the CCTV footage that the advocate depute has presented to the court?’

  ‘It’s pretty damning, I think?’

  ‘When I want your opinion, Detective Inspector, I’ll ask for it.’ He turned away dismissively, towards the judge. ‘I wonder, my Lord, if I might ask for the court’s indulgence in replaying Production Five A one more time?’

  The judge glanced towards the advocate depute, who shrugged. After all, it could only reinforce the case against the accused. ‘I have no objection, my Lord,’ the prosecutor said.

  Large screens mounted on all four walls flickered into life, and the murder of the unfortunate Archie Lafferty replayed for the umpteenth time in all its graphic detail. An argument of some kind was in progress. In full view, just across the river, of police headquarters at Pacific Quay, whose lights reflected in the dark waters of the Clyde flowing swiftly by. The levee on the north bank was deserted, except for the two antagonists. Stalker bellowed in Lafferty’s face. You could almost see the spittle gathering on his lips. Then he pushed the other man in the chest with both hands and Lafferty staggered backwards, gesticulating wildly, as if pleading innocence to some savage accusation. Another push and he lost his footing, falling backwards and striking his head on the cobbles. Enough, the pathologist later confirmed, to fracture his skull, though not apparently to induce unconsciousness. Lafferty was more than aware of the kicks that rained in on him from the vicious feet of his attacker, curling up foetally to protect his head and chest. But Stalker was relentless, and when his right foot finally breached the other man’s defences and caught Lafferty full in the face, you could see the spray of blood that it threw off.

  The kicking continued for an inordinate and excruciating period of time, long after Lafferty had stopped trying to fend off his attacker and lay spent on the cobbles, soaking up the repeated blows and leaking blood on to stone. Stalker appeared to be enjoying himself, putting all his energy into each repeated blow, until finally he stood breathing hard and looking down on his victim with clear contempt. Lafferty was almost certainly dead by now. Stalker turned on his heel and walked briskly out of shot. The screens flickered and the video came to an end.