Chapter 28
The drive back to Edinburgh seemed to take forever. Lucy sat in the passenger seat of Brodie’s car, exhaustion settling into her bones like a physical weight. The motorway was quiet, the rush over hours ago.
Brodie was quiet, his attention focused on the road, but Lucy could see the tension in his shoulders, the way his hands gripped the steering wheel a little too tightly. The warehouse had shaken all of them – the brass plates, the embalming room.
Lucy closed her eyes, but all she could see were those memorial plates gleaming under the harsh warehouse lights, their engraved names a catalogue of death. Sarah Morrison. Jennifer Walsh. Lisa Patterson.
What made them special? What had they meant to him that the others hadn’t?
‘You did good work tonight,’ Brodie said, breaking the silence. His voice was rough with fatigue.
‘Thank you, sir.’ Lucy opened her eyes, watching the lights of Edinburgh begin to appear on the horizon. ‘Do you think Alan McRae is still alive?’
Brodie was quiet for a moment. ‘I don’t know. If The Embalmer sees him as a liability, if he knows too much or has become unreliable…’ He shook his head. ‘But McRae is also potentially useful. He has access, credibility, expertise. The Embalmer might need him for whatever he’s planning next.’
‘I wonder what prompted him to start looking into the murders.’
‘Hopefully we’ll get to ask him.’ Brodie rubbed his eyes with one hand, keeping the other on the wheel. ‘We’ll know more once we interview the Mitchells tomorrow. If they’re willing to talk, if they’ll tell us who they’ve been working with…’
‘You think they will?’
‘It depends. If they think they’ll spend the rest of their lives in prison.’
They drove the rest of the way in silence, the city quiet and dark save for the orange glow of street lights. Brodie drove straight to Fettes, pulling into the nearly empty car park beside the main building.
‘Get some sleep,’ he told Lucy as they climbed out of the car. ‘Be back here by nine. We’ll regroup, go over everything we found, and I’ll carry out the Mitchell interviews.’
‘Yes, sir.’ Lucy retrieved her bag from the back seat, every muscle in her body protesting. She’d been running on adrenaline for hours, and now that it was wearing off, she felt hollow and shaky.
The drive home to her flat in Leith took twenty minutes, the streets empty at this hour. Lucy parked in her usual spot and climbed the stairs to her first-floor flat, unlocking the door with hands that shook slightly from exhaustion.