She smiled when she heard his voice. ‘Is that offer still on?’ she asked.
‘You look stunning,’ Gilchrist said as Beth took the seat beside him, then gave her a peck on the cheek. ‘And that perfume. It’s familiar. What is it?’
‘Men.’
‘Never heard of that one before.’
‘No, Andy. You bought it for me. Way back.’
‘Ah, yes, so I did.’
‘What’s it called, then?’
‘The name eludes me.’
She gave his arm a playful slap. ‘Ysatis.’
‘I was about to say that.’
‘You have such a way with words.’ She slipped off her jacket and folded it over the back of her seat.
‘Would you like a drink?’ he asked.
She nodded. ‘I’d love a drink.’
‘The usual?’
‘Does that elude you, too?’
‘Dry white wine. Chilled. Splash of soda. Slice of lime. Not lemon.’
‘I’m impressed.’
While he stood at the bar, he watched Beth dig into her leather satchel for her mobile. By the time he returned, it was back in her bag. She frowned and rubbed her upper arms, as if cold.
‘Problems?’ he asked her.
Beth reached for her wine and took a large sip.
‘Want to talk about it?’ he tried.
She held her glass for a long moment, deep in thought, twirling the stem. Then she sat back. ‘That was Cindy,’ she said. ‘She just called me from home.’
‘Is she all right?’
‘She’s fine. It’s just ... Cindy’s got a great memory.’
Gilchrist took a sip of his beer, not sure where this was leading. ‘Give her time,’ he joked.
‘Do you remember the body on the beach? Some years ago?’
Gilchrist was not sure which body on which beach Beth was referring to. He had seen seven, as best he could recall, but he nodded anyway.
‘Cindy was a student at the time. She used to jog along the West Sands every morning. She was there.’
Gilchrist leaned closer. ‘Go on.’
‘She remembered the boy. She remembered thinking how awful it must have been for him. It was his father.’
Gilchrist remembered, too. The body she was talking about was the bloodless corpse with the gash on the neck.
‘What about the boy?’ he asked.
‘It wasn’t until Cindy got home that it hit her. The boy on the beach. That creep in the shop ...’
‘The same person?’
‘She’s not sure. It only flashed into her head.’
Beth looked frightened, and he resisted putting his arm around her. Instead, he changed the subject. ‘Leave it with me. I’ll check it out. In the meantime, you once had a friend who was big into computers.’
‘Terry Leighton?’
‘That’s the one. Still see him?’
‘From time to time.’
‘If you asked him, would he do me a favour?’
‘Depends what you want me to ask.’
He removed the two pieces of Granton’s photograph from his pocket and laid them on the table. He slid them together and positioned them in front of Beth. ‘I need some digital enhancement done on this.’
‘What is it?’
‘A photograph.’
‘I see that, you idiot, but doesn’t the police lab—’
‘I’ve been suspended.’
‘Oh, yes. I forgot. How many times is that now?’
‘I’d rather not get into it.’
Beth fingered the photograph. ‘And you don’t want anyone to know what you’re doing. Right?’
‘Right.’
She leaned closer. ‘It looks old. Anyone I know?’
‘Could be.’
‘Keeping secrets, are we?’
‘Will you ask for me?’
‘Is this to do with the Stabber case?’
‘Could be.’ He shrugged. ‘It’s just a hunch.’
‘And we know all about your hunches, don’t we?’ she said, slipping her hand into her leather satchel and pulling out her mobile phone.
Gilchrist took a sip of beer as Beth called Leighton, and thought about his hunches. Beth had been referring to an earlier case of his in which he had chosen to ignore the usual line of questioning and go with his sixth sense. Trust it, he had told himself. It always works for you.
And it had.
His hunch and his inquisitive persistence had uncovered the murder weapon, a twelve-inch butcher’s knife buried in the soil by the victim’s headstone. The last place anyone would look. Anyone, that is, except Gilchrist. He had become the reluctant local hero after that, even portrayed as a genius by the editor-in-chief of the local newspaper, the one who had almost married Beth and whose article was the catalyst that sparked the beginning of Gilchrist’s relationship with her. Now his instinct was being piqued once again, this time by an unclear image of a cat on a twenty-year-old photograph.
Why? How could he continue to investigate on hunches? What if this time he was wrong? Would that convince him that Patterson was right and it really was time to hang up his boots? Despite his doubts, the image of the cat still niggled.
Beth disconnected. ‘Terry’s driving to London for a week,’ she said. ‘He’s leaving first thing in the morning. If you want him to work on the photograph while he’s there, he needs to have it this evening.’
‘Do you have an address for him?’
‘I pass his street on the way home. I’ll drop it off.’
‘Oh. Okay.’ Gilchrist lifted his pint.
Beth surprised him by taking hold of his hand and squeezing it. ‘Terry’s bald and grey and twenty stone,’ she said.
It irked Gilchrist that she could read him with such apparent ease, but with the digital enhancement now arranged, and concern over the creep in the shop seemingly behind them for the evening, he found them both relaxing as they ordered food and drinks and chatted about old times.
He liked how comfortable he felt with her, and how talk ebbed and flowed between them with no effort, and how her fingers would touch his, or her hand graze his thigh, if their conversation hinted at their past intimacy. And when her face lit up with a smile, he had to remind himself of her initial response to his invitation, and resist the urge to lean over and press his lips to hers.
After another two pints of Eighty and an unfinished glass of white wine, they left the bar at nine and walked arm in arm to the end of Market Street where Beth surprised him once again by giving him a quick kiss and ordering him to call her tomorrow. He wondered if her kiss was an invitation to respond, but by the time his mind had worked out that it had been nothing more than a parting peck, she already had her back to him and was heading off to Leighton’s.
He pulled his jacket collar tight and set off toward the Cathedral. In the cold night air, his breath rushed like steam and his mind cast up an image of the bloodless corpse on the beach, a white mass that had lain at the water’s edge like an abandoned lump of meat.
It had been cold that morning, too, and drizzling as he walked over the rippled beach of the West Sands, a uniformed policeman by his side. Five or six early morning beach strollers parted as they approached.
The body was naked, the skin flawless white in the cold light, drained of blood from a cut that ran across the throat from ear to ear and grinned at them like a clown’s misplaced smile. The drizzle was thickening, gathering into droplets that trickled over the skin like beads of sweat.
‘Anyone here recognize him?’ Gilchrist asked.
‘I do.’
A long-haired youth stepped forward, with skin as pale and smooth as that of a young boy. He would later be found to be in his mid-twenties.
‘You know his name?’ Gilchrist asked.
‘He’s my father.’
And Gilchrist saw that face now, the eyes more dark and dangerous looking, the hair longer, scruffier than it had been that day on the beach three years earlier.
He took out his mobile and asked to speak to PC Norris.
He was connected almost in the next breath.
‘Andy Gilchrist here,’ he said. ‘Can you talk?’
‘I don’t know if this is a good idea,’ said Norris.
‘My lips are sealed,’ said Gilchrist. ‘So should yours be. That body on the beach three years ago,’ he pressed on before Norris could object. ‘You remember it?’
‘Yes.’
‘Who was it?’
A moment’s pause, then, ‘Jimmy Hamilton.’
Gilchrist smiled. Now he remembered. ‘And the son is Sebastian. Right?’
‘Yes,’ said Norris. ‘And a right weirdo.’
‘Whatever happened to him?’
‘Couldn’t say, sir.’
‘Got an address?’
‘Way ahead of you, sir. I’ve got it up on the screen right now. You got a pen and paper?’
Gilchrist assigned the address to memory as Norris read it out to him. Hamilton lived on the other side of town. ‘Do me another favour, can you? Get hold of Stan and tell him to take Nance and bring Hamilton in for questioning.’
‘On what charge, sir?’
‘Indecent exposure. And if he has any problems with that, tell him to call me on my mobile.’
When Gilchrist reached the cemetery he walked toward the narrow entrance of Gregory Lane. To his right, the Cathedral ruins rose into the night sky like massive wraiths. Ahead, the lane beckoned like a cave.
He hesitated. His thoughts conjured up an image of the Stabber’s first victim, Donald McLeish, killed in a lane not dissimilar to this. In his mind’s eye, he watched a woman in denim jeans step from the deepest shadows and plunge a stave into Donald’s left eye. Had Donald known her? Had he been abusive to her in a past relationship? Gilchrist would never know, not until he came face to face with the Stabber and asked outright.
He stuffed his hands deep into his pockets and entered the lane. His footfall reverberated as darkness enveloped him and he found himself taking comfort from the dim glow of penumbral light that spilled from the rear courtyard of St Gregory’s.
He emerged at the opposite end with a shiver and crossed the path that paralleled the cliff face. He stood with his back against the metal railing. The sea wind was picking up, cold as ice. To his left, the path rose, then spilled, black as the River Styx, down toward Kirkhill. To his right, it ran off like some spectral invitation to the Castle ruins. From where he stood, he could just make out Garvie’s bedroom window, a grey rectangle on a black roof. Through the McLarens’ lighted window, he noticed young Ian slinking around his bedroom.
Forty minutes later, a weak light spilled from Garvie’s dormer, and a woman stepped forward to pull down the blinds. He thought he recognized Garvie’s features, but from that distance could not be sure.
He waited another ten minutes before making a move.
Back in Gregory Lane he pulled himself up and over the stone wall and landed in a garden as dank and cold as an abandoned forest. He pushed his way through a tangle of bushes and uncut grass until he came to what he worked out had to be Garvie’s perimeter wall.
He peered over.
Yellow light glowed from an upper window, soft and misted by the blinds. Through the fine material, he caught a flicker of movement. He imagined Garvie exercising, and an image of black Lycra shorts and blond hair, short and damp, reared up in his mind.
He was about to move closer when he stopped.
Had his eyes deceived him? Had someone else walked into the room? He kept his gaze glued to the window. Garvie lived alone, did she not? Did she have a visitor? And if so, who? And why upstairs?
But ten minutes later, Gilchrist made out no other movement and decided the shadows must have tricked his eyes.
The luminous hands on his watch stood at 10:33. Nothing moved in the darkness around him. Cliff surf rushed in the distance like leaves in an autumn wind. Garvie had told him she took sleeping pills, so he crouched, deep enough in shadow to be invisible to all except the keenest of observers, and waited another fifteen minutes before he peered over the wall once more.
Garvie’s house lay in darkness. Several lights still brightened the McLarens’ ground floor, and through the light blue sheen of a fabric roll-blind he saw the silhouetted form of someone by the sink. All the lights were out in the house on the other side of Garvie’s, grey windows dulled by drawn curtains. He toyed with the idea of entering Garvie’s garden from that side, but doing so would still leave him with an exposed climb over the dividing wall.
Decision made, he placed his hands on top of the wall, gripped the stone, and pulled himself up and over.
He dropped onto damp grass as thick as wet straw.
He was in.
CHAPTER 20
Kev opened the door with a ‘Yeah?’
Nance gave one of her gentler smiles. ‘We’re looking for Sebastian Hamilton,’ she said to him.
Kev’s gaze slid to Stan by her side, then back again. ‘It’s a bit much calling round people’s houses at this time of night, is it not?’
‘We like to work late,’ said Nance. ‘Is Mr Hamilton in?’
‘He’s gone.’
‘Out for the evening?’