Life For a Life (3 page)

Gilchrist had Nance chase up Donnelly’s missing associate.

When the call came into the office at 10.13 a.m., Nance was no further forward.

‘Whereabouts on the Coastal Path?’ Gilchrist asked, and jotted it down. ‘Are they still there?’ He flagged Jessie, and she caught his eye, puzzled. ‘Tell them to stay put. We’re on our way.’ He pushed to his feet, pulled on his leather jacket, Jessie by his side as they swept through the office, and out the door into North Street.

‘What’s the rush?’ Jessie gasped, as she struggled to keep up with him.

‘A couple walking their dog found a woman’s body,’ he said.

‘Dead?’

Gilchrist glanced at her. ‘A woman’s body usually means she’s dead. Yes.’

‘So she’s not going to get up and run away, then?’

Gilchrist eased back on his stride. ‘Sorry,’ he said. ‘Force of habit.’

‘Habit? Sounds like the East Neuk’s the murder capital of the world.’

By the time they reached Gilchrist’s Merc, Jessie was breathing heavily. She stood back as he pressed the remote, then opened the door for her.

‘Thought the last of the gentlemen vanished with the cowboys,’ she said, sliding into the passenger seat.

‘You look as if you could use a hand,’ he said, and closed the door on her.

Jessie fiddled with her iPhone while Gilchrist worked his Merc on to Abbey Walk, and neither of them spoke as he powered through the double roundabout and accelerated on to the A917. Gilchrist waited until he passed Kinkell Braes Caravan Park before flooring it to seventy, then said, ‘Hard night last night?’

‘Does it show?’

‘I’d say you’re looking a tad rough around the edges.’

‘Where’s a cowboy when you need him?’

He gripped the steering wheel and eyed the road ahead. ‘You found a place yet?’

‘Nothing permanent. A friend, Angie, is putting me up.’

‘Robert too?’

‘No, I stuck him in a bin back in Glasgow.’

He glanced at her.

‘Of course Robert too. He’s my son, for God’s sake. You can’t just wake up one morning and throw him away.’

‘Although sometimes you’d like to?’

‘Speak for yourself.’

‘Just asking,’ he said.

‘Well, ask something sensible.’

Gilchrist chose silence, and nudged the Merc up to eighty.

‘You’re not convincing me she’s not going to get up and run away,’ Jessie said.

Gilchrist eased his foot off the accelerator. ‘So, after your night out with Slim at the Park, when did you get up here?’

‘In time to make it to the office for eight.’

‘You always like to cut it that fine?’

‘Only when I can’t get rid of Jabba.’

Gilchrist glanced at her. ‘Sounds like he stayed the night.’

‘Yeah, he did. First I went on top, then he went on top. What is it with all the grilling? My personal life’s personal. So why don’t you stick to solving murders and mind your own business?’ She grasped the dashboard as the Merc powered through a bend. ‘And slow down, will you. You’re making me feel sick.’

Through the village of Boarhills, the road turned into a single-lane dirt track. Gilchrist followed it all the way to the seafront. He parked on the grass verge, and pulled up his collar. Hands of ice slapped his face from a bitter east wind. He trudged towards the Coastal Path in silence, Jessie breathing hard behind him.

‘Sorry,’ she said.

‘What’s that?’

‘You heard.’

He stopped then, and faced her. She pulled to an abrupt halt, eyes wide, like a deer trapped by spotlights. She looked not only cold and tired, but something else that he could not quite put his finger on. ‘It’s your first day in a new job,’ he said, ‘and I’m giving you the benefit of every doubt.’

Silent, she nodded.

‘But I’m curious as to why?’

‘Why what?’

‘Why you’re behaving the way you are.’

Her lips tightened, and her eyes creased. She blinked once, twice, and he thought he caught a flicker of fear shift across her face. Then she shook her head.

‘We’ll talk about it later,’ he said, then strode towards the waiting couple.

The SOCOs had not arrived yet, and Gilchrist flashed his warrant card.

‘Clive Watkins,’ the man said. ‘My wife, Jayne.’

Gilchrist nodded. ‘Who called it in?’

‘I did,’ said Mrs Watkins. She fingered her hair. ‘But it was Skip who found it, the woman’s body, I mean.’

As if on cue, the black Labrador lifted his eyes and gave a tired wag of his tail.

‘Where is she?’ Gilchrist asked.

‘This way.’

Mr Watkins led them along the Coastal Path, nothing more than a foot-worn grassway that looked icy enough in white stretches to demand crampons, until they reached a point where the trail narrowed.

Watkins faced Gilchrist and said, ‘She’s down there.’

Gilchrist glanced at his feet, at black leather shoes in need of a polish, and stepped into long grass whitened with snow and frost, Jessie close behind him.

They found her about twelve feet from the path, face down, bedded in snow. Skip’s paw prints trailed across her back. From the path, unless you knew the body was there, you could pass it every day until spring. It had snowed the last four nights but one, and even from where he stood, Gilchrist could tell the body was days old, maybe even a week.

Watkins looked down at them from the edge of the path.

‘Do you take Skip for a walk daily?’ Gilchrist asked him.

‘We do, but we haven’t been along this path since November.’

Christmas was less than three weeks away. Only someone walking a dog would have any chance of finding the body. ‘End, middle, beginning of November?’ Gilchrist asked, just to test the possibilities.

‘Twenty-third. Jayne’s birthday.’

Gilchrist nodded, turned away.

‘Are you thinking what I’m thinking?’ Jessie asked him.

‘Depends what you’re thinking.’

‘That she could have been lying here for a couple of weeks?’

‘Somebody would have reported her missing.’

‘Maybe,’ Jessie said. ‘Maybe not.’

Gilchrist frowned at the body. Even with her face hidden, he could tell she was a young woman, no more than a girl, early to mid teens. Could a teenager be dead for a couple of weeks without anyone noticing her missing?

‘She could have tripped and fallen,’ Jessie said to him.

Gilchrist looked back up at the path, at Mrs Watkins turning away, as if embarrassed to be caught talking on her mobile. He estimated the drop in elevation to be ten feet, the spot where the body was found to be distant enough from the path to lie unseen, and far enough from the water’s edge to be untouched by even the highest tides and the wildest seas. He eyed the path again, and in his mind’s eye watched a young girl trip, roll down the hill and . . .

‘Running along in the dark,’ Jessie said. ‘Then you trip all of a sudden. Crack your head on the way down.’ She looked across the rocks to the sea, gave a shiver against a sudden breeze. ‘Knock yourself unconscious,’ she said, ‘and you’d freeze to death out here in less than two hours.’

‘Running?’ Gilchrist said to her. ‘Why running?’

‘Check the heels.’

Gilchrist bent down, brushed snow off the woman’s feet. Not running shoes, but red high heels without the heels, evidenced by a square base where the fall had torn them free. Or had they been ripped off to make running possible? And bare legs, too, no tights, woollen or otherwise. Behind the left knee, the blue-black stain of a tattoo in the shape of a broken heart could have been mistaken for a bruise. He noticed, too, that the skirt was short, halfway up her thighs, and finished off with a red belt as shiny as plastic to match. And her white blouse, thin enough to raise goosebumps in the summer, did little to hide the stain of a larger tattoo that spread across her shoulders like a pair of wings. He pushed himself upright.

‘What do you think?’ he asked Jessie.

‘How does the East Neuk shape up for prostitution?’

‘It happens.’

‘I’ll bet it does.’ She sniffed, rubbed a hand at her nose. ‘Is it always this cold?’

‘An east wind,’ he said, then stared off along the Coastal Path. ‘What was she doing here?’

‘Any brothels close by?’

‘In St Andrews?’

‘I’d say that’s where she was running to. Wouldn’t you?’

Gilchrist tried to visualise the body falling off the path, rolling down the slope. But tumbling head over heels did not compute. Her body was lying in the direction she had run. He looked back along the path as it trailed the coast, back towards Kingsbarns. Although he had walked the Coastal Path several times when he first married, he had never travelled its full length – from Newporton-Tay to North Queensferry on the Firth of Forth. He pulled his collar tight to his neck. Gusts of wind raised spindrift from the sea like mist. Christ, it was cold out here. Too cold to survive in a summer blouse and bare legs.

‘You seen this?’ Jessie said.

She had brushed snow and frost from the woman’s arm, to expose a hand with fake fingernails, red to match her belt and shoes. One of her nails was missing, the middle finger of her left hand, probably broken off in the fall. As his gaze shifted to her wrists, a frisson chilled the length of his spine. He knew what it was but felt compelled to ask anyway.

‘Some sort of bracelet?’ he tried.

Jessie fiddled with the knotted rope, ran her fingers along its short length to a frayed end. Then she stared up at him. ‘I think you’ve got some serious shit going on up here.’

Jessie was still taking statements from Clive and Jayne Watkins when the SOCOs arrived and spilled from their white Transit van like students at a beach outing. Gilchrist led them to the body but the ground was too uneven, and the wind too strong, for them to erect their Incitent. They were in the process of roping off the path and slope when a black Range Rover eased in behind Gilchrist’s Merc.

He watched the door open and a pair of green Hunter wellington boots reach for the ground, followed by the suit-clad legs of the forensic pathologist, Dr Rebecca Cooper, who had taken over after old Bert Mackie retired six months earlier.

She gave him a warm smile as she shook his hand. ‘We must stop meeting like this,’ she said. ‘Why don’t you just ask me out?’

‘I don’t think Mr Cooper would approve.’

‘Mr Cooper wouldn’t know,’ she said, then looked beyond him. ‘What have we got?’

Gilchrist explained his thoughts as he escorted her along the path, where she then faced the wind in that imperious manner of hers that he found attractive. Her blonde hair whipped her shoulders, long and thick with a natural curl – not tight like a perm, but loose and soft. He had run his fingers through it once, and he struggled to shift the image.

‘Who’s the new face?’ she asked him.

‘DS Janes. Transferred from Strathclyde.’

‘First name?’

‘Jessie.’

‘Jessie Janes.’ She almost laughed. ‘Isn’t she a bit young for you?’

‘Everyone’s a bit young for me these days.’

‘That’s what I like about you.’

‘That I’m becoming old?’

‘That you’re an older man.’ The bluest of eyes held his for a tad too long, he thought. Then she turned, and marched down the slope.

Off to the side, Jessie closed her notebook, and Clive and Jayne Watkins departed on their unfinished morning walk, holding hands in mutual comfort, Skip nose to the ground, tail brushing the grass with renewed vigour, it seemed.

‘Anything of interest?’ he said to Jessie.

She shook her head. ‘They live in Kingsbarns. Retired. Moved up from England four years ago. Why do they do that?’

‘Do what?’

‘Make fun of the Scots, then when it’s time to retire, come and live among us. We should put a gate at the border.’ She raised her hand, ran it along an imaginary signboard. ‘No English welcome. Stay out.’ She chuckled. ‘Or better still. Exchange rate – two English pounds to one Scottish. That would keep ’em out.’

‘Got something against the English?’

‘1966 World Cup. You’re old enough to remember it.’

‘And you’re not,’ he said. ‘Which proves a point.’

‘What point?’

‘That children are influenced by what their parents tell them.’

He thought it odd how her lips tightened – not just pursed as if silenced but white and bitter as if reining in her anger. Too late, he realised that he knew nothing of her upbringing, knew only what he had read from her Police Records, and from his call to DCI Peter ‘Dainty’ Small from Strathclyde HQ –
Reliable, rock solid. Bit of a tongue on her, but so do most women. She won’t let you down. I’d recommend her
.

‘Looks like I stuck my foot in it,’ he said.

‘Forget it.’

‘I would like to,’ he went on, ‘but if we’re going to work together, I’ll need to know more about you.’

‘Why?’ she snapped at him. ‘So you won’t stick your foot in it again?’

Her snap of anger surprised him. ‘Look—’

‘I said forget it.’

His escape route opened in the form of Dr Cooper, who was making her way back up the slope. She reached out for a helping hand, and Gilchrist obliged by pulling her up and on to the path.

She offered her hand to Jessie. ‘Rebecca Cooper,’ she said. ‘Call me Becky.’

Jessie reciprocated with a firm grip. ‘Jessica Janes. Call me Jessie.’

If she caught the cynicism in Jessie’s voice, Cooper smothered it cleanly. ‘I’d say our young woman’s been dead for several days.’ Her gaze shifted from Gilchrist to Jessie, then back again. ‘Body temperature’s close to zero. Skin’s frozen solid from the ice and wind. She has a nasty cut on the right temple, but I won’t be able to determine cause of death until she’s on my table.’

‘Anything else?’ Gilchrist tried.

Manicured fingernails pushed through a layer of windswept curls. She shook her head, as if to tease him. ‘It’s interesting that she’s not wearing any knickers.’

‘Why’s that interesting?’ Jessie said.

Gilchrist caught the challenge in her voice, but again, Cooper glided over it.

‘It could give some lead to the cause of death,’ she said. ‘Any knickers close by?’ She held Jessie’s fierce gaze with a steady stare of her own. ‘Which might have been where she spent the last moments of her life.’ She faced Gilchrist, as if she’d had enough of Jessie. ‘Although I suspect she wasn’t murdered.’