Hand for a Hand (7 page)

“Chloe’s scar,” he said. “Why do you remember it so clearly?”

“She needed a couple of stitches. I took her to the hospital.”

“You and Chloe were dating?”

“Yeah.”

“So, the scar’s recent?”

“Last summer.” He sniffed again, tugged a hand through clumped hair. “Is that important?”

“Could be.” He dialled Mackie’s number. It was answered on the second ring. “Bert. Andy here. Have you completed your examination?”

“Other than spectrographic analysis, yes, I’m more or less finished.”

Gilchrist puffed out his cheeks, then let out his breath. “Find any scars?”

“One. On the right hand.”

A bull butted him in the gut. “Whereabouts?”

“Base of the thumb. Fairly recent, I’d say.”

Last summer?
Gilchrist pressed his phone hard to his ear as Mackie confirmed size and angle, and concluded with, “It looks like a knife wound.”

“How about an artist’s palette knife?”

“That’s an interesting suggestion. But, yes, any kind of knife would make sense. Why do you ask?”

“Jack’s with me. He might be able to make an ID.”

“Your son, Jack?”

“Yes.”

“Good lord, Andy. Are you saying.…”

“Nothing definite, Bert. But we’d better take a look at it.” He hung up and glanced at Jack. “I’m sorry, Jack,” he said. “It’s not looking good.”

“It’s Chloe. I know it is.” His voice sounded steady, as if he was oblivious to the gruesome prospect of examining amputated extremities.

Gilchrist wondered how on earth he ever got himself into such a morbid job.

He felt his heart sink. He hated to admit it.

But Jack was right.

G
ILCHRIST FOUND
M
ACKIE
in the post-mortem room in the Bell Street mortuary, a woman’s body on the stainless steel table in front of him, opened from sternum to pubis. Cruel looking surgical equipment lay on flat metal surfaces. Something wet and slimy and white as brain glistened by a set of scales. The air felt cold, and hinted of decaying flesh and formaldehyde that left an aftertaste on the tongue.

Mackie caught Gilchrist’s eye, and stepped away from the table.

Gilchrist introduced Jack, then together they followed Mackie into another room.

Gurneys lined either side.

Mackie shuffled forward without a word, and halted at one of the gurneys halfway along on the left. He peeled back a cotton sheet to reveal two clear plastic bags. Through the plastic sheen, the amputated hands looked ghostlike, as if at any moment they could move of their own accord and crawl from their confines. If Gilchrist had any doubts they were from different bodies, they evaporated right then.

He stood beside Jack. “Ready?”

Tight-lipped, Jack nodded.

Gilchrist eyed Mackie.

Mackie opened one plastic bag, removed a hand, the left one, and placed it palm down on the gurney. Then he did the same with the right hand. He pushed the bags to the side and positioned the hands so they looked as if they were reaching out for Gilchrist.

Jack let out a rush of breath and took a step back.

Something clamped Gilchrist’s chest. He stared at the hands, the claws, the lifeless things on the table. They had once belonged to a young woman, once touched and caressed and moved with life. An image of him holding those hands, looking down at those fingers, burst into his mind. He fought off an overpowering urge
to take Jack by the arm and lead him from the room. But his pragmatic side kept him rooted. He had a victim to identify, a murder to solve, and he prayed to God that Jack would simply shake his head and tell him the hands could not be Chloe’s, that they belonged to some other poor soul.

“The scar should be on the inside,” Jack whispered, and held his own hand out and pointed to the base of his right thumb. “About here.”

Mackie eyed Gilchrist with an intensity he had not seen in the old man’s eyes since he performed the post-mortem of his own sister-in-law. Grim-faced, Mackie turned the right hand over and pointed a finger to a pink mark at the base of the thumb. “This is the only scar I detected.”

Gilchrist felt his lungs deflate. He had his answer. His peripheral vision watched Jack’s body sway as if buffeted by a wind. He grasped his arm, tightened his grip. “Jack,” he said, “I need you to be sure.”

“It’s her,” Jack whispered. “It’s Chloe.”

Gilchrist stared at Jack’s face. For his own benefit, he needed to hear more. “No doubts?” he asked.

Jack opened his eyes. His cheeks glistened with tears. His breath shuddered as he stared at the hands, and he surprised Gilchrist by leaning closer and reaching out as if to lift the hand from the gurney. Instead, he tapped the back of his own hand. “When Chloe was ten years old she crushed a knuckle on her left hand. Her pinkie knuckle. Compared to the others, it looked flat when she made a fist.”

Gilchrist glanced at Mackie. “Did you take x-rays?”

Mackie nodded. He replaced the right hand, picked up the left, and pointed to the small knuckle. “Fifth metacarpal shows evidence of having sustained a similar injury.” He looked at Jack. “Did she say how it happened?”

“She’d been watching TV. Some judo expert. She tried to punch her fist through a block of wood.” He gave a wan smile.
“She said that was a defining moment in her life, when she realised she would be an artist, not a martial arts expert.”

Mackie returned his attention to the hand, giving Gilchrist the impression he was leaving the hard part to him.

“That’s all for now, Bert.” Gilchrist tugged Jack’s arm, felt a moment’s resistance, then Jack was by his side, out the refrigerated room, into a short corridor. They pushed through the door and stepped into the grey light and cold air of a late winter afternoon. They walked past Gilchrist’s Merc and over to the edge of the car park. Then stopped.

Jack breathed hard through his nostrils. “I’m not mistaken,” he said. “It’s Chloe.”

Gilchrist said nothing. Christ, what would he give for a cigarette at that moment? Fourteen years since he last had a smoke, and the need still hit him like an unscratchable itch deep in his gut. “Why don’t you stay here for a couple of days?” he said. “I’ll be instructing Forensics to examine your flat.”

Jack turned to him, eyes burning. “You don’t think I had—”

“No, Jack. I don’t. It’s standard procedure. We need samples of clothing, hair from Chloe’s hairbrush, stuff like that, to check her DNA.” He looked away, felt Jack’s eyes on him. Christ. He had the scar, the crushed knuckle. They would lift Chloe’s fingerprints from Jack’s flat. How conclusive did identification have to be? He gave Jack’s shoulder a quick squeeze, not sure if he was trying to be strong for Jack or himself.

“I’m sorry,” he whispered. “I’m truly sorry.”

Gilchrist watched his son walk to the car. Part of him was aching, too, for Chloe, for Jack. But his own pain seemed smothered in dread. The killer was clever. They would not find the rest of the body intact, Gilchrist knew. He knew that with certainty. All he could do was dig harder, look deeper, try to find some lead to work on. But his heart told him they were just waiting for the next body part to turn up.

And he was not sure he could take that.

Chapter 9

G
ILCHRIST CONTACTED
D
AINTY
Small with confirmation of Jack’s ID, and asked if Dainty could have someone keep an eye on Maureen for him.

“Bloody hell, Andy. We’re stretched thin as it is. But I’ll see what I can do.”

Strathclyde Police visited Chloe’s parents and informed them of their suspicions, always suspicions, nothing definite until they conclusively matched the DNA results or the fingerprints. He drove to Glasgow and assisted Forensics with their search of Jack’s flat. Three pairs of Chloe’s knickers were removed from the laundry basket and samples of her hair from a hairbrush in the bathroom. They also took tubes of oils from her studio and lifted a perfect set of fingerprints from a coffee mug on a table by her easel.

By 10:45, and back in St. Andrews, Gilchrist had done all he could, and drew his day to a close. He drove to Fisherman’s Cottage, and arrived home this side of midnight to find Jack crashed out on the settee, TV still on, and a half finished bottle of Glenfiddich standing upright on the coffee table. He decided not to waken him, and went to bed, his heart torn for Chloe and hurting for Jack.

He slept in confusing fits and sweating starts, his mind firing images of Gail in tears, only to morph into a waif-like Chloe who turned away to swirl paint onto an upright canvas with handless stumps. He pulled himself from bed at 5:00 and checked on Jack, pleased to see he had made it to the spare bedroom, and the bottle of Glenfiddich still at half-mast.

On the drive to the Office, he called Forensics who confirmed the fingerprints from the coffee cup matched those of the amputated right hand, and an appeal for information on Chloe’s whereabouts went out on the national and local news that day. Strathclyde Police had a young PW put on Chloe’s clothes—black jeans, top, shoes, jacket—and walk from Jack’s flat down to Byres Road then on to Great Western. Without knowing which route Chloe might have taken, they tried several. By the end of the day no one had come forward. It seemed as if Chloe had stepped from Jack’s flat and vanished in broad daylight.

To make matters worse, Bertie McKinnon, a local hack with a pathological distrust of Fife Constabulary, and Gilchrist in particular, stirred up local discontent with a passion. The incompetence of the Crime Management Department was spread across the front pages for all to see, with photographs of Gilchrist, the hapless SIO, in an assortment of unflattering poses. One inflammatory photo showed him standing alone on the sixteenth fairway, looking at his feet, scratching his head, under the headline
WHAT TO DO
? Another caught him stepping out of Lafferty’s with the caption
MURDER’S THIRSTY WORK
.

In support of Strathclyde’s efforts, teams of plain-clothed detectives and uniformed constables from Fife Constabulary were dispatched throughout the east coast. Farms on the outskirts of St. Andrews were searched. Gardens, outhouses, sheds, huts, barns, stables, even pig sties and a child’s tree-house were all turned over.

But they found nothing.

And nothing could be made of the two notes. It was a mathematical impossibility to find a sequence from only two words. No fingerprints were evident, as if the notes had been first cleaned then slipped between lifeless digits. Only Watt’s fingerprints were found on the scrap of paper pulled from under his windscreen wipers. And Watt still maintained that he removed it without
thinking, believing it to be nothing more than an advertising flyer.

By the end of the third day, the investigation appeared to be stalling. All they seemed to have was a list of names and addresses of artists and students, parents and cousins, shop owners and paint suppliers.

But no suspects. Not even close.

Although Gilchrist would never say it, he was praying the killer would feed them another body part with another note, just so he had something to go on. So, when Greaves called him into his office, he expected the worst.

Newspapers lay scattered across the surface of Greaves’ desk.

Gilchrist closed the door with a firm click.

“What the hell’s wrong with this bloody fool, McKinnon?” Greaves slapped the back of his hand across a front page photograph of the SOCO van on the sixteenth fairway. Three SOCOs, coverall hoods pulled back to reveal smiling faces, sipped tea from a silver flask and ate sandwiches. The caption
TEE BREAK
summed it up.

“He hates the local police,” Gilchrist said.

“But you in particular, Andy.” Greaves lowered his head, eyed Gilchrist over the rim of some imaginary specs. “What have you done to the man, for God’s sake? Skipped your round? Buy him a pint. Buy him a dozen. Just get him off our backs.”

“Not as simple as that.”

“Quite.” Greaves picked up a newspaper folded open to the photograph of Gilchrist stepping from the Dunvegan Hotel. He smacked the image with the back of his hand, as if clipping Gilchrist around the ears. “This does not present a good image of Fife Constabulary, Andy. I have to tell you that.”

“I was interviewing Tam Dunn again.”

“I’m sure you were.”

“It was eleven thirty at night, and I wasn’t exactly celebrating.”

“That’s not the point. The public doesn’t expect to open
their newspapers at the breakfast table and be confronted with photographs of Senior Investigating Officers looking like they’re out on the town when we’ve got such a bloody gruesome case to solve. Makes us look like the Keystone Cops, for God’s sake.”

“I really don’t—”

Greaves held up his hand, as if stopping traffic head on. “I don’t want excuses, Andy. I want results. And I want results
now
.”

Gilchrist eyed Greaves. They were getting down to it, and he did not like where it was heading.

“And we can’t have you and Watt bloody well squabbling in public.”

Greaves was referring to an incident at the University yesterday where Gilchrist had grabbed Watt’s arm and pulled him back from a heated interview with a student. The depth of Watt’s anger had surprised him.

“Are you any further forward?” Greaves demanded.

“I would be lying if I said yes.”

“Bloody hell, Andy. McVicar’s been on the phone twice today. Heat’s been turned up. Bloody flame’s turned from orange to blue, and aimed in my direction. I don’t like it, let me tell you.” He leaned forward. “Tell me something I want to hear, Andy. Give me something to calm the man down.”

Big Archie McVicar, Fife Constabulary’s Assistant Chief Constable, was a staunch supporter of Gilchrist. But there had to be a limit to the man’s patience. Gilchrist needed more than a pair of amputated hands and an army of police officers scouring the countryside. Like Greaves, he needed a result.

“Anything?” Greaves tried.

Gilchrist grimaced. Fabricating nonsense would help no one. “Nothing,” he said.