Tooth for a Tooth (14 page)

‘I can give you a photograph,’ he heard himself say.

By the time Gilchrist retrieved three photographs of Jack from his cottage in Crail, it was after 1 a.m. when they pulled up under the portico of the St Andrews Bay Hotel. Like the star attraction she thought she had now become, Gina Belli waited for Gilchrist to open the passenger door and help her out.

‘Don’t push it,’ he said, as she took hold of his hand.

‘Charming to the last.’ She left him to close the door.

Her room was on the third floor with a view of the sea, its presence noticeable only by a vast and utter darkness that stretched before him like a starless sky. In the distance, the lights of Carnoustie flickered through the night haze, helping him define the limits of the estuary’s northern shoreline.

He turned from the window and watched her clear a space on the writing desk. With her tanned skin and designer clothing she seemed ready-made for the surroundings.

‘This place is expensive,’ he said.

‘Uh-huh.’ She lit a cigarette.

‘Isn’t this non-smoking?’

‘As you said, it’s expensive.’ She exhaled from the side of her mouth and switched on a table lamp, adjusting the dimmer until it cast a dull glow over the desk. She took a hard draw of her cigarette, stubbed its lengthy remains into her empty whisky glass and held out her hand. ‘Photographs.’

Without looking at them, she laid all three face-down on the writing desk, taking care to line them up in a row. She placed the lighter next to one, taking her time selecting its exact position. Then she placed an envelope on the table – where had that come from? – and removed a dozen or so handwritten pages, which she placed on one corner of the desk with careful deliberation.

‘Lights?’

Gilchrist obliged by turning them off.

The room fell into darkness, except for a dim penumbra on the writing desk.

Gina turned over the handwritten pages, one by one, moving them from one corner of the desk to the other.

‘What are you doing?’

‘Sshh.’

Gilchrist tightened his lips like a chastised schoolboy, and could not help but think that all the fiddly palaver, the precise alignment, the photographs, the lighter, the turning of the pages, the silence and the dimmed lighting were all an act of showmanship to impress him.

She seemed to find the page she was looking for, which she removed from the sheaf and laid next to the lighter. Then she placed her hand over one of the photographs before moving to the next, then on to the last one, until her fingers brushed the cigarette lighter. She closed her eyes, inhaled slow and deep, let it out.

It felt like several minutes, but could have been less, when she opened her eyes and brushed her fingers down the single sheet of handwritten notes from top to bottom, then again, this time stopping about one third of the way down. With her other hand, she turned over the first photograph. Jack with shorn hair, collar and school tie, grinned up at her, teeth and gums sparkling. She flipped over the other two – Jack with flared hipsters, shoulder-length hair and a guitar slung over his shoulder, fretboard down-pointing, Johnny Cash style – Jack stripped to the waist, broad shoulders and ripped stomach muscles making Gilchrist wonder how they could ever have come from the same parents. She brushed Jack’s features with one hand, while her other tapped the page with a pen. Another surprise. Where had that come from? Then, with a suddenness that startled him, she pushed her chair back and stood.

Silent, Gilchrist faced her. Was he supposed to switch the lights back on? Say something? But she stood immobile, and stared at him in silence. In the shadowed lighting the swell of her breasts, the curve of her hips added a sexual charge to the macabre image. He returned her stare, not sure what he had just witnessed, and even less sure of what he was expected to do next.

She broke the spell by pushing her hands through her hair. ‘I’ve not been altogether honest with you,’ she said.

‘Well, that’s a start.’

She lit another cigarette, inhaled as if her life depended on it, then sat on the edge of the bed. She eyed him through a shadowed cloud of smoke. ‘I received a name.’

‘Voices whispering in your ear?’

‘In my head.’ Her cheeks pulled in for another draw. ‘It’s the same name.’

‘The same name as what?’

‘As before. Only this time stronger.’

‘Louder?’

‘No. Clearer.’

‘You’ve not been altogether honest with me?’

She looked away from him then, her gaze settling on some spot on the wall, as if she could see beyond it and was counting the night stars. ‘I read the accident report earlier. Worked through the cold files.’ She faced him. ‘I also visited the scene of the accident.’

‘When?’

‘Four or five months back.’

About the same time she approached Gail, he thought.

‘That’s when the name came to me.’ She drew in, inhaled hard and swallowed. ‘It was only a whisper.’ Her breath rushed in a white fog. ‘I couldn’t understand what I was hearing. I didn’t even think it was a name. It sounded like
fake love
.’ She grinned up at him. ‘How often is that true?’ She pushed herself to her feet, found her empty whisky glass, took another draw and stubbed the stem into it. Then she walked to the window. With her back to him, she stood silhouetted against the night beyond.

Gilchrist waited.

‘So I started digging.’

‘Digging?’

‘Research. I write biographies. It’s what I’m good at.’ She shrugged. ‘I thought I was on to something. I could feel it. I just didn’t know what it meant. So I tried another route. I contacted DVLA in Swansea, eventually found someone who would search their database for me—’

‘Who?’

She turned from the window and faced him. ‘That’s not important.’

‘Go on.’

‘I wanted a printout of the names and addresses of all owners of MGs registered in the UK for 1969.’

Gilchrist felt his eyebrows lift. ‘That’s quite a task.’

‘It was,’ she agreed. ‘It took me five weeks to get it, and four days to go through it.’

‘What were you looking for?’

She shrugged again. ‘Anything that came to me.’ She strode to the bedside table, removed a fresh packet of Marlboro from her handbag. She stripped it open, removed one and lit it with her diamond-studded lighter. Watching her addiction on full display seemed to douse Gilchrist’s own urges. Or maybe his dread of the outcome of her psychic show was killing his desire.

She sat on the bed again, closed her eyes and exhaled. ‘When I started going through the printout, I realized that the
fake love
I’d been hearing was really a name. I found seven in total.’ She glanced at the writing desk. ‘I wrote them down.’

Gilchrist thought he saw where she was going. ‘And one of these seven names came back to you tonight. Only clearer.’

‘Yes.’

He was almost afraid to ask. ‘Whose name?’ he tried.

She looked up at him, and something in the shape of her mouth, the glint in her eyes, told him she had not wanted to go this far.

‘It’s the name of the driver.’

Hearing those words had him struggling with the urge to walk to the door and leave her to play her silly psychic games. But he stood rooted. After all, was this not what he had hoped for, that her psychic powers might somehow give him a lead? But he had not thought it through, had not imagined what she could give him. Not the name of the driver.

He had not expected that.

‘On the writing desk,’ she said, ‘next to the lighter, is the list of seven names. I’ve underlined the name that came to me tonight.’

Gilchrist strode to the desk, snatched up the sheet.

James Matthew Fairclough
.

He scanned the other names, mostly close variations.

Only one was underlined.

James Matthew Fairclough
.

He scowled down at her, could not keep the sarcasm from his voice. ‘You expect me to believe this?’ he said. ‘When the entire police force failed to come up with any suspects in their investigation?’

She took a long draw. ‘We’re going back thirty-plus years here. Forensic science was in its infancy. The east coast of Scotland was a long way from Scotland Yard, if you get my drift. Fairclough was drunk when he killed your brother. Way over the limit.’

‘Who have you shown this to?’

‘Only you.’

He glared at the name again, his logic screaming that it was all a con, a way for the psychic author, Gina Belli, to land another book on the
New York Times
bestseller list. It would not be the first time he had crossed someone intent on conning him for some ulterior motive.

He stared into eyes as black as oil. ‘This is unbelievable.’

‘I won’t argue with you on that.’ She inhaled long and deep, then let it out with a rush. ‘But I’m seldom wrong.’

‘Which also means you’re not always right.’

‘But I’m right on this one.’

Silent, Gilchrist waited.

‘I knew you would be hard to convince,’ she went on. ‘So I dug deeper still.’

Now they were coming down to it, he knew, her moment of dishonesty.

‘There was a passenger in the car.’

Passenger?
Even as the word chilled his skin, his logic was firing two steps ahead, his nervous system twitching at the sudden possibility of a witness to the accident. ‘You mean, a woman?’

‘You never miss a trick.’

‘Fairclough’s girlfriend?’

‘Ex-girlfriend.’

‘You’ve spoken to her?’

‘I went to see her.’

‘You found her address? How?’

‘Don’t look so incredulous. Once I had Fairclough’s name, the rest was easy.’

‘You’re not answering my question.’

‘My father was wealthy,’ she said. ‘When he died, he left me a fortune. I don’t need to write for a living. I write because it’s what I want to do.’ Her dark eyes smouldered. ‘And it’s worth it just to experience moments like this.’

‘But how?’ he pleaded.

‘Money makes people search databases,’ she said. ‘And it makes people talk.’

Was that all it took, money? The man who had killed his brother had spent all these years free because the police could not throw enough money at the case? Was that what had happened?

‘And Fairclough’s passenger will come forward only through me,’ she continued. ‘No one else. She has lived with the memory of that accident for thirty-five years. She can live with it for the rest of her life if she has to.’

‘Why doesn’t she?’

‘She’s dying. Motor neurone disease.’ She blew a cloud of smoke at him. ‘Don’t worry, she won’t die before she talks to you.’

CHAPTER 10

Sleep eluded Gilchrist.

Images came at him as speeding cars, broken bodies, limbs splayed over damp cobblestones, as if his mind was a screen on which all accidents were replayed. If Gina’s information was correct, then he had the name of the hit-and-run driver who had killed his brother and since managed to evade every attempt by the police to track him down.

After thirty-five years.

He pulled himself from bed and stumbled along the hallway in the darkness. In the front room, he opened his notebook and read the name one more time, to reassure himself that it was still there, that he was not mistaken.

James Matthew Fairclough
.

Printed in pencil. Each letter gone over half a dozen times.

James Matthew Fairclough
.

He would have Stan dig up a current address. But in the meantime, it was the passenger, the sole witness to the accident, he needed to speak to.

Pittenweem was one of those fishing villages that featured in holiday postcards and the occasional restaurant menu –
Fresh Pittenweem Haddock Caught Daily
. He turned off the A917 and made his way on to Abbey Wall Road, driving downhill to a picturesque row of houses that looked quaint and fresh-painted and which fronted the sheltered harbour.