By the time he reached the twelfth tee he had found nothing. The tide was out and the flat sands of the Eden Estuary stretched before him as uninviting as mud. Overhead, clouds tumbled like windblown cotton. He decided to cut across the Jubilee and the New Course onto the West Sands and walk back to town along the beach.
When he ducked through the wire fence that bordered the links, his mobile rang.
“No luck,” said Dick without introduction. “Peggy Linnet is one of three students who rent the flat from McPhail. The number belongs to her ex-boyfriend who used her address for billing purposes.”
“Got a name?”
“Joe.”
“Joe who?”
“That’s the problem. She only ever knew him as Joe.”
“How long had she been going out with the guy?”
“Three months.”
“And she never knew his name?”
“Looks like it.”
“Are they all covering for him?”
“Don’t think so. Apparently he’s a nasty piece of work. Drank too much. Argued all the time. Left without paying his share of the rent. Peggy says she keeps getting his bills and keeps sending them back. They would all shop him if they could.”
“Description?”
“Slim. Dark hair. Five-eight. Thirty-something going on fifty. Rolls his own. Born in Glasgow. Rough as they come.”
Gilchrist dug his thumb and forefinger into his eyes. A thousand Glaswegians would fit that description. “Keep at it, Dick,” he said, even though it was probably useless.
He slid down a worn path between two dunes.
The West Sands stretched before him, copper and gold bordered by the dark waters of the North Sea. Multi-coloured kites of reds, yellows, blues, dipped and swooped then soared high. In the distance he noticed a gathering crowd and wondered if a busload of day-trippers had offloaded and spilled onto the sands, or if someone was having a party, a student perhaps, celebrating God only knew what excuse for a drunken orgy.
By the time he figured it out, his feet were pounding the firm sands at the water’s edge, his breath coming at him in hard hits. He heard his own whimper burst from his mouth with the certain knowledge that after a few more minutes he would have only one more body part to find. And then…
“Dear God, no.”
Chapter 25
GILCHRIST ORDERED EVERYONE to, “Step back. Police. Step back.”
And louder. “Sir. Back from the body.”
He had used the word body, even though it was not a complete body, but a mostly limbless torso. As he stood by the white thing that lay before him like a lump of bloodless meat, his lungs seemed unable to pull in air. He stumbled to his knees. Seawater soaked through his trousers.
He stared at it, at the headless torso with no legs, and only one arm-without a hand-which shifted on the sands with each incoming wave. Ruddied pockmarks dotted the skin where gulls and other seabirds had pecked through.
He brushed sand from the flat swell of the stomach, revealing what looked like a black stain above the belly-button. He cupped seawater with his hands, spilled it over the torso, and a tiny love-heart swam into view.
He pushed himself to his feet, brushed his hands on his thighs. Despite himself, he could not take his eyes off the blackened nipples of her small breasts. It struck him then that her nakedness was exposed for all to see, and he snapped at the onlookers, “Go on. Get out of here. What are you looking at?”
With hesitant reluctance the crowd backed up.
He slapped his mobile to his ear, ordered the SOCOs, and gave directions. But it was not until he closed his mobile and stared at the blonde pubis that lay between twin circles of butchered meat that he realised something was missing.
Curiosity overpowered his revulsion. He kneeled again, and studied the love-heart. The finest of blonde hairs, dried by the sun, stood proud, as if refusing to give up life. His gaze shifted on to bony shoulders made all the more narrow by the missing left arm, down across a rippled ribcage to a wasp-like waist that made Chloe’s torso seem strangely thin and frail. The gulls had not done too much harm. Open pits around the upper chest looked more like unhealed sores than carrion food-spots. But other than the tattoo and the peck-holes the torso was unblemished.
A wave rushed the shore and a hacked hip bumped against his arm before he could move. He choked back the urge to throw up, trying to convince himself it was the personal nature of the torso that was making him gag. But he saw with a clarity that stunned him that it was more than that. For once, he was on the receiving end, the relative of a murder victim, the person left to cope with death. How heartless he must have appeared to relatives of other victims. And he saw that no amount of whispered condolences or words of kindness could ever salve their loss.
He forced himself to concentrate on the task at hand, see this as just another murder. And that thought stopped him. Just another murder? How had he ever let himself become this cold? He took a deep breath, gripped Chloe’s right arm, pulled her up and over, surprised by how light she felt. Her torso slapped onto the sand, and a muted gasp rushed from the onlookers as they took another step back.
He had his sixth note. Gouged into the back with vee-shaped cuts deep enough to show bone. BUTCHER.
And the sixth letter. E.
It could not be clearer.
M. A. U. R. E. E.
His daughter was next. And she was missing.
“HEY.”
Gilchrist pressed his phone to his ear, stared out to sea. “Jack?”
“Hey, Andy, listen, I’m sorry about earlier. I just-”
“Jack.”
A pause, then, “It’s Chloe, isn’t it?”
Gilchrist dragged a hand over his face. Two SOCOs in white coveralls were rolling her torso into a body-bag. A yellow cordon did little to separate the scene from onlookers. Uniformed policemen were interviewing individuals from the dwindling crowd.
“Tell it to me straight, Andy.”
Straight? What could he say? He stepped away as the SOCOs lifted the body-bagged torso and carried it dripping with seawater to the back of their van for Mackie to examine at Ninewells.
“I’m sorry, Jack. It’s Chloe. That’s all I can tell you.”
“Jesus.” And from that one word Gilchrist could almost feel Jack’s utter despair.
He wondered if he should have spoken to Jack face-to-face rather than tell him over the phone. He had handled his marriage all wrong, the break-up, too. Now he was handling his son wrong.
“Jack. Listen,” he said. “We will solve this. I promise you.” He tried to force all thoughts of failing from his mind. But you could never tell with a murder enquiry. “Where are you?” he asked.
“Down by the harbour. It’s where we used to walk. Chloe loved the sea. Did she tell you that?”
He was about to say yes, then realised Jack needed to air his grief. “No, she didn’t.”
“Chloe had something about not being able to paint the ocean, about it being too wild and beautiful. The ocean represents life in its perpetual evolution, she said. She refused to paint seascapes because she said she could never capture its beauty in its stillness. You had to see it moving to appreciate the ocean’s true beauty.” A rush of breath, then, “I tell you, Andy, Chloe was something else. She was special, man.”
“I know she was.” It was all he could think to say. The SOCO van roared into life and eased along the sands. Onlookers drifted away. Already Chloe’s mutilated torso on the beach was being assigned to history.
“I feel like, you know… helpless, Andy. Just out-and-out helpless.”
Like father like son, he thought.
“Do you, uh, do you need me to do anything?”
Gilchrist knew what Jack was asking. But how could he have his son identify his girlfriend’s hacked up torso? “No,” he said, and thought he caught a sigh of relief.