Eye for an Eye

head. Eyes as dark as the Devil’s look into mine. He stumbles over my mother’s body and lunges toward us.
    Timmy whimpers, drops his hand from my mouth. I pull at him but he stands there, his skinny body shaking. Something warms the soles of my stockinged feet, and I realize he has wet himself. I try to make him move, shout at him, but it’s as if he is glued to the spot.
    I push the window open, wriggle onto the concrete sill. Timmy cries out. I leap.
    I never see my father again. Five days later, his body is recovered from the water’s edge. Nor Timmy either. His head was crushed by a blow to the back of his skull.
     
    Gilchrist fought off the urge to walk to Lafferty’s and spend the rest of the day drowning his sorrows. Instead, he walked back to The Pends and stood in the shelter of the crumbling archway. He eyed the grey stone wall and iron railings that bounded the grounds and cemetery of the ruined Cathedral and tried to imagine what MacMillan might have seen as he followed the Stabber into North Street.
    He visualized flickering skies, rain thrashing the road, a body hunched against the wicked night, anorak hood tugged tight. He followed the ghost in his mind and reached the corner of North Street.
    He stopped, checked his watch. Twenty-nine seconds.
    He looked along North Street. The huddles of worried neighbours had dispersed. Two uniformed officers were walking toward the Police Station. His gaze danced along the row of terraced houses on the north side of the road and he wondered why he always looked that way. Why not to the other side? He studied the old stone façades, tried to imagine what MacMillan had been too late to see, and came to realize that thirty seconds was just not sufficient time for someone to disappear from view so completely.
    Had MacMillan’s eyes failed him? Had he been blinded by the rain? If not, where could the Stabber have gone?
    Gilchrist felt his gaze pulling back to The Pends. From where he stood, he could see the left of the arched entrance. But from the other side of the road, that support pillar would be hidden. Which would mean the converse was true – that someone taking shelter behind that pillar would not be able to see that side of the street.
    Gilchrist’s mind crackled with possibilities. What if the Stabber had not turned into North Street, but slipped across the road, as he was doing now, then into the lane that paralleled the Abbey wall and continued toward the hill overlooking the harbour? That would mean he was backtracking, completing the circle around the Abbey ruins and heading back toward the scene of the murder where Granton’s body lay.
    Gregory Lane, on the other hand, ran almost perpendicular to North Street, down to the cliff front, a six-foot-high stone wall on one side, a combination of gable ends, walls and gates on the other.
    Had the Stabber escaped down this lane?
    MacMillan’s natural instinct would have been to seek shelter in the lee of the stone wall. The storm had come in over the Eden Estuary, and with the rain in his face he would have been hard put to see the murderer slipping into the lane.
    Enlivened by that possibility, Gilchrist entered Gregory Lane. Along the left wall, he noticed the indentation of two gates, one near North Street, the other close to the exit at the cliff pathway. On the right, the lane formed the short side of a triangular complex of terraced houses and open courtyards. Had the Stabber gone into one of these houses? Or through one of the gates? Or used the lane as a shortcut to the cliffs? Or was Gilchrist’s theory just a theory, and seriously flawed?
    As he walked along the lane, Gilchrist felt hesitant, like a child creeping through a forbidden room. His sixth sense was telling him something. Beware, it whispered. You are close. When he emerged at the far end of the lane, he crossed the asphalt path and gripped the metal railing that ran the length of the cliff face.
    Sixty feet beneath him, sea rocks glistened dark and wet. Gulls drifted by on invisible trails of wind, heads turning as if searching for their nests in the rocky face. The tuneless clamour of bagpipes came at him on the breeze. By the ancient ruins of Culdee Church, a lone piper paced back and forth. The sight of Scottish busking at its most ethnic brought a smile to Gilchrist’s lips.
    He spent the next thirty minutes investigating the residential complex bounded by Gregory Lane, the Abbey wall and the cliff path. It seemed to him