Eye for an Eye

boss.’
    ‘DeFiore giving you grief?’
    ‘And then some.’ Stan shook his head. ‘You’d think we’d done bugger all for the last four months except sit on our arses and wait for the bloody Crime Squad to drive in and save our souls.’ He slapped the files onto the desk as if he was throwing in a hand of cards. ‘I tell you what, boss, you’re well out of it.’ Then he frowned. ‘What are you doing here anyway? Patterson will have you.’
    ‘I need to use your computer to check out a few things.’
    ‘Tell me you’re kidding.’
    Gilchrist shrugged.
    Stan stood. ‘Well, I’m out of here. It’s your head, not mine. I’ll deny all knowledge. All right?’
    ‘Sounds fair.’
    Gilchrist waited until Stan closed the door before slipping behind the divider and taking his seat. He keyed in Stan’s password and set about clearing some niggling thoughts. When he next looked at his watch, it was 11:20.
    No one paid him any attention as he left the building.
    Stars glittered in a black sky. The night was north wind cold.
    Muttoes Lane led onto Market Street. A couple tottered arm in arm from the direction of the Central Bar, the man in short sleeves, drunk, oblivious to the cold, the woman grumbling beside him.
    At PM’s Fish and Chip Shop, the main thoroughfare narrowed to a lane wide enough for only one car. His footfall echoed off the walls on either side. He had almost purchased a house here, when he and Gail first married. But she had proclaimed the street too dingy, the house too dilapidated. As he recalled the ensuing arguments, he realized with a spurt of sadness how early he and Gail had started growing apart.
    He found himself slowing down as he came to the spot where the Stabber’s fourth victim had been found. He cast his gaze into the darkness beneath the open pend and wondered for the umpteenth time what the victim, Johnny Gillespie, had been thinking as the Stabber attacked. Had his mind, sodden with whisky, worked out in those final seconds of life as the stave popped his left eyeball, always the left, and plunged deep through the soft mass of his brain that he was about to die? And dead before his body thumped onto the cobbles. Had he let the Stabber walk up to him? And if so, why?
    Again an image of the Stabber as a woman, muscles hidden beneath her feminine façade, flooded his mind’s eye. And it livened him to see how well Lex Garvie fitted the role.
    Then he passed the spot, cut onto South Street, then left toward The Pends and Deans Court. As he neared the Roundel, the skeletal ruins of the Cathedral’s spires braced the night sky like Siamese twin rockets waiting to be launched.
    He checked his watch.
    11:44. Plenty of time.
    He sheltered behind the support column of the archway to The Pends. His breath puffed white in the frigid air as his thoughts drifted to Gail. It still surprised him how upset he’d been at losing not only his wife and lover of eighteen years, but his stone-built home in Windmill Road. Years ago, before their relationship soured beyond repair, he would often imagine the two of them walking the West Sands together, grandchildren in tow, an elderly couple still deeply in love.
    What had marriage meant to him? Loyalty, he supposed. And understanding, too. Being a policeman’s wife required considerable understanding. And trust. Definitely trust. But he had found out, almost by accident, that Gail was having an affair with an administrative manager in the hospital where she worked. Several days later, when he finally found the courage to challenge her, her response had been to file for divorce. Six months later, he lost his home, his furniture, his wife, both his children, and thirty-plus years of living in St Andrews. It seemed as if he had wakened one morning to find his past had evaporated.
    The pain he now felt at the news of Gail’s illness reminded him that their relationship had not always been bitter. Far from it. When he first met her, in the Whey Pat Tavern, drunk and loud on the second night of her summer break, up from Glasgow for the week, her libido surprised him. That first night, after a walk through the darkness of the West Sands, they crossed the first and eighteenth fairways of the Old Course. As they neared the last green the other side of midnight, Gail said, ‘I know all about golf. I’ve heard about this hole.’ She tottered off to the side, pulling Gilchrist with her. ‘There’s a dip in the green called the Valley of