Eye for an Eye

...’
    ‘No.’
    He stared at his hands and realized he was twisting his fingers. Why did he always feel tense around Gail? Why would she never let him through to her? He flattened a hand on each knee and tried to keep his voice level. ‘Are you being well looked after?’
    ‘I have Harry.’
    Hearing Harry’s name uttered by Gail in that way stabbed at his gut. He struggled to contain his frustration. ‘What I meant was – is there anything I can do for you?’
    ‘No.’
    ‘Well, if you think of anything, anything at all, I’d—’
    ‘I’m dying, Andy. Does that make you feel better?’
    Her comment stunned him, and he struggled with the urge just to get up and leave. He bit his tongue for a few seconds to make sure he was in control, then said, ‘Jack said you didn’t want me to come.’
    ‘That’s right.’
    ‘Why?’
    ‘What’s the point?’ she clipped.
    Gilchrist wondered if Harry could hear their discussion, and if so, was he proud of the way his wife was managing to diminish the feelings of her ex-husband? ‘I still care for you, Gail.’
    ‘Well, don’t. I have Harry.’
    Gilchrist felt his face colour. Gail had succeeded in doing what she always could. Smother any remnant of whatever feelings he had for her. All the support and sympathy he had wanted to offer her, all the kindness he had felt toward her, all of it vanished like steam in fog. Even his frustration at her coldness evaporated. He watched a frown creep across her forehead, and a tiny crease pucker her lips.
    He stood. ‘I’m sorry for troubling you. I thought, I thought ...’ He shook his head. ‘I don’t know what I thought. I’m sorry. I’ll let myself out.’
    ‘In six months I’ll be nothing but a memory to you and the children.’
    He refused to rise to the bait, did not have it in his heart to be cruel at that moment. ‘We were happy once,’ he said to her. ‘That’s how I would prefer to remember us. Not like this.’ He thought he caught the glint of tears in her eyes and wanted to reach out to her and give her a hug.
    As if sensing that possibility, she flapped a hand. ‘Go away, Andy. Please, will you do that for me? Just go away.’
    Gilchrist shifted his stance as Harry stepped from the kitchen, a cup of tea in one hand, a plate of biscuits in the other. But Gilchrist ignored him and let himself out into air as damp and heavy as his heart.
    He strode down the garden path, telling himself he would not look back. He knew she would not stand at the window to give a parting wave. So when he closed the gate and glanced back, he was not surprised. Gail had thrown him out of her life. Why could he not discard her from his?
    By the time he reached the road junction, despite all he had seen in his career – the decapitated bodies, the crushed skulls, the gruesome autopsies, the drug overdoses – despite seeing walls and ceilings and floorboards splattered with blood, and flesh slashed and sliced and gouged and rotting, despite having witnessed the cruellest and most evil of human depravity and becoming inured to it all, despite all of that, he found to his surprise that he could still cry.

CHAPTER 15
     
    Gilchrist spent the rest of the afternoon in the city centre trying to put his visit to Gail behind him, as well as clearing his brain of the alcohol he had consumed with Jack and Chloe. He wanted his mind to be firing on all six when he tied up this particular loose end.
    Cockburn? Granton? One and the same?
    He purchased two books in Waterstone’s and browsed a couple of hours in Slaters. At quarter past five the skies opened. Rainwater sluiced the streets in shimmering streams. Traffic shunted in stops and starts and pedestrians swelled through gaps in the flow. In the teeming rain, the city seemed stunned into sodden silence.
    Gilchrist caught a taxi at Queen Street Station and gave the driver the address he had finagled through Stan’s computer the night before. By the time he was dropped off in Newton Mearns the storm had passed, his hair had dried, and his trousers had lost their crease.
    He stepped onto the leaf-covered pavement and watched the taxi turn at the end of the road, then sweep past him, its tyres hissing over the wet asphalt.
    The driveway was fifty yards long, if it was an inch. Two stone pillars, chipped from careless driving and tilted from settlement, defined the entrance. A knee-high wall stretched off on both sides into the darkness. The night air smelled of an abandoned