Tooth for a Tooth (Di Gilchrist 3)

victims had lived their last minutes petrified with fear, helpless with despair and crying at the futility of it all?
    He felt his eyes burn, blinked away his own tears.
    Christ, he could not die. Not now. Not like this.
    He had to find a way out.
    By not giving him an injection, was that Ewart’s mistake? By keeping him trussed and alive, was Ewart giving him false hope of escape? Or had Ewart kept him alive because he needed Gilchrist to help him in the final act, by walking towards whatever death awaited him—
    The crunching sound of gravel again, the lopsided beat of the different steps of two people, and he sensed someone walk past the boot to the front of the car. The door opened, and the suspension settled as the driver took his seat.
    The engine started with the recognizable rattle of Megs’ old Vauxhall, and his head hit the boot lid as the car pulled from the garage and jerked to a halt.
    The suspension settled again, a bit more to the left side, he thought. So, Ewart was driving, with Megs as his passenger. The Vauxhall accelerated down the drive and lunged on to the road with a hard bump that cracked his head on the boot floor.
    Where were they going? Somewhere far from St Andrews, of that he was certain. If one of Fife Constabulary’s detective chief inspectors went missing, teams of experts would scour the countryside, starting at his last known position, spreading wider until his body was found, or his case eventually closed and filed, unsolved. The irony of it all did not escape him. He would end up just like Kelly.
    No, he thought, he would be dumped in some little-known spot at sea. Eight hundred metres deep. He wondered why Ewart had been so precise. As best he could recall, Dougie had never been a sailor, so bathymetrical details would be of no interest to him. Gilchrist had no idea if Megs was sea-wise, and he struggled to pull up a memory of anything in her house or garage that would suggest so. Other than the anchor, his mind remained blank.
    Were they taking him out on the North Sea? Or to some loch? Many of Scotland’s lochs were hundreds of metres deep. But eight hundred? Or maybe they would throw his body into some long-abandoned quarry pit.
    The car’s motion threw him around the boot, jarring limbs that were already burning from being hog-tied. His thighs cramped, his back ached, his shoulder muscles screamed for release. He twisted and turned, contorting himself in the tight confines, trying to work into a position that would lock his body in place, stop the reckless rolling about. He forced his head back, and found that doing so slackened the rope that tied his wrists to his ankles and relieved the pain, if only for just a moment—
    The car pulled to an abrupt halt that forced a curse from Dougie, and threw Gilchrist hard against the side.
    Hope soared in his heart.
    For one fleeting moment he had felt it.
    He forced his head back some more, put pressure on his neck, twisting more and more until his fingers just managed to touch the one thing that could set him free.
    The rope around his ankles.

CHAPTER 32
     
    By the time the car stopped, they had been travelling for two hours, the last ten minutes of which had thrown Gilchrist around the boot as they weaved and splashed along what felt like a potholed dirt track.
    He estimated they were a couple of miles deep off the beaten track.
    When the boot opened, he blinked against the glare of a torch that wavered over his nude body, then settled on his groin.
    ‘I see I wasn’t missing much,’ Megs quipped.
    Gilchrist groaned from behind his gag.
    Ewart bustled in beside Megs. ‘Give me a hand,’ he said, and leaned into the boot space. ‘Come on. We don’t have much time.’
    ‘You mean
you
don’t have much time. You’ve got to get back to that stuck-up wife of yours. I’ve got all night.’
    ‘You take his ankles. I’ll take his arms.’
    Gilchrist waited until Ewart’s gloved hands touched him.
    Then he rolled over, gripped the anchor with both hands and swung it up and into Ewart’s shocked face. His stiff joints and aching muscles caused him to miss with full force, but Ewart still slumped to the ground with a hard grunt. Gilchrist snatched the rope from his mouth, spat out the gag and scrambled out of the boot to confront Megs, who stood transfixed as he heaved the anchor to shoulder height.
    They stood no more than three feet apart.
    ‘Don’t make me hit you with this,’ he said to her. ‘Chain him to the