Tooth for a Tooth (Di Gilchrist 3)

psychic with an impressive record sift through your local cold-case files?
    As if in tune, she said, ‘It’s amazing what a simple telephone call can do.’
    ‘Why do you need to see the files again?’
    ‘I now have something that belonged to your brother,’ she said. ‘It could make all the difference.’
    ‘I can’t get hold of them tonight.’
    She shook her head. ‘How about tomorrow?’
    Tomorrow? Tomorrow was too long. He needed to know tonight, right now. He struggled with the rationale. This psychic business made no sense. Everyone knew that. It was nothing more than a hoax, a scam, a way to make money at the expense of others. But he still needed to push as far as he could. He did not have the cold-case files. Not tonight. But having come this far, what did he have to lose by going one step further?
    ‘I can give you a photograph,’ he heard himself say.
     
    By the time Gilchrist retrieved three photographs of Jack from his cottage in Crail, it was after 1 a.m. when they pulled up under the portico of the St Andrews Bay Hotel. Like the star attraction she thought she had now become, Gina Belli waited for Gilchrist to open the passenger door and help her out.
    ‘Don’t push it,’ he said, as she took hold of his hand.
    ‘Charming to the last.’ She left him to close the door.
    Her room was on the third floor with a view of the sea, its presence noticeable only by a vast and utter darkness that stretched before him like a starless sky. In the distance, the lights of Carnoustie flickered through the night haze, helping him define the limits of the estuary’s northern shoreline.
    He turned from the window and watched her clear a space on the writing desk. With her tanned skin and designer clothing she seemed ready-made for the surroundings.
    ‘This place is expensive,’ he said.
    ‘Uh-huh.’ She lit a cigarette.
    ‘Isn’t this non-smoking?’
    ‘As you said, it’s expensive.’ She exhaled from the side of her mouth and switched on a table lamp, adjusting the dimmer until it cast a dull glow over the desk. She took a hard draw of her cigarette, stubbed its lengthy remains into her empty whisky glass and held out her hand. ‘Photographs.’
    Without looking at them, she laid all three face-down on the writing desk, taking care to line them up in a row. She placed the lighter next to one, taking her time selecting its exact position. Then she placed an envelope on the table – where had that come from? – and removed a dozen or so handwritten pages, which she placed on one corner of the desk with careful deliberation.
    ‘Lights?’
    Gilchrist obliged by turning them off.
    The room fell into darkness, except for a dim penumbra on the writing desk.
    Gina turned over the handwritten pages, one by one, moving them from one corner of the desk to the other.
    ‘What are you doing?’
    ‘Sshh.’
    Gilchrist tightened his lips like a chastised schoolboy, and could not help but think that all the fiddly palaver, the precise alignment, the photographs, the lighter, the turning of the pages, the silence and the dimmed lighting were all an act of showmanship to impress him.
    She seemed to find the page she was looking for, which she removed from the sheaf and laid next to the lighter. Then she placed her hand over one of the photographs before moving to the next, then on to the last one, until her fingers brushed the cigarette lighter. She closed her eyes, inhaled slow and deep, let it out.
    It felt like several minutes, but could have been less, when she opened her eyes and brushed her fingers down the single sheet of handwritten notes from top to bottom, then again, this time stopping about one third of the way down. With her other hand, she turned over the first photograph. Jack with shorn hair, collar and school tie, grinned up at her, teeth and gums sparkling. She flipped over the other two – Jack with flared hipsters, shoulder-length hair and a guitar slung over his shoulder, fretboard down-pointing, Johnny Cash style – Jack stripped to the waist, broad shoulders and ripped stomach muscles making Gilchrist wonder how they could ever have come from the same parents. She brushed Jack’s features with one hand, while her other tapped the page with a pen. Another surprise. Where had that come from? Then, with a suddenness that startled him, she pushed her chair back and stood.
    Silent, Gilchrist faced her. Was he supposed to switch the lights back on? Say something? But she stood