Tooth for a Tooth (Di Gilchrist 3)

and licked her lips. ‘That tastes wonderful. I can’t tell you the last time I had a vodka martini. Tom usually had Scotch. They used to keep a bottle of Glenfiddich in the gantry, just for him. That was before the previous owner passed away.’
    Gilchrist waited for some more history, but Annie seemed content to stir her olives. He felt hesitant to press on with the morbid subject, but after a few beats said, ‘What are
your
memories of Kelly?’
    Annie looked into his eyes for a long second, then her gaze shifted and settled over his shoulder, focusing somewhere in the distance. ‘The blondest hair,’ she said, ‘and baby’s tears. I can still see her in her little swimsuit, running across our backyard, her arms sticking through those life-ring things you used to see. Tom bought one of those plastic swimming pools and set it up in the backyard, just for Kelly. We have albums of photographs of her. Hair so blonde it was almost white. She got that from Tom, not me. I’m fair, but nowhere near as fair as Tom was.’
    She chuckled then. ‘The first time Kelly went into the pool with all her life-rings on and flippers, too, it was so funny. She was scared she would drown. But the water was too shallow. Tom made sure of that. Once she got more confident, he put more water in it. But that first time, she splashed in the pool all day long like she never wanted to come out. And that’s when the tears came, when I brought her in. She cried for hours. She could be quite stubborn when she put her mind to it, Kelly could.’ She took another sip of martini, almost finished it. ‘Would you mind if we just ate here? At the bar?’
    ‘Not at all,’ Gilchrist said, and asked for the menu.
    ‘That’s what Tom liked to do. Sit at the bar. Don’t get me wrong, Tom wasn’t much of a drinker. He preferred the informality of sitting at the bar. I liked that about him. So down to earth. But he could wear a business suit as well as any man.’
    Gilchrist noticed Annie’s drink was almost done, and his Sam Adams had helped lift his spirits, so he ordered another round.
    When the menu came, Annie selected a fish sandwich, fries on the side and hold the bun. Gilchrist chose a chicken sandwich with fries, and what the hell, ‘Hold the bun,’ he ordered.
    They chinked glasses again, and Gilchrist found himself warming to Annie, catching glimpses of Kelly in the way she laughed – plenty of teeth, pleasing eyes, an almost beguiling innocence in her manner that could have men misinterpreting her meaning.
    ‘Are you married, Andy?’
    ‘Divorced.’
    ‘Any children?’
    ‘Two.’
    Annie seemed to give that some thought. ‘Kelly was an only child. I wanted more. We both did. But that was God’s will. Only the one. Which I suppose made it all the more painful when we lost her.’
    Gilchrist tried to hide his feelings in his beer. It felt surreal sitting in a bar in the States, talking to Kelly’s mother about the past, about Kelly and Jack, about their families, after all these years, as if two individual yet separate parts of his memory had been released to hit him with their joint demands.
    Kelly. Jack.
    Could he ever put them to rest?
    And he realized the only way to fight those demons was to find their killers.

CHAPTER 25
     
    Back at his hotel, he pulled Kelly’s letter from his jacket, not an airmail envelope but a business envelope with two blue
par avion
stickers straddling either side of the address. He eyed her handwriting with its curling tails to upper-case letters and tidy, almost individual letters throughout. He removed a single A4 sheet with floral borders, a daughter’s letter to her parents, and read the date:
     
January 30th 1969
     
    About three weeks before she would be murdered.
    He read on.
     
Dear Mom and Dad:
Happy New Years (sorry it’s a bit late). It was so lovely to see you both at Xmas. I promise I’ll be back in the States for Xmas next year. How is life in good old US of A? Life in sunny Scotland is so much fun. I am sad that my stay is nearly at an end, and I will be sad to leave. I have loved every minute of my time here, even the weather. Everybody complains about the weather, especially the rain, but it is the rain that makes the countryside so beautiful. And I am going to miss St Andrews with its cathedral ruins and cobbled streets and all these old stone buildings. I am going to miss university life and all things Scottish, like fish and chips, and pints of beer, and driving