Tooth for a Tooth (10 page)

The skull took on a ghostly appearance as the bone around the eye sockets seemed to evaporate and fill in with something that spread down both cheeks like fungus. Then the sockets softened and pooled with the same spectral imagery until a pair of eyes took form.

The half skull, half face mask caused the hairs on Gilchrist’s neck to stir.

With a click, the eyes changed from dark to light.

‘I’ve got it on greyscale for speed,’ she said. ‘Colour would show these eyes as blue.’ Another click, and the eyes darkened. ‘Green,’ she said, then another click. ‘Or back to brown. Of course, we have no way of telling if the eyes are heavy-lidded, hooded, wide open or narrow. What we can do is give a best-guess estimate of what the face should look like. Sometimes it’s best to play the odds.’ Another click, and the eyes shut.

Gilchrist watched in silence as Black worked the mouse, filling in the remainder of the skull until he was left looking at a bald head that rotated and rolled before him as if Black was showing off her finished sculpture. Gilchrist puzzled that it looked oddly familiar.

Black turned the skull to profile and placed the cursor on the nose. ‘This,’ she said, ‘in my opinion, is the most difficult feature to portray with any real accuracy. The nose is shaped with cartilage that can deform over the years. Accidents, fights, even the simple act of sticking a finger into the nasal cavity over a period of time can deform the cartilage.’ She dragged the mouse over the nose, creating a bulge on the bridge and turned the skull face-on. Another couple of clicks and the nose widened. ‘Different. Don’t you think?’

She repeated the exercise, this time giving the nose a delicate concave curve.

Straight on again, the bald head had a more refined look to it. Gilchrist studied it. ‘Seems familiar,’ he said.

Black smiled. ‘Would you like me to add glasses?’

Gilchrist almost gasped. He turned to Black, back to the skull, then Black again.

‘That’s you?’ he asked.

She nodded. ‘Without the telltale markers of hairstyle, colour, glasses, the memory isn’t triggered by any recognizable feature. There’s nothing locked in memory for the brain to pull up. So it sees the image as a stranger.’ She worked the mouse again, until a woman’s face with blonde spiked hair rotated on the screen. ‘That’s what I would look like as a punk rocker.’ She added nose and ear piercings, and chuckled. ‘Not so stunning. Right?’

‘Right,’ he agreed.

The blonde spikes melted and shifted to shoulder length. ‘How about that?’

‘I think I’m used to you not being blonde.’

Another click, and the hair faded to light grey. ‘Better?’

‘Getting there.’

She clicked the mouse. The skull vanished. ‘That,’ she said, ‘is what I mean by guesswork.’

‘Still,’ he said, ‘it’s all we have to go on.’

She nodded. ‘We have the sceptics in the profession, of course. The die-hards, the so-called experts who believe that working plasticine over the skull produces a much better result.’

‘You don’t agree?’

‘With some aspects, I do,’ she said. ‘But no matter which method is used, the skull provides us with certain measurements that dictate certain features. For example, the ratio of the distance between both eyes to that between the eyes and the mouth, gives some indication of the length of the nose. Not precise, by any manner of means. But it’s a guide. Where computer-aided facial reconstruction beats the hand-sculpted method hands down is in its ability to produce a number of variations.’

‘Would the age of the victim have any impact on the visual accuracy?’ Gilchrist asked. ‘I mean, a younger person would be less likely to have been in a nose-reconfiguring accident, or spent years picking their nose. The image could be more lifelike.’

Black let out a short laugh. ‘You would have made a wonderful student,’ she said. ‘The face goes through all its major changes during puberty. Once you’re past the teenage years, what you have is basically it for life. Plastic surgery notwithstanding.’ She walked towards the door, and Gilchrist had the feeling their meeting was over.

‘Once we have an idea of the age,’ she continued, and opened the door, ‘we can still only reconstruct the face from the skull. Once we have the basic features, we can then age them.’ She held out her arm. Gilchrist stepped from her office. ‘Bags under the eyes. Wrinkled lips. Chicken necks. That sort of thing.’

‘So you will have seen yourself as an older woman?’ he tried.

She emitted a high-pitched chuckle like a child’s scream. ‘I experimented with it once. Found it depressing.’

‘And the glasses?’

She surprised him by slipping her arm through his and marching along the corridor.

‘That, I believe, was a turning point,’ she said. ‘My sight was so bad that I had to keep my glasses on to see the image on the screen. I liked what I saw, so I thought I’d give it a shot.’

They reached another door, and she slipped her arm free. ‘Can you find your way from here?’

‘I’m sure I can.’

‘I’ll have something with you tomorrow.’

She held out her hand, gave a firm shake, then turned on her heels and marched back to her office.

Once Gilchrist was back on the M8, he called Nance.

‘That list of names you’ve got,’ he said to her. ‘Could you scan and email a copy to Jeanette Pennycuick?’ He read off her email address. ‘Was Betty Forbes on the list?’ he asked.

‘Yes. Betty Forbes, née Smith.’

‘Address?’

‘Somewhere in Glasgow, I think. Give me a minute.’

‘Shit.’ Gilchrist eyed the motorway signs and pulled across two lanes to the slip road for the city centre.

‘Here it is.’ She read it out, and Gilchrist assigned it to memory. It made sense, of course. If Jeanette and Betty had remained friends up until only five years ago, he should have guessed they lived in or around the same city. He asked for her telephone number, assigned that to memory too, and dialled it when he hung up with Nance.

‘Betty speaking.’ She sounded out of breath.

Gilchrist introduced himself, again declining to mention he was with Fife Constabulary. ‘Are you available some time this morning for a chat?’ he asked.

‘Oh.’ A pause. ‘I’m going to the hairdresser’s this afternoon. I have an appointment at two.’

‘I could meet you before then.’

He found Betty Forbes’ home before 11 a.m., a well-kept, splitlevel house that sat on a steep hill and seemed ready to fall away from the street. He rang the doorbell, was about to ring again when he was startled by a woman’s voice addressing him from the side.

‘I’m down in the back,’ she said.

She stood at the corner of the building, gloved hands resting on a wooden garden gate. She smiled at him, an open grin that told him she was at ease with herself and the rest of the world.

Betty Forbes?’

‘Last time I checked.’ She slipped her right hand from her garden gloves, pushed her fingers through a curl of dirty-blonde hair that dangled over her eyes and held out her hand.

Gilchrist kept his grip gentle.

She slipped her glove back on. ‘If you don’t mind,’ she said, ‘I’m trying to finish something in the garden. Can we talk in the back?’

He followed her down a steep grass slope, through another wooden gate and into a level area consisting mostly of stone slabs, some of which had been lifted to expose fill as grey and soft as crushed ash. A fence, dilapidated and overgrown with ivy, defined the end of her property. To the side, the back of the house reared more than two storeys skyward. A few yards away, by a green whirligig, broken slabs lay piled like the beginnings of a concrete bonfire.

‘Doing this by yourself?’ he asked.

She dragged a gloved hand through her hair. ‘Who else is there to help me?’

‘No Mr Forbes?’

‘Done a runner.’

‘I’m sorry to hear that.’

‘Don’t be. The son of a bitch’d been screwing his secretary behind my back for the best part of three years.’ She almost laughed. ‘Last I heard, she’d left him for a younger stud.’

Gilchrist heard Jeanette Pennycuick’s words remind him,
She tried to have an affair with my husband
, and he wondered if Betty’s husband’s affair had something to do with that. ‘When did this happen?’ he asked. ‘Mr Forbes doing a runner.’

‘Six years ago last Christmas. Can you believe he left on Christmas Day?’ She picked up a sledgehammer and raised it above her head with an ease that surprised Gilchrist. ‘Watch your eyes,’ she said, and slammed the sledgehammer on to the corner of a slab. It cracked with a dull thud.

‘You make it look easy.’

‘I pretend it’s his balls I’m crushing. It’s funny,’ she said, and laughed as she took another swing. ‘I imagine them wrapped up in Christmas paper. It gives me strength.’ She hit the broken piece twice more then threw the hammer down. ‘There. That ought to sort him out, don’t you think?’ She bent forward and pulled out chunks of broken concrete, which she threw on to the bonfire.

‘Like a hand?’

She screwed up her eyes against a burst of sunlight. Standing like that, in denim jeans and polo shirt, teeth glinting white and strong, Gilchrist thought he had never before seen anyone display such sexual presence without even trying.

‘You offering to help?’

‘If you’d like.’

‘I thought men like you had vanished with the cowboys.’ She nodded to the sledgehammer. ‘You hit. I’ll pick up.’

Gilchrist removed his jacket and threw it over the fence. He spat on his hands and gripped the sledgehammer. Its weight surprised him. ‘Same slab?’ He caught a quick nod as he pulled the sledgehammer back, swung it behind him, let its momentum carry it up and over. Then he shifted his weight, stepped forward and aimed for the middle of the slab.

‘What would I give to have muscles,’ she said, and bent down to pull out the broken pieces.

‘They wouldn’t suit you.’

She glanced up at him and smiled, then swung her body to the side and threw a chunk of concrete on to the pile.

You’d get more for these slabs unbroken,’ he offered.

‘They’re too heavy for me to lift. Until you turned up, the only way I could move them was to break them into smaller pieces.’

‘Like me to try?’

‘I’m only breaking up another four or five,’ she said. ‘That’s all the flowerbeds I’ll need. The rest I’ll keep as a walkway.’

They worked together for the next half-hour, Gilchrist swinging the hammer, Betty leaning forward, using her arms and her upper body to lug the pieces of concrete to the side. On the last slab, he helped clear the broken pieces, surprised by how at ease he felt being next to her.

Then it was done.

She stood. Sweat glistened on her forehead and at the open neck of her polo shirt.

Gilchrist felt his own shirt stick to his back.

‘Thirsty work,’ she said. ‘Like a drink?’

‘Thought you’d never ask.’ He stood back as she picked up the sledgehammer, slung it over her shoulder and marched up the side of her house. The physical work had done wonders for his hangover, and he pushed his fingers through his hair, surprised to find how damp with sweat it was.

She dumped the tools at the side of the garage, kicked off her heavy boots and stepped inside. Gilchrist removed his own shoes and followed.

The kitchen was small and airy and smelled of flowers and lemon. The window lay open, and warm air from a sun-trapped corner of the garden wafted in on the breeze. In the bright sunlight it could have been the middle of summer.

‘Why don’t you have a shower while I rustle up a sandwich? It has to be chicken or tuna, I’m afraid. What’ll you have?’

‘Whatever you’re having.’

‘You look as if you could do with putting on some weight, though,’ she continued. ‘My Bob was turning into a right fat slob. God knows what that bitch saw in him.’ She chuckled. ‘Come to think of it, God knows what I ever saw in him.’ She shook her head as she ducked into a head-high fridge. ‘The guest bathroom needs retiling. Use the master bathroom. It’s through the back. Towels are hanging over the radiator. Use as many as you like. I do. I just love them all warm and fluffy. Don’t you?’ She looked at him, and her face split into a white-toothed, blue-eyed grin. ‘Are you helpless, or what?’

Gilchrist shook his head. ‘I’d like to ask you a few questions, but I’m not sure I’m going to get a word in edgeways.’

She held up a tin of John West tuna. ‘I always get it in brine. Never oil. Doesn’t taste the same. On you go and have your shower. I’ll have one after you. I always like to have a cuppa before I shower. Never understood why, just do. And I promise I’ll keep this trap of mine shut while you ask me what you want to know. That suit you?’

Gilchrist nodded.

‘What’s this about anyways?’

‘A thirty-five-year-old skeleton. And Jeanette Pennycuick,’ he added, intrigued by the way her face froze and her eyes fired up. ‘I won’t be long.’

The bathroom was tiled floor to ceiling and had about it an airy freshness he liked. The window was open and looked down on to the neighbour’s back garden. He heard voices from below, but saw no movement. In the shower cubicle, he was surprised to find a bar of Aramis soap-on-a-rope hanging from the nozzle. And Brylcreem shampoo. She could have been expecting him.