by Muir, T. F.
‘How did you light your cigars?’ he asked.
‘This is preposterous,’ snapped Pennycuick. ‘What on earth has lighting cigars got to do with anything? I think we’ve heard quite enough.’ He held out his hand. ‘Jeanette?’
She looked at him, but made no attempt to stand.
He glared at her for a moment, then growled, ‘I’ll be in the car. And I’ll be leaving in exactly one minute.’
Gilchrist waited until it was only the two of them. The room seemed larger without Pennycuick’s presence. And Jeanette seemed smaller, too, almost insecure. ‘Where do you work?’ he asked her.
‘The city centre.’
A car door slammed. Gilchrist glanced out the window. ‘I can give you a lift, if you’d like.’
Jeanette stood, patted the creases from her skirt. ‘If you have no further questions,’ she said, ‘I’d rather Geoffrey dropped me off.’
Gilchrist nodded. ‘After you.’
He followed her along the hallway where a cold wind blew in through the opened front door. As he stepped outside, he caught sight of Pennycuick’s flushed face through the windscreen of his BMW. He waited until Jeanette locked the front door.
‘You never did answer my question,’ he said.
‘I didn’t?’
‘How did you light your cigars?’
‘With a candle.’
She stepped down the slabbed footpath, her heels ringing in the icy air.
Gilchrist wrapped his arms around himself to fend off the chill. Somehow the air in Glasgow felt colder than in St Andrews, as if the west-coast dampness could infiltrate the heaviest of garments. ‘A candle,’ he repeated. ‘I don’t remember the Central Bar ever having candles on the table.’
‘We brought our own.’
Gilchrist almost stopped. ‘But why would you bring a candle?’
She smirked as she stepped through the gateway. When he followed, she pulled the wrought-iron gate towards her, closing it with a hard metallic clang. ‘Now, why else would nice girls carry candles around with them, Inspector?’
Gilchrist stepped aside as she opened the passenger door and slid on to the seat, her skirt riding high on stockinged thighs. He watched the BMW accelerate down the hill, its exhaust leaving a white trail that swirled to the ground. His breath puffed in the cold air as if in weak imitation. He coughed, and something vile hit his tongue, causing him to fight off an almost overpowering need to throw up.
The Pennycuicks had mocked him. He watched their BMW’s brake lights flash as it turned towards Great Western Road without indicating. An image of Geoffrey Pennycuick flickered into his mind. Pinstriped suit, starched white shirt, shining black shoes. Gilchrist looked down at his own feet, at leather that had not seen polish in three days. Grey scuff-marks soiled the uppers. Then Jeanette surfaced beside the image of her husband, her black hair glistening in the light from the window, her white blouse thin enough to reveal the floral pattern of her bra.
Cigars. Periods. Candles.
If it wasn’t so serious it would be funny.
Gilchrist faced his Roadster. It looked small and worn compared to Pennycuick’s BMW. He turned on the ignition and gripped the steering wheel while the car’s engine split the silence of a suburban Glasgow morning. He fought off the crazy urge to floor the pedal, then pulled into Drive and eased away from the pavement.
He replayed the interview, struggling to force his thoughts through the haze of his hangover. It was not until he turned off Hyndland Road and was nearing Glasgow University that he realized his failing. He fumbled in his pocket and removed her business card. He read the company name. ScotInvest. The address in Bath Street. Her name and title, Jeanette W. Pennycuick, MBA, Human Resources Director. He scanned the phone numbers. One was her office, another her fax, the last one her mobile.
He flipped open his phone.
She answered on the fifth ring. ‘Hello?’
Without introduction, he said, ‘I have one more question.’
She let out a tired sigh. ‘I didn’t give you my business card so you could call to annoy me every five minutes.’
‘What did you use to light the candle?’
‘Matches, Inspector. What on earth did you think we used?’
Somehow, her answer did not surprise him. His sixth sense was screaming at him, telling him she was not speaking the truth. She could have used a cigarette lighter. Like the one they found in the graveyard. ‘How did you meet your husband?’ he tried.
‘At a party.’
‘At university?’
‘In the flat in South Street, if you must know. And I’m not sure I like your manner, Inspector. I think I’m going to register a formal complaint. Fife Constabulary, did you say?’
Gilchrist hung up, threw his mobile on to the passenger seat and wondered if Jeanette Pennycuick really was lying to him. She had told him she met her husband at a party in her flat. Which meant Geoffrey Pennycuick had lived in St Andrews at the same time. Or had he been up there on holiday, the same way Gilchrist had met his wife, Gail? Or perhaps he’d been a student at the university. He was a consultant at the Western. St Andrews offered medical degrees. Had Pennycuick graduated from St Andrews? And if so, had his wife tried to fudge her answer to his question?
As a detective, Gilchrist knew that all things were possible. But what was forming in his mind was something ominous. If Jeanette was lying, she had something to hide. Which meant that Geoffrey and Jeanette Pennycuick were now smack dab in the middle of his sights.
CHAPTER 7
It had been two years since Gilchrist last met with Dr Heather Black.
She smiled as he approached, her arm outstretched.
‘Good to see you again, Andy,’ she said, shaking his hand. ‘You haven’t changed a bit. Maturing gracefully with age, if anything.’
Not the politically correct introduction, perhaps, but from memory, Heather Black was not a woman who minced her words. Somehow she looked different, her eyes, he thought – larger, sharper, more focused. Brighter, too. Perhaps it was the subtle use of mascara, the hint of kohl on the lids.
‘Good to see you, too,’ he said. ‘You look, eh . . .’
‘Stunning?’
He nodded. Yes, stunning would do.
‘Laser surgery last year. Best thing I ever did.’ She chuckled. ‘With three teenage kids and a needy husband, compliments are not something with which I am familiar. If I don’t pay them to myself, who else will? Come on,’ she said. ‘It arrived only half an hour ago.’ She strode along the corridor with the enthusiasm of someone half her age.
They entered an open office that reminded Gilchrist of a school laboratory. Desks like drafting tables lined the walls. Tower computers, flat computers, oversized off-white metal boxes that held prehistoric motherboards and hard drives lay stacked under the desks, all seemingly interconnected by what Gilchrist could describe only as cable spaghetti. Six white-coated students sat huddled around a monitor screen on which a face of horizontal and vertical grid lines rotated like a spool of thread on a spindle. Barely a glance as Black led Gilchrist beyond them and into an office at the far end.
A FedEx box lay opened on a grey metal desk, and by a wired window a young Asian woman with black-rimmed spectacles looked up from her computer. Next to her, a familiar skull with its crushed side sat on a raised metal plate like some unfinished sculpture. A camera lay beside it, connected to the computer.
‘Yan is one of our more promising students,’ Black said, peering at the monitor. ‘How’s it coming along?’
‘Slowly,’ Yan replied. ‘We could use more memory, faster chips, what can I say? Digital tomography always takes like, for ever.’
‘Limited budgets. The bugbear of university research. Here,’ she said to him, ‘look at this.’
Gilchrist followed her to another monitor.
‘How long are you in town?’ she asked.
‘How long will it take to come up with a visual?’
‘Depends,’
she replied. ‘But if you’ve something else to do, you should do it.’ She eyed the screen, clicked the mouse. ‘I’m developing a new technique for fleshing out the skull. It’s more time-consuming, but the results are worth it.’
‘In what way?’
‘Less wooden-looking. More lifelike. I could send a digital image tomorrow. That work for you?’
‘That works,’ he said.
Another couple of clicks, a password typed and a string of files with numerical identification that meant nothing to Gilchrist flowed down the screen. She clicked again, and the digital waterfall stopped.
‘Let me show you,’ she said, as the image of a human skull appeared on the screen. She jiggled the mouse and the skull turned left, back to the right, rolled over and around and back to face-on again. ‘By holding down the left button and dragging the mouse, you can rotate the image any way you like. Here. Try it.’
Gilchrist obliged, and the skull span on its spot. He clicked again, managed to stop it, but turned it over so that he was looking at it from above. Another couple of clicks and drags and he had the skull stopped, almost back to where it began.
‘Three-D imaging,’ Black said. ‘Helps us develop a more accurate picture. But there’s still a lot of guesswork goes into the final image. Skin tone. Hair colour. Eye colour. Shape of the nose. Lips. Ears. We mostly skip the ears. Each of which leaves a different visual impact on the beholder. Here, let me show you.’ She spun the skull on its spinal axis, returning it to its original position.
‘Certain parts of the face we know have little skin covering.’ As she spoke, her fingers worked the mouse. ’Around the eyes, for example.’
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.
&nb
sp; ‘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.’