Free Hand for a Hand by Frank Muir Page A

until.…” He glanced at his watch. “… 5:45. On the button.”
    “Sir?”
    “And get Bert Mackie and his team down there right away. I’m on my way.”
    He stumbled to the bathroom. Rain battered the frosted glass. He brushed his teeth, felt his stomach lurch, and coughed into the sink. Why had he let Jack persuade him to have a half? Just the one. But one always led to two. He tried to convince himself that he’d had a few to keep Jack company, get his mind off Chloe. At that thought he coughed again, spat out a dribble of bile. Jesus. Was he really about to see Chloe’s hacked off leg?
    He stared at the mirror, ran a hand over his face, felt the hard brush of stubble on his chin. Slivers of grey pressed by his ears. He tried a smile. It was a toss-up as to which was whiter, his teeth or his face. The bags under his eyes looked as dark as mascara. If he ever thought he was a looker, those days were gone. Maybe it was just as well Gail had found Harry. And how could he blame Beth for running off to Spain?
    He shaved and showered, and as he stepped into a brisk east coast breeze he made a promise to himself that soon he would retire. He would take up photography again, be more serious this time, maybe turn the front room into a gallery, make a few bob selling framed photographs, just enough to supplement his pension. Much more sensible than running around at all hours of the day and night looking at body parts.
    Twenty minutes later, he parked his Merc by the side of the R&A Clubhouse. The rain had stopped, the air as fresh and cold as ice. He removed a set of coveralls and gloves from the boot, put his head down, and marched into the wind. Winter on the Fife coast could be freezing cold. That morning was making no exceptions.
    Ahead, the lone figure of PW Lambert stood as still as a silhouette by the dulled light from a streetlamp on the opposite side of the road, the area devoid of police tape and cones.
    Gilchrist reached her. “Where is it, Dot?”
    “This way, sir.”
    He thought her voice possessed a hint of a shiver, from the cold or her gruesome find, he could not say. She pointed to arolled sheet of plastic that lay just off the back of the path, then stepped to the side, as if in deference to his seniority. The plastic sheet had split open to reveal the knee joint and a length of white calf.
    Gilchrist slipped on his coveralls and gloves.
    He eased back the sheet to reveal the painted toenails of a left foot. Rain dotted the plastic’s grimy surface, but from the length of it, Gilchrist could tell it was a complete leg. He grimaced. Left leg .
    Watt had won the sweepstake. A guess? Or had he known?
    Gilchrist promised himself he would tear it out of him.
    The package had been dumped on the grass next to the putting green, and by the way it had burst open Gilchrist would bet a month’s wages that it had been thrown there.
    Tossed from a passing car?
    “How did you find it?” he asked Lambert.
    “It was just lying there, sir.”
    “Which way were you walking?”
    She glanced over his shoulder, away from the beach, past the R&A Clubhouse. “From that way, sir.”
    “Did you walk along the Links Road?”
    “Yes, sir.”
    “From the pathway by the Jigger Inn?”
    “Yes, sir.”
    “So, from the Jigger it would take you what, five to ten minutes to walk from there to here?”
    “About that, sir. Yes.”
    “During which time this road”—he swept an arm from the seafront to Auchterlonies, down past Tom Morris’s to the house at the end of the terrace that overlooked the eighteenth tee—“would have been in your view.”
    “Yes, sir.”
    It would have been dark, too. But still.…
    “Did you see anyone?” he asked.
    “No, sir.”
    “Any cars? Anything?”
    “Sorry, sir. I was just walking past when I happened to look over and see it.”
    Gilchrist nodded. At night, this was a quiet part of town. No reason for anyone to walk or drive that way, unless they were heading to the beach. And who