Free Hand for a Hand by Frank Muir Page B

would do that in the pre-dawn hours of a winter morning? He turned to The Scores, the road that ran uphill at right angles to Golf Place. Hotels lined one side and overlooked an expanse of grass that fell away to rocks and the beach below. Martyrs’ Monument stood dark and tall as a silent sentinel.
    Gilchrist eyed the hotel windows. Most lay in blackness, but beyond The Scores Hotel a few rectangles of light spilled into the pre-dawn gloom. Had someone glanced out one of those windows? Had anyone heard anything, seen anything?
    He shifted his gaze to the junction at the top of the hill. If you turned right at the Dunvegan, then through the mini-roundabout, that put you on the road out of St. Andrews. And he saw in his mind’s eye that the car had come from Glasgow. That was where Chloe and Jack lived. Why hide her body anywhere else? He would challenge Greaves again on working closer with Strathclyde Police.
    From somewhere beyond the buildings that bordered the eighteenth, he heard the unsteady rumble of a car’s exhaust. He eyed the road out of town and caught the shiver of parting headlights beyond the hedgerows and shrubs.
    But at that time in the morning it could be anyone.
    He turned his attention back to the polythene package. Through the sheeting, the leg was slim, verging on the skinny. It lay at an angle, so the inner thigh lay exposed. A lump choked his throat. Had Jack’s hand caressed that leg in moments of intimacy? How could he let Jack see this? He was torturing himself. What the hell would it do to Jack?
    He kneeled. The grass felt cold through his coveralls. The leg had been amputated at the top of the thigh, cut at an angle. He tugged the sheeting, eased it back. The wind shifted at that moment, and he thought he caught the smell of burning. He looked up, sniffed the air.
    Maybe he’d imagined it.
    He shifted the sheet a touch more.
    From the marks on the thigh bone and the roughness of the meat where the skin had been cut he guessed the leg had been amputated with a saw.
    Mackie would be the one to make that call.
    It struck him all of a sudden that there was no note. Which puzzled him. Was that not what this was about? The killer taunting Gilchrist, torturing him, making him pay for the wrong some lunatic conceived had been done against him? And with that, he gripped the plastic and pulled it back.
    A rush of ice chilled his blood.
    Dear God. There it was. His note. Branded into the skin.
    He let go of the plastic, slipped on the wet grass, landed on his rump, and scrambled back, back with his elbows, away from the leg, away from the message that—
    “Sir?”
    He looked up at Lambert and forced a smile. But his lips jerked instead. “Slipped,” he said. She helped him to his feet. He brushed a hand over his coveralls, tried to convince himself he had seen worse. The five-year-old girl they pulled from the mud of the Kinness Burn four years ago. Even Mackie had gagged when her head slipped through his fingers, leaving him holding her peeled off face as her skull bounced and skittered on the post-mortem slab. But it had still not been as bad as this. This was personal. Chloe had been murdered so her hacked off body parts could be sent to Gilchrist as some kind of morbid message.
    He gritted his teeth, held his breath as he bent down to the amputated limb. Christ, just get on with it. He lifted the plasticso the leg could slide free. But it stuck for a second before ripping free and rolling onto the grass to reveal a mass of blackened scars that ran from the top of the outer thigh to halfway down the calf.
    He stared at the disfigured letters, at first unable to make sense of the mess, then deciphered the single word.
    BLUDGEON .
    The smell hit him again, a warm guff that rose from the blackened skin like a pall of invisible smoke that found its way into his mouth and lungs—the stench of the burned flesh of his son’s girlfriend. He felt his stomach lurch, and he stumbled to the side. He bumped