‘Will that take long?’
‘A couple of minutes.’
Fox nodded his satisfaction with this, then noticed that she was holding out her hand, palm upwards.
‘It’s thirty pence per sheet,’ she informed him. ‘Unless you have a student card…’
The Anstruther address was a flat overlooking the harbour. So many day-trippers were queuing at the fish and chip shop, they had spilled out on to the pavement. The woman who lived in the flat was an artist. She offered Fox some herbal tea but little else. She had bought the place from the previous owner, who had died of old age. Yes, it had been a rental property at one time, but she had no details. Mail sometimes arrived for people she’d never heard of, but she just threw it in the bin. She didn’t recognise the name Alice Watts, and none of the old tenants had ever paid a visit. Fox made show of admiring her work – the walls were covered in vibrant paintings of fishing boats, harbours and coastlines – and left her to it, but only after she’d pressed a business card on him and informed him that she did commissions.
‘I’ll bear that in mind,’ he said, making good his escape.
He considered a trip to Glasgow – it would take maybe ninety minutes – but made a few calls from his car instead. Eventually someone got back to him from Govan police station. The officer had driven out to the address himself.
‘It’s an office block,’ he informed Fox.
‘Offices?’ Fox frowned as he stared at Alice Watts’s university details. ‘How long has it been like that?’
‘It was a warehouse until 1982. Renovated in ’83.’ Nineteen eighty-three: the year Watts had arrived at St Andrews.
‘I must have the wrong address.’
‘Reckon so,’ the officer agreed. ‘No housing in that street at all.
Far as I can tell, never has been.’ Fox thanked him and ended the call. He tried Alice Watts’s home phone number again. The constant tone told him no such number existed. He held the two photos of Alice next to one another. A low sun had broken from behind the clouds, causing him to lower his windscreen visor. Even with the windows closed, he could smell batter and oil from the chippy.
‘I’ve got a gun that shouldn’t exist and a student who’s vanished without trace,’ he explained to the photographs. ‘So I have to wonder, Alice – just who the hell are you?’
And where was she now?
24
‘Thanks for meeting me,’ Tony Kaye said.
The cafe was in a tired-looking shopping centre next to the bus station, all strip lighting and bargain bins. Teresa Collins had dark rings under her eyes, and he reckoned the stains on her clothes were blood from a few days earlier. He’d actually gone back to her street, sitting in the Mondeo for a time. Smears on her living-room window – blood again. He hadn’t gone to see her, though. Instead he had pushed a note through her door with his phone number and request, then waited for her to get back to him.
‘I’m starving,’ she said, pushing the matted hair out of her eyes. There were faded home-made tattoos on the backs of her hands, and one wrist was bandaged, the other needing nothing more than a large sticking plaster. He pushed the menu towards her.
‘Whatever you like,’ he said.
She ordered a banana split and a mug of hot chocolate.
‘I wanted to apologise about the other day,’ he said, once the order had been placed.
‘And it’s true about Paul Carter? He’s been done for murder?’
Kaye nodded, seeing little harm in the lie. ‘So he won’t be bothering you again.’
‘Poor man,’ she muttered.
‘Paul, you mean?’
She shook her head. ‘The one he killed.’
He could see she was itching for a cigarette. The pack was on the table in front of her, and her fingers played with a cheap plastic lighter. But when the dessert arrived, she tucked in. Three sachets of sugar were added to the accompanying drink. There was something almost childlike about the way her face softened as she ate, as though she were remembering past pleasures.
‘Good?’ he asked.
‘Yeah.’ But as soon as she’d finished, she asked if they could leave. He paid the bill, leaving his own coffee untouched, and she led him out on to the high street, lighting the needed cigarette and inhaling deeply.
‘Where do you want to go?’ he asked.
She shrugged and kept walking. They crossed at some lights. He knew they were headed in the vague direction of the football park.
‘Town’s seen better days,’ he speculated.
‘Seen worse ones, too.’
‘You’ve always lived here?’
‘I went to London once – hated it.’
‘How long were you there for?’
‘Until the money ran out. Took me nearly three days to hitch home.’
The shops thinned out, many of them looking closed permanently. A few high-rises separated them from the seafront. She walked towards one of them and in through a broken set of doors, stopping at the lift.
‘Want to show you something,’ she told him. The lift jolted them upwards to the top floor. When they stepped out on to the walkway, the wind hit them hard. She stretched her arms wide, facing the onslaught of air.
‘Loved coming here as a kid,’ she explained. ‘Always expected to be lifted clean off my feet and taken somewhere else.’
Kaye stared at the drop, and felt a moment’s giddiness. Instead, he focused on the view across the water towards Edinburgh.
‘I had an auntie lived here,’ Teresa Collins was saying. ‘She wasn’t really an auntie, just my mum’s pal. I got to stay with her when my dad was home.’ She saw that Kaye didn’t quite understand. ‘He was in the army – lots of time away. When he came back, there was always booze and shagging and then maybe a few slaps.’
‘Your mum didn’t want you to see it?’
Collins shrugged. ‘Either that or she didn’t want him starting on me.’ She paused, fixing him with a look. ‘All the places he went… stories he told… he never brought me back a present. Not once. Men are right bastards, eh? Never met one that wasn’t.’
‘That makes me a bastard, then.’
She didn’t deny it, but tried lighting a fresh cigarette instead. He held his coat open to shelter the lighter’s flame.
‘Thanks,’ she said, leaning over the wall of the walkway, exhaling a stream of smoke.
‘What happened to your auntie?’ he asked.
‘Moved away. Then I heard she’d died.’
‘Your mum and dad?’
‘Mum had a stroke. Died a year later. No idea where my dad is.’
‘Do you want to know?’
She shook her head.
‘No man in your life at the moment, Teresa?’
‘Now and again,’ she admitted. ‘But only when I’m short of cash.’ The smile was rueful. ‘You got any cash to spare?’
‘I could lend you twenty.’
She looked at him. ‘And why would you do that, Mr Policeman?’
He shrugged, pushing his hands deep into his coat pockets.
