Tooth for a Tooth by Frank Muir Page B

the lighter could be the break they were looking for.
    But despite his best efforts to think beyond that daunting task, Gilchrist could not lift his spirits.
     
    Darkness settled over the Fife coastline like a prison blanket. The temperature had dropped close to freezing, and a haar fogged the air like fine mist. Seagulls cried from the invisible distance.
    In the Central Bar he ordered a portion of steak pie and chips and a pint of Eighty-Shilling. He remembered Gina Belli saying she would be in the Central around seven, and he thought of taking a seat in a corner at the back so that she might not see him and leave. But in the end he chose a bench seat near the door.
    He called Stan for an update, only to be told that Pennycuick appeared to be as clean as his starched white shirts. ‘Keep at it,’ he said, and grimaced as Stan grunted and hung up.
    Nance seemed just as frustrated.
    ‘Why don’t you join me in the Central for a beer?’ he offered.
    She paused long enough to make him think she wanted nothing more to do with him, then surprised him by saying, ‘Give me five minutes.’ But the tone of her voice warned him that all was not well.
    He had finished his steak pie and was on his second Eighty-Shilling when Nance eventually joined him, pushing her way on to the bench seat and sidling up close enough for their thighs to touch. But the look on her face told him she wanted to sit close so that no one could hear what she was about to say.
    ‘Beer?’ he tried.
    She shook her head. ‘Coffee only.’
    ‘Changed days.’
    ‘I’m on duty.’
    Well, that said it all right there, he thought. He breathed in her perfume, a fragrance that brought back memories of late nights and secret rendezvous, and he resisted the urge to squeeze her thigh. Instead, he looked around him, at students drinking beer, knocking back spirits as clear as water. And smoking cigarettes, too. He inhaled, searching for the dry hit of secondary smoke. He found some, breathed it in, almost closed his eyes.
    ‘I can’t stay long,’ Nance said.
    ‘You haven’t had your coffee yet,’ he replied, and thought he sounded like a man searching for the last straw to clutch.
    Her short smile spilled from her face.
    ‘Did you get anywhere with the initials?’ he tried, feeling he was only delaying the inevitable.
    She shook her head in dismay. ‘If I didn’t know you better, I’d swear you were trying to bore the pants off me.’
    ‘Seems to be the only way these days,’ he joked, and from the tightening of her lips wished he had not even tried.
    She turned to face him, and he had a sense that the moment was upon him.
    ‘Look, Andy,’ she began, ‘I think we—’
    ‘Not interrupting anything, am I?’ Gina Belli smiled down at them, her gaze shimmying over Nance’s face as she pulled out the seat opposite and sat.
    Nance pushed away from the table and stood. ‘We’ll talk later,’ she said to Gilchrist, and shoved past Gina without a backward glance.
    Gina watched her go, her mouth forming an ugly grimace that Gilchrist thought did not suit her. She sat, lifting one bare leg over the other, skirt riding high on muscled thigh, and removed a packet of Marlboro Lights from her bag. She flipped it open and pulled out a filter cigarette. ‘Not a bit young for you?’
    ‘She’s one of my team,’ he growled. ‘So don’t even go there.’
    ‘Purely professional, I’m sure.’
    He said nothing as she lit up with a deep draw that sucked in her cheeks, then clicked her lighter shut – not a cheap plastic Woolworth’s lighter like the one in the grave, but one that looked as solid and heavy as gold, with initials on the corner, a collection of tiny diamond studs that formed GB. He saw, too, that by not offering him a cigarette she was telling him she knew he had given up smoking. She could probably tell him the exact date, time and place.
    ‘What are you doing here?’ he asked.
    She turned her head, exhaled a stream of smoke as blue as