art Two

Chapter 19

November 2003; Glenrothes, Scotland

ACC James Lawson eased his car into the slot that bore his name in the police HQ car park. Not a day went by when he didn't congratulate himself on his achievement. Not bad for the illegitimate son of a miner who'd grown up in a poky council flat in a dump of a village thrown up in the 1950s to house displaced workers whose only possibility of a job was in the expanding Fife coalfield. What a joke that had been. Within twenty-five years, the industry had shrunk beyond recognition, stranding its former employees in ugly oases of redundancy. His pals had all laughed at him when he'd turned his back on the pit to join what they perceived as the bosses' side. Who had the last laugh now? Lawson thought with a grim little smile as he pulled the key out of the ignition of his official Rover. Thatcher had seen off the miners and turned the police into her personal New Model Army. The Left had died and the phoenix risen from its ashes loved to wave the big stick almost as much as the Tories did. It had been a good time to be a career copper. His pension would bear testament to that.

He picked up his briefcase from the passenger seat and walked briskly toward the building, head down against a bitter East Coast wind that promised stinging showers of rain before the morning was out. He punched his security code into the keypad by the back door and headed for the lift. Instead of going straight to his office, he made for the fourth-floor room where the cold cases squad was based. There weren't many unsolved murders on Fife's books, so any success would be seen as spectacular. Lawson knew this operation had the potential to enhance his reputation if it was handled correctly. What he was determined to avoid was a botched job. None of them could afford that.

The room he'd requisitioned for the squad was a decent size. There was space for the half-dozen computer work stations, and although there was no natural light, that meant plenty of room for each of the ongoing cases to be displayed on large corkboards that went all round the walls. Alongside each case was a printed list of actions to be carried out. As the officers worked their way through these tasks, new handwritten actions were added to the lists. Boxes of files were stacked to waist level along two walls. Lawson liked to keep a close eye on progress; although this was a high-profile operation, that didn't mean it wasn't tightly constrained by budgetary controls. Most of the new forensic tests were expensive to commission, and he was determined not to allow his squad to be so seduced by the glamour of technology that they squandered all of their resources on lab bills, leaving nothing for the sheer slog of routine investigative tasks.

With one exception, Lawson had handpicked the team of half a dozen detectives, choosing those with a reputation for meticulous attention to detail and the intelligence to connect disparate pieces of information. That exception was an officer whose presence in the room troubled Lawson. Not because he was an inadequate copper, but because he had far too much at stake. Detective Inspector Robin Maclennan's brother Barney had died in the course of investigating one of these cold cases, and if it had been up to Lawson, he'd have been allowed nowhere near the review. But Maclennan had appealed over his head to the Chief Constable, who had overruled Lawson.

The one thing he'd managed to achieve was to keep Maclennan away from the Rosie Duff case itself. After Barney's death, Robin had transferred out of Fife down south. He'd only returned after his father's death the previous year, wanting to work out his last years before his pension close to his mother. By chance, Maclennan had a loose operational link to one of the other cases, so Lawson had persuaded his boss to let him assign the DI to the case of Lesley Cameron, a student who had been raped and murdered in St. Andrews eighteen years ago. Back then, Robin Maclennan had been based near her parents' home and he'd been the designated liaison officer with Lesley's family, probably because of his own connections in the Fife force. Lawson thought Maclennan was likely looking over the shoulder of the detective assigned to the Rosie Duff case, but at least his personal feelings couldn't interfere directly with that investigation.

That November morning, only two officers were at their desks. Detective Constable Phil Parhatka had what was probably the most sensitive case in the review. His victim was a young man found murdered in his home. His best friend had been charged and convicted of the crime, but a series of embarrassing revelations about the police investigation had led to the overturning of the conviction on appeal. The repercussions had holed several careers below the waterline, and now the pressure was on to find the real killer. Lawson had partly chosen Parhatka because of his reputation for sensitivity and discretion. But what Lawson had also seen in the young DC was the same hunger for success that had driven him at that age. Parhatka wanted a result so badly Lawson could almost see the desire smoking off him.

As Lawson walked in, the other officer was getting to her feet. DC Karen Pirie yanked an unfashionable but functional sheepskin coat off the back of her chair and shrugged into it. She glanced up, sensing a new presence in the room, and gave Lawson a weary smile. "There's nothing else for it. I'm going to have to talk to the original witnesses."

"There's no point in that until you've dealt with the physical evidence," Lawson said.

"But, sir?

"You're going to have to go down there and do a manual search."

Karen looked appalled. "That could take weeks."

"I know, but that's all there is for it."

"But, sir?what about the budget?"

Lawson sighed. "Let me worry about the budget. I don't see what alternative you've got. We need that evidence to apply pressure. It isn't in the box it's supposed to be in. The only suggestion the evidence custody team can come up with is that somehow it got 'mislaid' during the move to the new storage facility. They haven't got the bodies to do a search, so you'll have to."

Karen hefted her bag on to her shoulder. "Right you are, sir."

"I've said right from the beginning that, if we're going to make any progress with this one, the physical evidence is going to be the key. If anyone can find it, you can. Do your best, Karen." He watched her leave, her very walk a simulacrum of the doggedness that had instigated his matching of Karen Pirie with the twenty-five-year-old murder of Rosemary Duff. With a few words of encouragement to Parhatka, Lawson set off for his own office on the third floor.

He settled himself behind his expansive desk and felt a niggle of worry that things might not work out as he had hoped in the cold case review. It would never be enough merely to say they'd done their best. They needed at least one result. He sipped his sweet, strong tea and reached for his in-tray. He scanned a couple of memos, ticking off his initials at the top of the pages and consigning them to the internal mail tray. The next item was a letter from a member of the public, addressed to him personally. That was unusual in itself. But its contents jerked James Lawson to attention in his chair.

12 Carlton Way

St. Monans

Fife

Assistant Chief Constable James Lawson

Fife Constabulary Headquarters

Detroit Road

Glenrothes

KY6 2RJ

8 November 2003

Dear ACC Lawson,

I read with interest a newspaper report that Fife Police have instigated a cold case review on unsolved murders. I presume that, among these cases, you will be looking again at the murder of Rosemary Duff. I would like to arrange a meeting with you to discuss this case. I have information which, while perhaps not directly relevant, may contribute to your understanding of the background.

Please do not dismiss this letter as the work of some crank. I have reason to believe that the police were not aware of this information at the time of the original investigation.

I look forward to hearing from you.

Yours sincerely,

Graham Macfadyen

Graham Macfadyen dressed carefully. He wanted to make the right impression on ACC Lawson. He'd been afraid the policeman would write off his letter as the work of some attention-seeking nutter. But to his surprise, he'd had a reply by return of post. What was even more surprising was that Lawson himself had written, asking him to call to arrange an appointment. He'd expected the ACC would pass his letter on to whichever of his minions was dealing with the case. It impressed him that the police were clearly taking the matter so seriously. When he'd rung, Lawson had suggested they meet at Macfadyen's home in St. Monans. "More informal than here at headquarters," he'd said. Macfadyen suspected that Lawson wanted to see him on his home turf, the better to make an assessment of his mental state. But he had been happy to accept the suggestion, not least because he always hated negotiating the labyrinth of roundabouts which Glenrothes seemed to consist of.

Macfadyen had spent the previous evening cleaning his living room. He always thought of himself as a relatively tidy man, and it invariably surprised him that there was so much to clear up on those occasions involving the presence of another in his home. Perhaps that was because he so seldom took the opportunity to extend his hospitality. He'd never seen the point of dating and, if he was honest, he didn't feel the lack of a woman in his life. Dealing with his colleagues seemed to use up all the energy he had for social interaction, and he seldom mixed with them out of working hours; just enough not to stand out. He'd learned as a child it was always better to be invisible than to be noticed. But no matter how much time he spent in software development, he never tired of working with the machines. Whether it was surfing the net, exchanging information in newsgroups or playing multi-user games online, Macfadyen was happiest when there was a barrier of silicon between him and the rest of the world. The computer never judged, never found him wanting. People thought computers were complicated and hard to understand, but they were wrong. Computers were predictable and safe. Computers did not let you down. You knew exactly where you were with a computer.

He studied himself in the mirror. He'd learned that blending in was the perfect way to avoid unwanted attention. Today he wanted to look relaxed, average, unthreatening. Not weird. He knew most people thought anyone who worked in IT was automatically weird, and he didn't want Lawson to jump to the same conclusion. He wasn't weird. Just different. But that was definitely something he didn't want Lawson to pick up on. Slip under their radar, that was the way to get what you wanted.

He'd settled on a pair of Levis and a Guinness polo shirt. Nothing there to frighten the horses. He ran a comb through his thick dark hair, scowling slightly at his reflection. A woman had once told him he resembled James Dean, but he'd dismissed it as a pathetic attempt to get him to take an interest in her. He slipped on a pair of black leather loafers and glanced at his watch. Ten minutes to kill. Macfadyen walked through to the spare bedroom and sat down at one of the three computers. He had one lie to tell, and if he was going to be convincing, he needed to be calm.

James Lawson drove slowly up Carlton Way. It was a crescent of small detached homes, built in the 1990s to resemble the traditional East Neuk style of houses. The harled walls, steep tiled roofs and crow-stepped gables were all trademarks of the local vernacular architecture, and the houses were individual enough to blend innocuously with their surroundings. About half a mile inland from the fishing village of St. Monans, the houses were perfect for young professionals who couldn't afford the more traditional homes that had been snapped up by incomers who wanted something quaint either to retire to or to let out to holidaymakers.

Graham Macfadyen's house was one of the smaller ones. Two recep, two beds, Lawson thought. No garage, but enough of a drive to accommodate a couple of small cars. An elderly silver VW Golf sat there presently. Lawson parked on the street and walked up the path, the trousers of his lounge suit flapping against his legs in the stiff breeze from the Firth of Forth. He rang the bell and waited impatiently. He didn't think he'd fancy living somewhere this bleak. Pretty enough in the summer, but grim and dreich on a cold November evening.

The door opened, revealing a man in his late twenties. Medium height, slim build, Lawson thought automatically. A mop of dark hair, the kind with a wave that's almost impossible to keep looking neat. Blue eyes, deep set, wide cheekbones and a full, almost feminine mouth. No criminal convictions, he knew from his background check. But far too young to have any personal knowledge of the Rosie Duff case. "Mr. Macfadyen?" Lawson said.

The man nodded. "You must be Assistant Chief Constable Lawson. Is that what I call you?"

Lawson smiled reassuringly. "No need for rank, Mr. Lawson is fine."

Macfadyen stepped back. "Come in."

Lawson followed him down a narrow hallway into a neat living room. A three-piece suite in brown leather faced a TV set next to a video and a DVD player. Shelves on either side held video tapes and DVD boxes. The only other furniture in the room was a cabinet containing glasses and several bottles of malt whiskey. But Lawson only took that in later. What hit him between the eyes was the only picture on the walls. An atmospheric photograph blown up to 20" by 30", it was instantly recognizable to anyone involved with the Rosie Duff case. Taken with the sun low in the sky, it showed the exposed long cists of the Pictish cemetery on Hallow Hill where her dying body had been discovered. Lawson was transfixed. Macfadyen's voice dragged him back to the present.

"Can I offer you a drink?" he asked. He stood just inside the doorway, still as prey caught in the gaze of the hunter.

Lawson shook his head, as much to disperse the image as to refuse the offer. "No thanks." He sat down, the assurance of years as a police officer granting him permission.

Macfadyen came into the room and settled in the armchair opposite. Lawson couldn't read him at all, which he found faintly unsettling. "You said in your letter that you have some information on the Rosemary Duff case?" he began cautiously.

"That's right." Macfadyen leaned forward slightly. "Rosie Duff was my mother."

Chapter 20

December 2003

The cannibalized timer from a video recorder; a paint tin; quarter of a liter of petrol; odds and ends of fuse wire. Nothing remarkable, nothing that might not be found in any jumbled collection of domestic flotsam in any cellar or garden shed. Innocuous enough.

Except when combined in one particular configuration. Then it becomes something entirely undomesticated.

The timer reached the set date and time; a spark crossed a gap of wire and ignited the petrol vapor. The lid of the tin exploded upward, spraying the surrounding waste paper and offcuts of wood with flaming petrol. A textbook operation, perfect and deadly.

Flames found fresh fodder in rolls of discarded carpet, half-empty paint pots, the varnished hull of a dinghy. Fiberglass and outboard fuel, garden furniture and aerosol cans turned into torches and flame-throwers as the fire built in intensity. Cinders skyrocketed upward, like a cheapskate's firework display.

Above it all, smoke gathered. While the fire roared at the darkness below, the fumes drifted through the house, lazily at first and then growing in intensity. The outriders were invisible, thin vapors oozing through floorboards and wafting upward on drafts of hot air. They were enough to make the sleeping man cough uneasily but not sufficiently acrid to waken him. As the smoke followed, it became perceptible, wraiths of mist eerie in the patches of moonlight cast by uncurtained windows. The smell, too, became palpable, an alert for anyone in a position to heed it. However, the smoke had already dulled the responses of the sleeping man. If someone had shaken his shoulder, he might have been able to rouse himself and stagger to the window and its promise of safety. But he was beyond self-help. Sleep was becoming unconsciousness. And soon, unconsciousness would give way to death.

The fire crackled and sparked, sending scarlet and golden comet trails into the sky. Timbers groaned and crashed to the ground. It was about as spectacular and painless as murder gets.

In spite of the climate-controlled warmth of his office, Alex Gilbey shivered. Gray sky, gray slates, gray stone. The hoar frost that coated the roofs on the other side of the street had scarcely diminished all day. Either they had terrific insulation across the road, or the temperature hadn't climbed above freezing since the late December dawn. He looked down at Dundas Street below. Exhaust fumes billowed like the ghosts of Christmas past from the traffic that made the routes into the city center even more clogged than usual. Out-of-towners in to do their Christmas shopping, not realizing that finding a parking space in the center of Edinburgh in the weeks leading up to the festive season was harder than finding the perfect gift for a fussy teenage girl.

Alex looked back up at the sky. Leaden and low, it was advertising snow with all the subtlety of a furniture showroom January sales TV commercial. His spirits sank further. He'd been doing pretty well so far this year. But if it snowed, all his determination would unravel and he'd be back in his usual seasonal gloom. Today of all days, he could do without the snow. Exactly twenty-five years ago, he'd stumbled across something that had turned every Christmas since into a maelstrom of bad memories. No amount of goodwill from all men, or women for that matter, could erase the anniversary of Rosie Duff's death from Alex's mental calendar.

He must, he thought, be the only manufacturer of greetings cards who hated the most profitable season of the year. In the offices down the hall, the telesales team would be taking last-minute orders from wholesalers replenishing stock, and using the opportunity to bump up the orders for Valentine's Day, Mother's Day and Easter. At the warehouse, staff would be starting to relax, knowing the worst of the rush was well over now, taking the opportunity to review the successes and failures of the past few weeks. And in the accounts department, they'd be smiling for once. This year's figures were up almost eight percent on the previous year, thanks in part to a new range of cards Alex had developed himself. Even though it had been more than ten years since he'd moved on from earning his living with his pens and inks, Alex liked to make the occasional contribution to the product range. Nothing like it to keep the rest of the team on their toes.

But it had been back in April when he'd designed those cards, well clear of the shadow of the past. It was odd how seasonal this malaise was. As soon as Twelfth Night saw the Christmas decorations consigned to storage once more, the shade of Rosie Duff would grow insubstantial again, leaving his mind clear and unclouded by memory. He'd be able to take pleasure in his life again. For now, he'd just have to endure.

He'd tried a variety of strategies over the years to make it all go away. On the second anniversary, he'd drunk himself into oblivion. He still had no idea who had delivered him back to his bedsit in Glasgow, nor which bar he had ended up in. But all that achieved was to ensure that the night's sweaty paranoid dreams featured Rosie's ironic smile and easy laugh in a constant mad kaleidoscope he couldn't waken from.

The year after that, he'd visited her grave in the Western Cemetery in St. Andrews, right on the edge of the town. He'd waited till dusk to avoid anyone spotting his face. He'd parked his anonymous clapped-out Ford Escort as near to the gate as he could manage, pulled a tweed cap low over his eyes, turned up his coat collar and skulked into the damp gloom. The problem was, he didn't know exactly where Rosie was buried. He'd only ever seen the pictures of the funeral that the local paper had splashed all over the front page, and all that told him was that it was somewhere up toward the back of the graveyard.

He stole head down among the gravestones, feeling like a freak, wishing he'd brought a torch and then realizing there was no better way to draw attention to himself. A little light leaked in from the streetlamps as they came on, just enough to read most of the inscriptions. Alex had been on the point of giving up when he'd finally come upon it, in a secluded corner right against the wall.

It was a simple black granite block. The letters were incised in gold and still looked as fresh as the day they'd been cut. At first, Alex took refuge in his role as an artist, dealing with what was before him as a purely aesthetic object. In those terms, it satisfied. But he couldn't hide for long from the import of the words he'd been trying to see only as shapes in the stone. "Rosemary Margaret Duff. Born 25 May 1959. Cruelly snatched from us 16 December 1978. A loving daughter and sister lost to us forever. May she rest in peace." Alex remembered the police had set up a collection to pay for the headstone. They must have done well, to afford so lengthy a message, he thought, still trying to avoid engaging with what those words connected to.

The other element it was impossible to ignore was the assortment of floral tributes carefully placed at the foot of the stone. There must have been a dozen bunches and sprays of flowers, several in the squat urns that florists sold for the purpose. The overflow lay on the grass, a potent reminder of how many hearts Rosie Duff still inhabited.

Alex unbuttoned his overcoat and took out the single white rose he'd brought with him. He'd crouched down to place it unobtrusively with the others when he nearly pissed himself. The hand on his shoulder came out of nowhere. The wet grass had absorbed the footsteps and he'd been too engrossed in his own thoughts for his animal instincts to have warned him.

Alex spun round and away from the hand, slipping on the grass and sprawling on his back in a nauseating mimicry of that December night three years before. He cringed, expecting a kick or a blow as whoever had disturbed him realized who he was. He was completely unprepared for a concerned inquiry from a familiar voice addressing him by a nickname only ever used by his closest circle.

"Hey, Gilly, you OK?" Sigmund Malkiewicz extended a hand to help Alex to his feet. "I didn't mean to give you a fright."

"Christ, Ziggy, what else did you think you were going to do, creeping up on me in a dark graveyard?" Alex protested, scrambling upright under his own steam.

"Sorry." He indicated the rose with a jerk of his head. "Nice touch. I could never think what might be appropriate."

"You've been here before?" Alex brushed himself down and turned to face his oldest friend. Ziggy looked ghostly in the dim light, his pale skin seeming to glow from within.

He nodded. "Only on the anniversaries. Never saw you before, though."

Alex shrugged. "My first time. Anything to try and make it go away, you know?"

"I don't think I'll ever manage that."

"Me neither." Without another word, they turned and walked back toward the entrance, each locked into his own bad memories. By unspoken agreement, once they'd left university, they'd avoided speaking about the event that had changed their lives so profoundly. The shadow was always there; but these days it remained unacknowledged between them. Perhaps it had been the avoidance of those conversations without resolution that had allowed their friendship to survive as strongly as it had. They didn't manage to see each other so often now that Ziggy was living the hellish schedule of a junior doctor in Edinburgh, but when they did arrange a night out together, the old intimacy was still as strong.

At the gate, Ziggy paused and said, "Fancy a pint?"

Alex shook his head. "If I start, I'll not want to stop. And this isn't a good part of the world for you and me to be pissed in. There are still too many people round here who think we got away with murder. No, I'll get away back to Glasgow."

Ziggy pulled him into a tight hug. "We'll see each other over the New Year, right? Town Square, midnight?"

"Aye. Me and Lynn, we'll be there."

Ziggy nodded, understanding everything contained in those few words. He raised a hand in a mock-salute and walked away into the gathering dark.

Alex hadn't been back to the grave since. It hadn't helped, nor was that how he wanted to encounter Ziggy. It was too raw, too loaded with stuff they both wanted to avoid coming between them.

At least he didn't have to suffer in secret, the way he believed the others did. Lynn had known everything about the death of Rosie Duff right from the word go. They'd been together since that winter. He sometimes wondered if that was the single thing that had made it possible for him to love her, that his biggest secret was already common currency between them.

It was hard not to feel that the circumstances of that night had somehow robbed him of a different future. It was his personal albatross, a stain on the memory that left him feeling permanently tainted. Nobody would want to be his friend if they knew what lay in his past, what suspicions still hung over him in the minds of so many. And yet Lynn knew, and she loved him in spite of it.

She'd demonstrated it in so many ways over the years. And soon, the ultimate proof would come. In two short months, please God, she'd be delivered of the child they'd both desired for so long. They'd both wanted to wait till they were settled before they started a family, and then it had begun to look as if they'd left it too late. Three years of trying, the appointment already set up at the fertility clinic, then out of the blue Lynn had become pregnant. It felt like the first fresh start he'd had in twenty-five years.

Alex turned away from the window. His life was going to change. And maybe, if he made a determined effort, he could loosen the grip of the past. Starting tonight. He'd book a table at the restaurant on the roof of the Museum of Scotland. Take Lynn out for a special meal, instead of sitting at home and brooding.

As he reached out for the phone, it began to ring. Startled, Alex stared stupidly at it for a moment before he reached for it. "Alex Gilbey speaking."

It took him a while to connect the voice on the other end with its owner. Not a stranger, but not someone he expected to call any afternoon, never mind this one in particular. "Alex, it's Paul. Paul Martin." The recognition was made all the more difficult by the caller's obvious agitation.

Paul. Ziggy's Paul. A particle physicist, whatever that was, with the build of a quarterback. The man who'd been bringing a dazzle to Ziggy's face for the past ten years. "Hi, Paul. This is a surprise."

"Alex, I don't know how to say this? Paul's voice cracked. "I got bad news."

"Ziggy?"

"He's dead, Alex. Ziggy's dead."

Alex nearly shook the phone, as if something mechanical had caused him to misapprehend Paul's words. "No," he said. "No, there must be some mistake."

"I wish," Paul said. "There's no mistake, Alex. The house, it went on fire in the night. Burned to the ground. My Ziggy?he's dead."

Alex stared at the wall, seeing nothing. Ziggy played guitar, his brain hummed pointlessly.

Not anymore he didn't.

Chapter 21

Although he'd spent half the day scribbling the date on assorted pieces of paper alongside his initials, James Lawson had managed entirely to avoid its significance. Then he came across a request from DC Parhatka for authorization of a DNA test on an emerging suspect in his inquiry. The combination of the date and the cold case review team made the tumblers of his mind clatter into place. There was no escape from the knowledge. Today was the twenty-fifth anniversary of Rosie Duff's death.

He wondered how Graham Macfadyen was dealing with it, and the memory of their uncomfortable interview made Lawson shift in his seat. At first, he'd been incredulous. No mention of a child had ever been made during the investigation into Rosie's death. Neither friends nor family had even hinted at such a secret. But Macfadyen was adamant.

"You must have known she had a child," he'd insisted. "Surely the pathologist noted it at the post mortem?"

Lawson's mind instantly summoned up the shambling figure of Dr. Kenneth Fraser. He'd already been semiretired by the time of the murder and generally smelled more of whiskey than of formalin. Most of the work he'd done in his long career had been straightforward; he had little experience of murder, and he remembered Barney Maclennan wondering aloud whether they should have brought in someone whose experience was more current. "It never came out," he said, avoiding any further comment.

"That's incredible," Macfadyen said.

"Maybe the wound obscured the evidence."

"I suppose that's possible," Macfadyen said dubiously. "I assumed you knew about me but had never been able to trace me. I always knew I was adopted," he said. "But I thought it was only fair to my adopted parents to wait till they'd both died before I carried out any research into my birth mother. My dad died three years ago. And my mother?well, she's in a home. She's got Alzheimer's. She might as well be dead for all the difference it'll make to her. So a few months ago, I started making inquiries." He left the room and returned almost immediately with a blue cardboard folder. "There you go," he said, handing it over to Lawson.

The policeman felt as if he'd been handed a jar of nitroglycerine. He didn't quite understand the faint feeling of disgust that crept through him, but he didn't let that prevent him from opening the folder. The bundle of papers inside was arranged in chronological order. First came Macfadyen's letter of inquiry. Lawson flicked on through, absorbing the gist of the correspondence. He arrived at a birth certificate and paused. There, in the space reserved for the mother's name, familiar information leaped off the page. Rosemary Margaret Duff. Date of birth, 25 May 1959. Mother's occupation: unemployed. Where the father's name should have been, the word, "unknown" sat like the scarlet letter on a Puritan dress. But the address was unfamiliar.

Lawson looked up. Macfadyen was gripping the arms of his chair tight, his knuckles like gravel chips under stretched latex. "Livingstone House, Saline?" he asked.

"It's all in there. A Church of Scotland home where young women in trouble were sent to have their babies. It's a children's home now, but back then, it was where women were sent to hide their shame from the neighbors. I managed to track down the woman who ran the place then. Ina Dryburgh. She's in her seventies now, but she's in full possession of all her marbles. I was surprised how willing she was to talk to me. I thought it would be harder. But she said it was too far in the past to hurt anybody now. Let the dead bury their dead, that seems to be her philosophy."

"What did she tell you?" Lawson leaned forward in his seat, willing Macfadyen to reveal the secret that had miraculously withstood a full-scale murder inquiry.

The young man relaxed slightly, now it appeared he was being taken seriously. "Rosie got pregnant when she was fifteen. She found the courage to tell her mother when she was about three months gone, before anybody had guessed. Her mother acted fast. She went to see the minister and he put her in touch with Livingstone House. Mrs. Duff got on the bus the next morning and went to see Mrs. Dryburgh. She agreed to take Rosie, and suggested that Mrs. Duff put it about that Rosie had gone off to stay with a relative who'd had an operation and needed an extra pair of hands round the house to help with her children. Rosie left Strathkinness that weekend and went to Saline. She spent the rest of the pregnancy under Mrs. Dryburgh's wing." Macfadyen swallowed hard.

"She never held me. Never even saw me. She had a photo, that was all. They did things differently back then. I was taken off and handed over to my parents that same day. And by the end of the week, Rosie was back in Strathkinness as if nothing had happened. Mrs. Dryburgh said the next time she heard Rosie's name was on the television news." He gave a short, sharp exhalation.

"And that's when she told me that my mother had been dead for twenty-five years. Murdered. With nobody ever brought to book. I didn't know what to do. I wanted to contact the rest of my family. I managed to find out that my grandparents were both dead. But I've got two uncles, apparently."

"You haven't made contact with them?"

"I didn't know whether I should. And then I saw the article in the paper about the cold case review, and I thought I'd speak to you first."

Lawson looked at the floor. "Unless they've changed a lot since I knew them, I'd say you might be well advised to let sleeping dogs lie." He felt Macfadyen's eyes on him and raised his head. "Brian and Colin were always very protective of Rosie. They were always ready with their hands too. My guess is that they'd take what you have to say as a slur on her character. I don't think it would make for a happy family reunion."

"I thought, you know?maybe they'd see me as some part of Rosie that lived on?"

"I wouldn't bank on it," Lawson said firmly.

Macfadyen looked stubbornly unconvinced. "But if this information helped your new inquiry? They might see it differently then, don't you think? Surely they want to see her killer caught at last?"

Lawson shrugged. "To be honest, I don't see how this takes us any further forward. You were born nearly four years before your mother died."

"But what if she was still seeing my father? What if that had something to do with her murder?"

"There was no evidence of that sort of long-term relationship in Rosie's past. She'd had several boyfriends in the year before she died, none of them very serious. But that didn't leave room for anybody else."

"Well, what if he'd gone away and come back? I read the newspaper reports of her murder, and there was some suggestion there that she was seeing somebody, but nobody knew who it was. Maybe my father came back, and she didn't want her parents to know she was seeing the boy who'd got her pregnant." Macfadyen's voice was urgent.

"It's a theory, I suppose. But if nobody knew who the father of her child was, it still doesn't take us anywhere."

"But you didn't know then that she'd had a child. I bet you never asked who she was going out with four years before her murder. Maybe her brothers knew who my father was."

Lawson sighed. "I'm not going to hold out false hope to you, Mr. Macfadyen. For one thing, Brian and Colin Duff were desperate for us to find Rosie's killer." He enumerated the points he was making on his fingers. "If the father of Rosie's child had still been around, or if he'd reappeared, you can lay money that they'd have been knocking on our door and screaming at us to arrest him. And if we hadn't obliged, they'd probably have broken his legs themselves. At the very least."

Macfadyen compressed his lips into a thin line. "So you're not going to pursue this line of inquiry?"

"If I may, I'd like to take this folder away with me and have a copy made to pass on to the detective who's dealing with your mother's case. It can't hurt to include it in our inquiry and it might just be helpful."

The light of triumph danced briefly in Macfadyen's eyes, as if he'd scored a major victory. "So you accept what I'm saying? That Rosie was my mother?"

"It looks that way. Though of course we'll have to make further inquiries ourselves."

"So you'll be wanting a blood sample from me?"

Lawson frowned. "A blood sample?"

Macfadyen jumped to his feet in a sudden access of energy. "Wait a minute," he said, leaving the room again. When he returned, he was grasping a thick paperback which fell open in line with its cracked spine. "I've read everything I could find about my mother's murder," he said, thrusting the book at Lawson.

Lawson glanced at the cover. Getting Away With Murder: The Greatest Unsolved Cases of the Twentieth Century. Rosie Duff merited five pages. Lawson skimmed it, impressed that the authors seemed to have got so little wrong. It brought back in uncomfortably sharp focus the terrible moment when he'd stood looking down at Rosie's body in the snow. "I'm still not with you," he said.

"It says that there were traces of semen on her body and on her clothing. That in spite of the primitive levels of forensic analysis back then, you were able to establish that three of the students who found her were possible candidates for having deposited it. But surely, with what you can do now, you can compare the DNA in the semen to my DNA? If it belonged to my father, you'd be able to tell."

Lawson was beginning to feel as if he'd stumbled through the looking glass. That Macfadyen would be eager to find out anything he could about his father was entirely understandable. But to carry that obsession to the point where finding him guilty of murder was better than never finding him at all was unhealthy. "If we were going to make comparisons with anyone, it wouldn't be you, Graham," he said as kindly as he could manage. "It would be with the four lads referred to in this book. The ones who found her."

Macfadyen pounced. "You said, 'if.' "

"If?"

"You said, 'If we were going to make comparisons.' Not, when. If."

Wrong book. It was definitely Alice in Wonderland. Lawson felt just like someone who has tumbled headlong down a steep, dark burrow, no safe ground beneath his feet. His lower back pain throbbed into action. Some people's aches and pains responded to the weather; Lawson's sciatic nerve was an acute barometer of stress. "This is very embarrassing for us, Mr. Macfadyen," he said, retreating behind the phalanx of formality. "At some point in the past twenty-five years, the physical evidence relating to your mother's murder has been mislaid."

Macfadyen's face screwed up in an expression of angry incredulity. "What do you mean, mislaid?"

"Exactly what I say. The evidence has been moved three times. Once, when the police station in St. Andrews moved to a new site. Then it was sent to central storage at headquarters. Recently, we moved to a new storage facility. And at some point the evidence bags that contained your mother's clothes were mislaid. When we went looking for them, they weren't in the box where they should have been."

Macfadyen looked as if he wanted to hit someone. "How could that happen?"

"The only explanation I can offer is human error." Lawson squirmed under the young man's look of furious contempt. "We're not infallible."

Macfadyen shook his head. "It's not the only explanation. Someone could have removed it deliberately."

"Why would anyone do that?"

"Well, it's obvious. The killer wouldn't want it found now, would he? Everybody knows about DNA. As soon as you announced a cold case review, he must have known he was living on borrowed time."

"The evidence was locked up in police storage. And we've not had any break-ins reported."

Macfadyen snorted. "You wouldn't need to break in. You'd just need to wave enough money under the right nose. Everybody has their price, even police officers. You can hardly open a paper or turn on the TV without seeing evidence of police corruption. Maybe you should be checking out which one of your officers has had a sudden dose of prosperity."

Lawson felt uneasy. Macfadyen's reasonable persona had slipped to one side, revealing an edge of paranoia that had been previously invisible. "That's a very serious allegation," he said. "And one for which there is no foundation whatsoever. Take it from me, whatever happened to the evidence in this case, it's down to human error."

Macfadyen glared mutinously. "Is that it, then? You're just going to stage a cover-up?"

Lawson tried to arrange his face in a conciliatory expression. "There's nothing to cover up, Mr. Macfadyen. I can assure you that the officer in charge of the case is conducting a search of the storage facility. It's possible she may yet find the evidence."

"But not very likely," he said heavily.

"No," Lawson agreed. "Not very likely."

A few days had passed before James Lawson had a chance to follow up his trying interview with Rosie Duff's illegitimate son. He'd had a quick word with Karen Pirie, but she'd been gloomily pessimistic about getting a result from the evidence warehouse. "Needle in a haystack, sir," she'd said. "I've already found three misfiled bags of evidence. If the public knew?

"Let's make sure they never do," Lawson had said grimly.

Karen had looked horrified. "Oh God, aye."

Lawson had hoped the cock-up with the evidence in the Duff case could be buried. But that hope had died thanks to his own carelessness with Macfadyen. And now he was going to have to confess it all over again. If it ever came out that he'd kept this particular piece of information from the family, his name would be smeared across the headlines. And that would benefit nobody.

Strathkinness hadn't changed much in twenty-five years, Lawson realized as he parked the car outside Caberfeidh Cottage. There were a few new houses, but mostly the village had resisted the blandishments of developers. Surprising really, he thought. With those views, it was a natural location for some boutique country house hotel catering to the golf trade. However much the residents might have changed, it still felt like a working village.

He pushed open the gate, noticing the front garden was as neat as it ever had been when Archie Duff had been alive. Maybe Brian was confounding the prophets of doom and turning into his father. Lawson rang the bell and waited.

The man who opened the door was in good shape. Lawson knew he was in his mid-forties, but Brian Duff looked ten years younger. His skin had the healthy glow of a man who enjoys the outdoors, his short hair showed little sign of receding, and his T-shirt revealed a wide chest and the barest covering of fat over a taut abdomen. He made Lawson feel like an old man. Brian looked him up and down and indulged in a look of disdain. "Oh, it's you," he said.

"Withholding evidence could be construed as police obstruction. And that's a crime." Lawson wasn't going to be put on the back foot by Brian Duff.

"I don't know what you're on about. But I've kept my nose clean for over twenty years. You've no call to come knocking on my door, slinging your accusations about."

"I'm going back more than twenty years, Brian. I'm talking about your sister's murder."

Brian Duff didn't flinch. "I heard you were trying to go out in a blaze of glory, getting your foot soldiers to try and solve your old failures."

"Hardly my failure. I was just a bobby on the beat back then. Are you going to invite me in, or are we going to do this here for the whole world to see?"

Duff shrugged. "I've got nothing to hide. You might as well come in."

The cottage had been transformed inside. Uncluttered and pastel, the living room showed the handiwork of someone with an eye for design. "I've never met your wife," Lawson said as he followed Duff into a modern kitchen, its size doubled by a conservatory-style extension.

"That's not likely to change. She'll not be home for an hour yet." Duff opened the fridge and took out a can of lager. He popped the top and leaned against the cooker. "So what are you on about? Withholding evidence?" His attention was ostensibly on the can of beer, but Lawson sensed that Duff was alert as a cat in a strange garden.

"None of you ever mentioned Rosie's son," he said.

The bald statement provoked no visible response. "That would be because it had nothing to do with her murder," Duff said, flexing his shoulders restlessly.

"Don't you think that was for us to decide?"

"No. It was private. It happened years before. The boy she was going out with then didn't even live round here anymore. And nobody knew about the baby outside the family. How could it have had anything to do with her death? We didn't want her name dragged through the mud, the way it would have been if your lot had got hold of it. You'd have made her look like some slag who got what was coming to her. Anything to take the heat off the fact that you couldn't do your job."

"That's not true, Brian."

"Aye, it is. You'd have leaked it to the papers. And they'd have turned Rosie into the village bike. She wasn't like that, and you know it."

Lawson conceded the point with a faint grimace. "I know she wasn't. But you should have told us. It might have had some bearing on the investigation."

"It would have been a wild-goose chase." Duff took a long swig of his lager. "How come you found out about it after all this time?"

"Rosie's son has more of a social conscience than you. He came to us when he saw the story in the papers about the cold case review."

This time, there was a reaction. Duff froze halfway through raising the can to his mouth. He put it down abruptly on a worktop. "Christ," he swore. "What's that about, then?"

"He tracked down the woman who ran the home where Rosie had the baby. She told him about the murder. He wants to find his mother's killer as much as you do."

Duff shook his head. "I doubt that very much. Does he know where me and Colin live?"

"He knows you live here. He knows Colin's got a house in Kings-barns, though he's mostly out in the Gulf. He says he traced you both via public records. Which is probably true. There's no reason why he should lie. I told him I didn't think you'd be very pleased to meet him."

"You're right about that at least. Maybe it would have been different if you'd managed to put her killer away. But I for one don't want to be reminded of that part of Rosie's life." He rubbed the back of his hand against his eye. "So, are you finally going to nail those fucking students?"

Lawson shifted his weight. "We don't know it was them, Brian. I always thought it was an outsider."

"Don't give me that shite. You know they were in the frame. You've got to be looking at them again."

"We're doing our best. But it's not looking promising."

"You've got DNA now. Surely that makes a difference? You had semen on her clothes."

Lawson looked away. His eye was caught by a fridge magnet made from a photograph. Rosie Duff's smile beamed out at him across the years, a needle of guilt that pierced deep. "There's a problem," he said, dreading what he knew would come next.

"What kind of a problem?"

"The evidence has been mislaid."

Duff pushed himself upright, tense on the balls of his feet. "You've lost the evidence?" His eyes blazed the rage Lawson remembered across the gulf of years.

"I didn't say lost. I said mislaid. It's not where it should be. We're pulling out all the stops to track it down, and I'm hopeful it'll turn up. But right now, we're stymied."

Duff's fists clenched. "So those four bastards are still safe?"

A month later, in spite of his supposedly relaxing fishing holiday, the memory of Duff's fury still reverberated in Lawson's chest. He'd heard nothing from Rosie's brother since then. But her son had been a regular caller. And the knowledge of their righteous anger made Lawson doubly conscious of the need for a result somewhere in the cold case review. The anniversary of Rosie's death somehow made that need more pressing. With a sigh, he pushed back his chair and headed for the squadroom.