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 Kingsbarns, 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.