Chapter Two

The File

Rob had the file on the table when she came in.

She had expected a box. Cases involving multiple missing persons, spanning a weekend, in a town the size of Kinloch — she had expected a box at minimum, more likely two. The kind of accumulation that spoke of an investigation properly conducted: interview transcripts, scene photographs, forensics reports, witness statements cross-referenced and indexed, family liaison notes, the slow and thorough paper trail of people doing their jobs.

What was on the table was a manila folder. Thin enough that she could see the slight warp of the cardboard where it had absorbed moisture sometime in the last three decades and dried into a gentle curve.

She picked it up. She counted the pages inside without taking them out, pressing gently through the cover.

Eleven.

* * *

The family liaison coordinator's name was Moira Sinclair and she had been in Kinloch for twenty-two years, which meant she knew every family on the high street by name and every family on the Flats by nickname.

She sat in the incident room with Melissa and Rob and looked at the thin file, eleven pages, and at the thick file, forty-one pages, and at the board with its photographs and strings.

'Callum Keith,' she said. 'Mother still on Wallace Crescent, number 14, you said three doors down from you, Melissa, yes, I know her, Jean Keith, seventy, husband died 2019, son Callum was ten, she kept his bedroom for ten years, sewing room, then bedroom again for grandson. She still puts flowers on the loch on October 12th, every year, even though there is no grave. She puts them where the path meets the reeds, where she thinks he went in, though he didn't go in, he was taken.'

'How does she cope?' Melissa asked.

'She copes the way people cope in Kinloch. She goes to church. She goes to the bakery. She talks to people. She doesn't talk about Callum, not directly, but she talks around him, the way you talk around a thing that is too big to say. She says: my boy liked football. She says: my boy was cold, he felt the cold worse. She says: he should not have been out so late. She says it every year on October 12th, to anyone who will listen, and most people listen, because it is easier to listen than to say: we should have looked harder.'

Moira turned a page.

'Duncan Mackay. Mother eighty-two, care home in Inverness, daughter with her. Father fisherman, died 2005, never knew. Mother says: I knew he didn't drown, the loch wouldn't take him like that. She says it with certainty, as if the loch were a person who makes choices.'

'Jamie Rennie. Parents both died, mother 2010, father 2018. Sister forty-six, Glasgow, twelve when Jamie disappeared, angry with him for going out late for thirty-seven years. She said: how do I stop being angry? I told her: you don't stop being angry, you learn where to put the anger. She said: where do I put it? I said: on the people who took him, not on him. She cried then. First time she had cried about Jamie since she was twelve, she said.'

'Stuart Rennie, fourteen, oldest. Mother seventy-five, Flats, PVC porch 1992, similar to your father's porch, Melissa, yes, I know, I have seen it. Other son present when we told her. She said very little. She said: where is he now? I said: he is with Dr Bell, who is taking care of him, and he will be returned soon, with respect. She said: will he be in one piece? I said: fragmentary, but in anatomical order, with care. She said: good. That is good.'

Moira closed the file.

'Four families, four rooms, same time, same message. That is how we will do it when Bell confirms identification. No press. No leak. With liaison officers, not police, not yet. You will see them tomorrow, when it is formally confirmed.'

Melissa looked at Moira, who had been in Kinloch for twenty-two years and who knew every family by name and nickname and who put flowers on the loch on October 12th every year.

'Thank you,' Melissa said. 'For knowing them. For putting flowers.'

'I put flowers because someone should,' Moira said. 'For thirty-seven years no one put flowers except the mothers. Now we will all put flowers. On Sunday, four pm, northern shore, all welcome, bring a torch. That notice in the co-op — I wrote it. In blue biro on lined paper. Because someone should write it and it should be in blue biro on lined paper, not printed, not official, just... someone writing it because they care.'

She stood. She had another meeting, another family, another story that was too big to say directly.

After she left, Melissa looked at the board, at the five faces, at the four red circles, at the one face left clear, Marcus Hale, recovered, and at the four who were not recovered but who were now found, with four red flags on a tussocky shore, sixty to ninety centimetres, shallow enough to dig in an hour, deep enough that a dog walker wouldn't find it.

'We will bring them back,' she said to Rob, who was still there, notebook half-full, other half waiting. 'Properly. With respect. With Moira and Bell and care.'

'We will,' Rob said.

Outside, the loch was between the rooftops, grey, flat, keeping its own counsel, as it had always done. But it had given something back. In the end, it had given something back, and Moira Sinclair had written a notice in blue biro on lined paper because someone should write it.

'You counted too?' Rob asked.

'Three times,' she said. 'In the car park. Thought I was miscounting.'

He sat down. He had coffee, two mugs, one for her, the way he always did when a file was bad. 'I called the archive in Edinburgh. Asked for the Kinloch 1987 file, all volumes. They said this is all volumes.'

'Five children,' she said. 'One recovered. Four not located. Eleven pages.'

'One of the pages is a cover sheet.'

She opened it. She read it properly this time, at the table, with Rob opposite.

Page one: cover sheet. INCIDENT 87/10/12 - KINLOCH. Five names, ages, addresses. Marcus Hale, 12, Edinburgh Road. Jamie Rennie, 13, Wallace Crescent. Callum Keith, 10, Wallace Crescent. Duncan Mackay, 12, High Street. Stuart Rennie, 14, Wallace Crescent. Three from the same street. She lived on that street now, in her father's house, with the PVC porch he had put up in 1992.

Page two: brief summary. Boys last seen north shore path, approx 9pm, October 12th. Search initiated 10pm. One boy recovered, Marcus Hale, deceased, loch. Search continued for remaining four until October 15th, then scaled down. No further trace. Case closed October 20th, 1987, accidental drowning, misadventure.

'Misadventure,' she said out loud.

Rob nodded. 'That's the word they used.'

Page three: statement from Stuart Rennie's mother, taken October 13th, 1987, 9am. Three paragraphs. Boys went out to look for birds. Stuart was oldest. Should not have been out late.

Page four: statement from Callum Keith's father, same day, similar length. Same story, less detail.

Page five: statement from a man named Alan Watt, occupation: council worker, address: Kinloch. Two paragraphs. Saw boys on north shore path, approx 8:45pm. Thought they should not be out so late. Continued on his way.

Pages six through ten: search log, incomplete. Personnel numbers but no names. Areas searched but no grid references. No dive team log. No helicopter log.

Page eleven: closing report. One paragraph. Investigation thorough. Conclusions settled. Accidental drowning. No further action required. Signed: Superintendent Victor Gray, October 20th, 1987.

She closed the folder.

'No forensic report,' she said. 'No post-mortem for Marcus Hale. No search personnel log with names. No family liaison beyond three brief statements in first forty-eight hours. No follow-up interviews. No canvass of local residents. No inquiry into last-known movements beyond afternoon of the 12th.'

'Someone wrote an investigation and removed the investigation from it,' Rob said. 'Leaving only the frame.'

'Who closed it?'

'Gray. Victor Gray. He was DI then. He closed it eight days after five kids went missing. Four not located.'

She thought about that. Eight days. Four children not located. In October, in the Highlands, where water is cold and nights are long.

'Get me everything on Gray,' she said. 'And get me everything on Watt. Alan Watt. Council worker. He saw them at 8:45. That's the last independent sighting. I want to know what he did after.'

Rob wrote it down. He had a notebook that was always half-full, the other half waiting.

'And get me the post-mortem for Diana Morse as soon as Bell has it,' she said. 'I want to know if she drowned in ten centimetres of water or if she was placed there for us to find.'

Rob looked up. 'You think she was placed?'

'I think a woman who spent thirty years building a case about four boys in a loch doesn't drown by accident in the same loch, in the shallows, in October, the week after she finally gets someone to listen.'

She put the thin folder back on the table. It sat there, warped, eleven pages, five names, four not located.

'We need to find out where those four are,' she said. 'Before whoever paid Diana off in 1994 decides we are getting too close.'

The Flats Remember

The cold case archive at Kinloch CID occupied three metal shelving units in a room that smelled of old paper and damp carpet and the particular staleness of things that had not been looked at in a long time.

Melissa had been in the room twice before. Once when she first joined the station and was shown around by a desk sergeant who described the archive with the affectionate dismissiveness of a man who had never once needed it. And once three years ago when she was looking for background on a land dispute that had its roots in a boundary drawn in the 1970s. Both times she had left quickly. The room had a quality she couldn’t name exactly — not quite unease, not quite sadness — the quality of things officially concluded but not actually resolved.

Rob had the file on the table when she came in.

She picked it up. She counted the pages inside without taking them out, pressing gently through the cover.

Eleven.

She put it back down.

‘Eleven pages,’ she said.

‘Aye.’ Rob was leaning against the shelving unit with his arms folded, watching her. ‘I counted twice.’

‘Five boys missing over a single weekend.’

‘Four never found.’

‘Eleven pages.’

She opened the folder and laid the pages out on the table in a single row, the way she always did with new material, so she could see everything at once before she read anything closely. She had learned this from a detective in Aberdeen twenty years ago, a woman named Bryce who had the best close-rate in the division and who said that reading a file in order was letting someone else decide what mattered. Spread it out first. Look at the shape of it. See what’s there and, more importantly, what isn’t.

She looked at the shape of it.

An initial incident report, two pages, dated October 13th 1987. A brief scene summary, one page, same date. Three witness statements, one page each, from parents of the missing boys. A search summary, one page, undated. A record of the case being formally closed, half a page, signed by Detective Chief Inspector Alan Watt, dated November 3rd 1987. A pathologist’s report on the single recovered body, three pages, dated October 22nd 1987.

The single recovered body.

She found the pathologist’s report and read it standing up. One boy, aged eleven, recovered from the loch three hundred metres north of where Diana Morse had been found this morning. Cause of death: drowning. No signs of violence. Case consistent with accidental death. The boy’s name was Jamie Rennie. He had been identified by his father.

One boy recovered. One verdict of accidental drowning. Four boys simply — in the language of the closing report — ‘not located.’

Not located. She read the phrase again. As though they were items in a stockroom temporarily misplaced, liable to turn up when someone reorganised the shelving.

‘The families,’ she said.

‘Three of the four.’ Rob unfolded his arms. ‘Rennie family left Kinloch in the nineties. Mackay family — second boy — left around the same time. The Keiths moved away even earlier, ninety-one. I’ve got no trace of a fourth family yet. The fourth boy in the file is listed as Marcus Hale.’

She looked up.

The name from this morning. Diana Morse, née Hale, mother of Marcus Hale. She had stood at the water’s edge with this case at her feet and not known she was already inside it.

‘Start there,’ she said. ‘Marcus Hale. And I want to know who signed off on this file. I want to know about DCI Alan Watt.’

Her office was a glass-partitioned corner of the main CID floor, which meant that privacy was largely theoretical.

She had never minded this. She had worked in open-plan offices and she had worked in private ones and she had found that the enclosed rooms made her think in circles whereas the open floor, with its ambient noise and movement and the occasional raised voice from someone on a difficult call, kept her moving forward. There was something about knowing she was visible that made her work harder, or at least differently. She thought less and did more, which was not always the right balance but was usually a better one than the alternative.

She sat at her desk with the eleven pages in front of her and read them properly now, in order, the way the file demanded. She let the case speak in the voice it had been given by whoever assembled it, thin as that voice was, and she listened for what was underneath.

October 12th, 1987. Five boys between the ages of ten and fourteen had been reported missing by their families when they failed to return home by nine in the evening. The boys had been seen together on the north shore path in the late afternoon. A search was initiated the following morning. The search was conducted over two days and covered the northern loch shore and the surrounding moorland to a depth of two kilometres. Nothing was found.

On October 18th, Jamie Rennie’s body was recovered from the loch.

On November 3rd, the case was closed.

Twenty-two days. Five boys missing, one dead, four never found, and the case closed in twenty-two days.

She turned back to the three witness statements. They were brief — a single page each, not the minimum length the format allowed but close to it. Each parent had given a statement describing when they last saw their son, where they thought he was going, and when they reported him missing. None of the statements contained a single follow-up question. Not one. She had been taking statements for twenty years and she knew what a statement looked like when someone had asked a question and got an answer and recorded it, and she knew what one looked like when it had been taken by a person who wanted it completed and filed. These were the second kind.

She turned to the search summary. Undated, which was irregular. Unsigned, which was more than irregular. Described the search area as the north shore and surrounding moorland without specifying who had conducted it, how many personnel had been deployed, what equipment had been used, or what, precisely, had been searched.

The search summary was one of the eleven pages. It was also the most useless single document she had ever read in a professional context, and she had worked a case once where the only evidence was a receipt from a petrol station that had been filed upside down.

She closed the folder.

There was a knock at the glass partition and she looked up. Rob, with a mug of tea she hadn’t asked for and a look on his face that meant he had something.

‘Come in.’

He set the tea on the desk and sat in the chair opposite. ‘Alan Watt. Retired January 1988, two months after closing the file. Full pension, thirty years’ service.’

‘Anything unusual about the retirement?’

‘Nothing on record. He’d have been, what, mid-fifties. Early but not extraordinary.’ He paused. ‘He bought a house.’

‘People generally do.’

‘In Inverdrum. Nice part. Detached, garden, off-street parking. I had a look at the land registry. He paid cash.’

She picked up the mug. The tea was too hot to drink but she held it anyway for the warmth.

‘On a DCI’s pension.’

‘Retired DCI’s pension. After thirty years.’

‘Cash.’

She put the mug down. ‘Where is he now?’

‘Care home in Inverdrum. Elm Grove. He’s eighty-three. Advanced dementia, according to the admission records, which I probably shouldn’t have been able to access as easily as I did.’

‘We’ll discuss your methods later. The Marcus Hale line?’

Rob reached into his jacket pocket and produced a folded sheet. ‘Payment record. Single entry in a defunct council fund. October 1994, seven years after the disappearance. Forty-two thousand pounds. Payee listed as D. Hale.’

She unfolded it. Council fund 87-C. Seven years after the fact. A number with nothing around it — no reference, no authorisation signature, no description of purpose. Just a date, a fund code, a sum, and an initial and a surname.

‘The fund no longer exists?’

‘Dissolved in 1997. Records were archived but the archive reference leads to a storage facility in Inverdrum that was decommissioned in 2006. Files were destroyed under a ten-year retention policy.’

‘How convenient.’

‘Isn’t it.’

She folded the sheet and held it. Forty-two thousand pounds in 1994 was a significant sum. It was not a payment made casually or without authorisation, regardless of how carefully the authorisation had been obscured. Someone had known about Diana Hale — Diana Morse, by then, perhaps — and had paid her to stay quiet and stay gone. And she had stayed quiet and stayed gone for thirty years.

Until she came back to Kinloch. Twice.

Until someone put her in the loch with her hands bound and a photograph of five boys in her pocket.

‘There’s something else,’ Rob said.

She waited.

‘In Diana Morse’s address book. Recovered from her hotel room this morning. One name with a Kinloch address.’

He held out his notebook. She read the name he’d written there.

Graham Tate.

She had expected to feel something when she saw it. She felt less than she expected, which was more unsettling than the alternative. When you expected a name and found it, it meant you were following the right thread. When you found a name without surprise, it sometimes meant the thread was leading somewhere you already knew, which was not the same thing as somewhere you could prove.

‘All right,’ she said. ‘Let’s go and see him.’

The Tate Property Group occupied the best-situated building on the marina — a converted boathouse, slate and glass, with a view of the loch that would have cost several hundred thousand pounds in a city and here simply existed as a consequence of being built in the right place at the right time by people who understood which way the town would grow.

Melissa had driven past this building hundreds of times. She had never been inside.

The reception desk was staffed by a young woman who received them with the composed pleasantness of someone trained to receive anyone, including police, without visible alarm. She made one brief call, spoke in a murmur, and then led them to a meeting room on the first floor with a long glass wall overlooking the water.

Graham Tate was already standing when they entered.

She had seen him before in the way you saw prominent people in a small town — at a distance, in a context that was entirely his. Opening a new community centre. On the front page of the Kinloch Herald shaking hands with a man from the council. Giving a speech at the Christmas lights switch-on two years ago that she had watched for forty seconds before moving on. He was sixty-four, broad-shouldered, with the kind of even tan that spoke of managed time outdoors rather than working in it. His suit was charcoal, well-fitted, and he was wearing it at eight-thirty in the morning without apparent effort.

He shook her hand first, then Rob’s.

‘Detective Inspector. Thank you for coming to me — I’d have come to you, of course, as soon as I heard. Dreadful business. Diana was — well. Please, sit down.’

She sat. She noted that he had used the woman’s first name.

‘You knew Diana Morse?’

‘Socially. We were acquainted through the — well, the town, really. Kinloch is a small place. You know how it is.’ He settled into his chair with the ease of a man for whom chairs arranged themselves conveniently. ‘We’d see each other occasionally. She was a private person. Kept to herself for the most part.’

‘When did you last see her?’

He considered this with an expression of careful recollection. ‘The week before last, I think. She came to one of the planning consultation evenings for the new development. Northern shore project. She had some questions about the site.’

She kept her face neutral. ‘What kind of questions?’

‘Oh, the usual sort. Environmental impact, timeline, that kind of thing. She was…’ He paused, and the pause was the first slightly unsmooth thing in the conversation. ‘She was quite persistent. But that’s her right, of course. It’s a public consultation.’

‘You spoke to her directly?’

‘Briefly, yes.’

‘And her manner?’

‘Perfectly pleasant.’ Another pause. ‘Determined.’

Melissa looked out at the loch. The morning light was on it now, the mist finally gone, and the water was the colour of pewter with a line of silver where the sun hit it from a low angle. She let the silence extend for a moment longer than was comfortable.

‘Mr Tate, did you know Diana Morse before she came to Kinloch recently?’

‘I’m sorry?’

‘She checked into the Kinloch Arms three weeks ago. Before that she had no local presence that we’ve found. I’m wondering if you knew her from elsewhere, or from an earlier time.’

‘No.’ Clean and quick. ‘No, I met her here. This trip.’

She nodded as though this were completely satisfactory. ‘And after the consultation evening — did you see her again?’

‘I don’t believe so.’

‘Did she contact you?’

Something moved in his face. Not across it — inside it, beneath the surface, the way something moves underwater when you can’t quite see the shape of it. It was there and then it was gone and she was already holding the image in place for later examination.

‘I may have had a brief email from her. Following up on the consultation. I’d have to check.’

‘That would be very helpful. We’ll need access to that correspondence.’

‘Of course. Whatever I can do.’ He stood, which was the gesture of a man indicating that the meeting was appropriately concluded. She stayed sitting for a moment longer than the gesture warranted, which was something she had done since she was a constable and which still occasionally produced results.

It produced nothing this time. He waited with the patience of someone who had learned patience as a professional skill.

She stood. They shook hands again. He walked them to the meeting room door and said that if there was anything else, anything at all, they only had to call.

In the corridor, out of his eyeline, she stopped and looked back through the glass.

Graham Tate had turned to the window. He was standing with both hands braced on the meeting room table, looking out at the loch. His head was slightly bowed.

She watched for a moment. Then she turned and followed Rob to the stairs.

In the car park she stopped.

‘His hands,’ she said.

Rob looked at her. ‘Sorry?’

‘When he shook mine. His hands were shaking. Very slightly. But they were.’

Rob was quiet for a moment. ‘Could be grief.’

‘Could be.’

She looked at the marina. The boats sitting still on the flat water, their masts making a thin irregular line against the sky. She thought about the feeling she’d had when she first saw his name in Rob’s notebook. The absence of surprise. The sense of a thread already running in a direction she couldn’t see the end of.

‘It could be a lot of things,’ she said. ‘Get me everything on his development. Planning applications, site surveys, timeline. And find out who else was on the consultation panel.’

She got in the car. The marina moved past the passenger window as Rob pulled out — the boathouse, the boards of the new development rendered in bright primary colours, the wide CGI sky above a row of bright buildings that didn’t exist yet, a family smiling in the foreground with a loch behind them like a promise.

She looked at it until it was gone.

She drove to the Flats at eleven.

She hadn’t intended to. She had a full afternoon — the hotel room walkthrough with Rob, a briefing with her DCI, a call she needed to return from the forensics lead about the photograph. She had a sandwich in her bag that she hadn’t eaten and wasn’t going to eat and she had the particular low-grade headache that came from six hours of sleep over two nights and too much station coffee.

She was on the loch road heading back to the station and she turned off at the Flats without quite deciding to.

The Flats was what people called it, which was not entirely accurate — there were some flats, three blocks of them on the east side of the estate, the usual grey render and exterior stairwells, but most of the Flats was terraced housing, two-bed and three-bed, built in the early seventies along streets named for Highland heroes as though the naming could compensate for the construction. She had grown up on Wallace Crescent, which had the particular bleakness of a street that had been optimistic once.

She parked on the street and sat in the car.

The house she’d grown up in was at the far end of the crescent, identifiable from here by the porch her father had added in 1992 — a lean-to of PVC and corrugated perspex that had seemed like luxury at the time and now looked like what it was, which was an afterthought. The house was a different colour now. Someone had painted it in the last few years, a pale yellow that looked faintly optimistic against the grey of the surrounding render. There were plants in the window. She didn’t know who lived there. She had never tried to find out.

Her father had died in this house. Not the dramatic kind of dying — he had been ill for three years and they had discussed at length whether he should go somewhere with more support, and he had said each time that he was perfectly all right and that if she wanted to help she could come and visit more often and be less obvious about counting his whisky bottles. She had visited more often and been more obvious about the bottles and in the end he had died on a Tuesday morning in February, in his own bed, with the television on in the next room.

The box was still in her flat. In the back of her wardrobe, which was a cliché she was aware of. She had brought it back from the house the week after he died because it had his handwriting on the side — her name, in his particular blocky capitals, MELISSA — and she had not been able to leave it behind. She had also not been able to open it.

It had been inside that wardrobe for fourteen months.

She sat in the car looking at the house with the yellow paint and the window plants and thought about Diana Morse, who had also been paid to forget and had come back anyway. Who had stood in a planning consultation meeting and asked persistent questions. Who had kept a sealed photograph of five boys in a plastic sleeve inside her jacket, and who had been found this morning in the shallows of the loch with her hands bound.

She thought about what it cost to come back.

She thought about the box.

Then she started the car and drove to the station.

The hotel room was on the second floor of the Kinloch Arms, overlooking the high street.

It was a standard room — double bed, desk, wardrobe, bathroom with a shower over the bath. The kind of room that was comfortable enough to sleep in and impersonal enough to leave without feeling you’d departed anywhere. Diana Morse had been in it for three days this visit and had made almost no impression on it. The bed was made — the manager confirmed she’d refused housekeeping — and the wardrobe held two changes of clothes on hangers and a folded spare jumper on the shelf above. In the bathroom, a small bag of toiletries, everything functional, nothing decorative.

She was not a woman who had expected to be comfortable. She was a woman who had expected to need to leave quickly.

The desk had been used. There was a notepad with the Kinloch Arms letterhead and three pages of notes in Diana’s handwriting — small, slightly slanted, the kind of handwriting that belonged to someone who wrote a great deal and had stopped caring about legibility for anyone but themselves. Forensics had photographed it in situ and were taking the originals. Melissa leaned over the photographs on Rob’s tablet.

Names. Dates. Some of the dates were recent — the last two weeks. Some were older. 1987 appeared three times, in two different contexts. There was a column of numbers she couldn’t decode at a glance, possibly phone numbers, possibly something else. One name was underlined twice: N. Cassel.

‘N. Cassel,’ she said aloud.

‘Nothing in our system.’ Rob was on the other side of the room, moving methodically through the wardrobe. ‘I’ll run it wider.’

Under the desk, in the narrow space between the desk leg and the wall, forensics had found a small padded envelope, unsealed. Inside: a USB drive and a handwritten note on a folded piece of plain paper. The note said: ‘If something happens — P.’

Just that. If something happens. And a single initial.

She looked at it for a long time.

Someone had known Diana Morse was afraid. Had perhaps helped her prepare for the possibility of something happening. Had perhaps been in this room and left with her, or after her, or had been told about the envelope by phone.

She thought of the name Petra Hale, which she didn’t know yet but would by the end of the afternoon. She thought of the note and the USB drive and the particular phrasing — not ‘if I die,’ not ‘if they find me,’ just the patient, careful conditional: if something happens. The language of someone who had been waiting for something to happen for a very long time.

‘Rob.’

‘Boss.’

‘Marcus Hale. In the 1987 file. His family listing — is there anything about next of kin? Children?’

She heard him checking. The wardrobe door. The rustle of papers.

‘Nothing in the file. But it’s an eleven-page file.’

‘Find out if Marcus Hale had a daughter.’

She stood in the middle of Diana Morse’s hotel room and looked at the bed and the wardrobe and the desk and the pad of notes and the envelope with its two quiet objects. A woman had lived here for three days, carefully and without comfort, going somewhere each morning and returning each evening and making no impression on the room she slept in. A woman who had changed her name and taken a payment and stayed gone for thirty years, and who had then, at fifty-eight, come back to the town where her son had vanished.

She had not come back to mourn. She had come back to find something, or to deliver something, or to finish something that should have been finished in 1987 by people who had instead closed a file in twenty-two days and bought a house with cash and left four boys not located.

Melissa picked up the evidence bag with the USB drive and held it up to the light from the window. A small grey rectangle, anonymous, the kind sold in every electronics shop in the country. Whatever was on it was the reason someone had bound Diana Morse’s wrists with fishing twine and left her in the shallows of the loch.

Or part of the reason. She was learning, with this case, not to assume she could yet see the whole of it.

‘Boss.’ Rob in the doorway. ‘Marcus Hale. One child. Daughter, born 1980. Name registered as Petra Jean Hale.’

There it was.

She set the evidence bag down carefully. ‘Find me an address.’

She drove back through the Flats on the way out of town, which she told herself was the most direct route and which was not.

At the end of Wallace Crescent she stopped the car again. The yellow house. The window plants. The PVC porch her father had put up in 1992 because the winter that year had been brutal and the original front door let in a cold that settled in the hallway like a tenant.

She thought about what she’d said to Rob on the north shore that morning. Pull the cold case files. I want to see what’s actually in it.

She thought about Diana Morse, who had seen what was in it and had spent thirty years carrying the weight of that knowledge and had come back anyway, at the end of her patience or the end of her fear or simply at the point where the cost of staying silent finally exceeded the cost of not.

She looked at the house a moment longer.

Then she drove.

—

End of Chapter Two

DARK WATER

Book One of The Hollow Coast Series