secrets, did Rosie. But me and Colin, we reckoned she was keeping quiet about the boyfriend because she thought we wouldn't approve of him." Duff scratched his chin. "We were maybe a bit heavy-handed when it came to looking out for Rosie. After she got pregnant?well, let's just say we didn't want her getting mixed up with another loser.
"Anyway, she left after closing time, and nobody saw who she met up with. It's like she just disappeared off the face of the earth for four hours." He gripped his glass tightly, his knuckles white. "Round about four o'clock in the morning, four students staggering home drunk from a party found her lying in the snow on Hallow Hill. The official version was that they stumbled on her." He shook his head. "But where she was, you wouldn't just find her by chance. That's the first thing you need to remember.
"She'd been stabbed once in the stomach. But it was a hell of a wound. Deep and long." Duff's shoulders rose protectively. "She bled to death. Whoever killed her carried her up there in the snow and dumped her like she was a sack of shite. That's the second thing you need to remember." His voice was tight and clipped, the emotion still possessing him twenty-five years on.
"They said she'd likely been raped. They tried to say it might just have been rough sex, but I never believed that. Rosie had learned her lesson. She didn't sleep with the guys she went out with. The cops made out that she was spinning me and Colin a line about that. But we had a word with a couple of the guys she'd dated, and they swore they never had sex with her. And I believe them, because we weren't gentle with them. Sure, they messed about. Blow jobs, hand jobs. But she wouldn't have sex. So she had to have been raped. There was semen on her clothes." He gave an angry snort of disbelief. "I can't believe those useless fuckers have lost the evidence. That was all they needed, DNA testing would have done the rest." He swallowed more beer. Macfadyen waited, tense as a hunting dog on point. He didn't want to say a word and break the spell.
"So that was what happened to my sister. And we wanted to know who did this to her. The police didn't have a fucking clue. They took a look at the four students who found her, but they never really worked them over. See this town? Nobody wants to upset the University. And it was worse back then.
"Remember these names. Alex Gilbey, Sigmund Malkiewicz, Davey Kerr, Tom Mackie. That's the four who found her. The four who ended up covered in her blood, but with a so-called legitimate excuse. And where were they during the missing four hours? They were at a party. Some drunken student party, where nobody keeps tabs on anybody else. They could have come and gone without anybody being any the wiser. Who's to say they were ever there for more than half an hour at the beginning and maybe half an hour at the end? Plus, they had access to a Land Rover."
Macfadyen looked startled. "That wasn't in anything I read."
"No, it wouldn't have been. They stole a Land Rover belonging to one of their mates. They were driving about in it that night."
"Why weren't they charged with it?" Macfadyen demanded.
"Good question. And one we never got an answer to. Probably what I was saying before. Nobody wants to upset the University. Maybe the cops didn't want to bother with minor charges if they couldn't prove the big one. It would have made them look pretty pathetic."
He let go his glass and ticked off the points on his fingers. "So, they've got no real alibi. They had the perfect vehicle for driving around with a body in a blizzard. They drank in here. They knew Rosie. Me and Colin thought students were a bunch of lowlifes who used lassies like Rosie then chucked them when the proper wife material came along, and she knew that, so she'd never have let on if she was going out with a student. One of them actually admitted that he'd invited Rosie along to that party. And according to what I was told, the sperm on Rosie's clothes could have come from either Sigmund Malkiewicz, Davey Kerr or Tom Mackie." He leaned back, momentarily worn out by the intensity of his