Colin and Brian exchanged a look, a promise to each other that they'd make it through the day without doing anything to shame themselves or their sister's memory. They squared their shoulders and went through.
The hearse was parked outside the house. The Duffs walked down the path, heads bowed, Eileen leaning heavily on her husband's arm. They took up their places behind the coffin. Behind them, friends and relatives gathered in somber groupings. Bringing up the rear were the police. Maclennan led the detachment, proud that several of the team had turned up on their time off. For once, the press were discreet, agreeing among themselves on pool coverage.
Villagers lined the street to the church, many of them falling in behind the cortege as it moved at a slow walk down to the gray stone building that sat four square on the hill, brooding over St. Andrews below. When everyone had filed in, the small church was packed. Some mourners had to stand in the side aisles and at the back.
It was a short and formal service. Eileen had been beyond thinking of details, and Archie had asked for it to be kept to the bare minimum. "It's something we've to get through," he'd explained to the minister. "It's not what we're going to be remembering Rosie by."
Maclennan found the simple words of the funeral service unbearably poignant. These were words that should be spoken over people who had lived their lives to the full, not a young woman who'd barely begun to scratch the surface of what her life could be. He bowed his head for the prayer, knowing this service would bring no resolution to anyone who had known Rosie. There would be no peace for any of them until he did his job.
And it was looking less and less likely that he would be able to satisfy their need. The investigation had almost ground to a halt. The only recent forensic evidence had come from the cardigan. All that had yielded were some paint fragments. But none of the samples taken from inside the student house in Fife Park had come anywhere near a match. Headquarters had sent a superintendent down to review the work he and his team had done, the implication being that they'd somehow fallen down on the job. But the man had had to concede that Maclennan had done a commendable job. He hadn't been able to make a single suggestion that might lead to fresh progress.
Maclennan found himself coming back again and again to the four students. Their alibis were so flimsy they hardly deserved the name. Gilbey and Kerr had fancied her. Dorothy, one of the other barmaids, had mentioned it more than once when giving her statement. "The big one that looks a bit like a dark-haired Ryan O'Neal," she'd put it. Not how he would have described Gilbey himself, but he knew what she meant. "He fancied her something rotten," she'd said. "And the wee one that looks like him out of T Rex. He was always mooning after Rosie. Not that she gave him the time of day, mind you. She said he fancied himself too much for her liking. The other one, though, the big one. She said she wouldn't mind a night out with him if he was five years older."
So there was the shadow of a motive. And of course, they'd had access to the perfect vehicle for transporting the dying body of a young woman. Just because there were no forensic traces didn't mean they hadn't used the Land Rover. A tarpaulin, a groundsheet, even a thick plastic sheet would have contained the blood and left the interior clean. There was no doubt that whoever had killed Rosie must have had a car.
Either that or he was one of the respectable householders on Trinity Place. The trouble was, every male resident between fourteen and seventy was accounted for. They were either away from home, or asleep in their beds, alibied to the hilt. They'd looked closely at a couple of teenage boys, but there was nothing to link them to Rosie or to the crime.
The other thing that made Gilbey look less likely as a suspect was the forensics. The sperm they'd found on Rosie's clothes had been deposited by a secretor, someone whose blood group was present in his other bodily fluids. Their rapist and presumably their killer had blood group O. Alex Gilbey was AB, which meant he hadn't raped her unless