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.