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