The Distant Echo

by Val McDermid

  The fire crackled and sparked, sending scarlet and golden comet trails into the sky. Timbers groaned and crashed to the ground. It was about as spectacular and painless as murder gets.

  * * *

  In spite of the climate-controlled warmth of his office, Alex Gilbey shivered. Gray sky, gray slates, gray stone. The hoar frost that coated the roofs on the other side of the street had scarcely diminished all day. Either they had terrific insulation across the road, or the temperature hadn't climbed above freezing since the late December dawn. He looked down at Dundas Street below. Exhaust fumes billowed like the ghosts of Christmas past from the traffic that made the routes into the city center even more clogged than usual. Out-of-towners in to do their Christmas shopping, not realizing that finding a parking space in the center of Edinburgh in the weeks leading up to the festive season was harder than finding the perfect gift for a fussy teenage girl.

  Alex looked back up at the sky. Leaden and low, it was advertising snow with all the subtlety of a furniture showroom January sales TV commercial. His spirits sank further. He'd been doing pretty well so far this year. But if it snowed, all his determination would unravel and he'd be back in his usual seasonal gloom. Today of all days, he could do without the snow. Exactly twenty-five years ago, he'd stumbled across something that had turned every Christmas since into a maelstrom of bad memories. No amount of goodwill from all men, or women for that matter, could erase the anniversary of Rosie Duff's death from Alex's mental calendar.

  He must, he thought, be the only manufacturer of greetings cards who hated the most profitable season of the year. In the offices down the hall, the telesales team would be taking last-minute orders from wholesalers replenishing stock, and using the opportunity to bump up the orders for Valentine's Day, Mother's Day and Easter. At the warehouse, staff would be starting to relax, knowing the worst of the rush was well over now, taking the opportunity to review the successes and failures of the past few weeks. And in the accounts department, they'd be smiling for once. This year's figures were up almost eight percent on the previous year, thanks in part to a new range of cards Alex had developed himself. Even though it had been more than ten years since he'd moved on from earning his living with his pens and inks, Alex liked to make the occasional contribution to the product range. Nothing like it to keep the rest of the team on their toes.

  But it had been back in April when he'd designed those cards, well clear of the shadow of the past. It was odd how seasonal this malaise was. As soon as Twelfth Night saw the Christmas decorations consigned to storage once more, the shade of Rosie Duff would grow insubstantial again, leaving his mind clear and unclouded by memory. He'd be able to take pleasure in his life again. For now, he'd just have to endure.

  He'd tried a variety of strategies over the years to make it all go away. On the second anniversary, he'd drunk himself into oblivion. He still had no idea who had delivered him back to his bedsit in Glasgow, nor which bar he had ended up in. But all that achieved was to ensure that the night's sweaty paranoid dreams featured Rosie's ironic smile and easy laugh in a constant mad kaleidoscope he couldn't waken from.

  The year after that, he'd visited her grave in the Western Cemetery in St. Andrews, right on the edge of the town. He'd waited till dusk to avoid anyone spotting his face. He'd parked his anonymous clapped-out Ford Escort as near to the gate as he could manage, pulled a tweed cap low over his eyes, turned up his coat collar and skulked into the damp gloom. The problem was, he didn't know exactly where Rosie was buried. He'd only ever seen the pictures of the funeral that the local paper had splashed all over the front page, and all that told him was that it was somewhere up toward the back of the graveyard.

  He stole head down among the gravestones, feeling like a freak, wishing he'd brought a torch and then realizing there was no better way to draw attention to himself. A little light leaked in from the streetlamps as they came on, just enough to read most of the inscriptions. Alex had been on the point of giving up when he'd finally come upon it, in a secluded corner right against the wall.

  It was a simple black granite block. The letters were incised in gold and still looked as fresh as the day they'd been cut. At first, Alex took refuge in his role as an artist, dealing with what was before him as a purely aesthetic object. In those terms, it satisfied. But he couldn't hide for long from the import of the words he'd been trying to see only as shapes in the stone. "Rosemary Margaret Duff. Born 25 May 1959. Cruelly snatched from us 16 December 1978. A loving daughter and sister lost to us forever. May she rest in peace." Alex remembered the police had set up a collection to pay for the headstone. They must have done well, to afford so lengthy a message, he thought, still trying to avoid engaging with what those words connected to.

  The other element it was impossible to ignore was the assortment of floral tributes carefully placed at the foot of the stone. There must have been a dozen bunches and sprays of flowers, several in the squat urns that florists sold for the purpose. The overflow lay on the grass, a potent reminder of how many hearts Rosie Duff still inhabited.

  Alex unbuttoned his overcoat and took out the single white rose he'd brought with him. He'd crouched down to place it unobtrusively with the others when he nearly pissed himself. The hand on his shoulder came out of nowhere. The wet grass had absorbed the footsteps and he'd been too engrossed in his own thoughts for his animal instincts to have warned him.

  Alex spun round and away from the hand, slipping on the grass and sprawling on his back in a nauseating mimicry of that December night three years before. He cringed, expecting a kick or a blow as whoever had disturbed him realized who he was. He was completely unprepared for a concerned inquiry from a familiar voice addressing him by a nickname only ever used by his closest circle.

  "Hey, Gilly, you OK?" Sigmund Malkiewicz extended a hand to help Alex to his feet. "I didn't mean to give you a fright."

  "Christ, Ziggy, what else did you think you were going to do, creeping up on me in a dark graveyard?" Alex protested, scrambling upright under his own steam.

  "Sorry." He indicated the rose with a jerk of his head. "Nice touch. I could never think what might be appropriate."

  "You've been here before?" Alex brushed himself down and turned to face his oldest friend. Ziggy looked ghostly in the dim light, his pale skin seeming to glow from within.

  He nodded. "Only on the anniversaries. Never saw you before, though."

  Alex shrugged. "My first time. Anything to try and make it go away, you know?"

  "I don't think I'll ever manage that."

  "Me neither." Without another word, they turned and walked back toward the entrance, each locked into his own bad memories. By unspoken agreement, once they'd left university, they'd avoided speaking about the event that had changed their lives so profoundly. The shadow was always there; but these days it remained unacknowledged between them. Perhaps it had been the avoidance of those conversations without resolution that had allowed their friendship to survive as strongly as it had. They didn't manage to see each other so often now that Ziggy was living the hellish schedule of a junior doctor in Edinburgh, but when they did arrange a night out together, the old intimacy was still as strong.

  At the gate, Ziggy paused and said, "Fancy a pint?"

  Alex shook his head. "If I start, I'll not want to stop. And this isn't a good part of the world for you and me to be pissed in. There are still too many people round here who think we got away with murder. No, I'll get away back to Glasgow." Ziggy pulled him into a tight hug. "We'll see each other over the New Year, right? Town Square, midnight?"

  "Aye. Me and Lynn, we'll be there."

  Ziggy nodded, understanding everything contained in those few words. He raised a hand in a mock-salute and walked away into the gathering dark.

  Alex hadn't been back to the grave since. It hadn't helped, nor was that how he wanted to encounter Ziggy. It was too raw, too loaded with stuff they both wanted to avoid coming between them.

  At least he d
idn't have to suffer in secret, the way he believed the others did. Lynn had known everything about the death of Rosie Duff right from the word go. They'd been together since that winter. He sometimes wondered if that was the single thing that had made it possible for him to love her, that his biggest secret was already common currency between them.

  It was hard not to feel that the circumstances of that night had somehow robbed him of a different future. It was his personal albatross, a stain on the memory that left him feeling permanently tainted. Nobody would want to be his friend if they knew what lay in his past, what suspicions still hung over him in the minds of so many. And yet Lynn knew, and she loved him in spite of it.

  She'd demonstrated it in so many ways over the years. And soon, the ultimate proof would come. In two short months, please God, she'd be delivered of the child they'd both desired for so long. They'd both wanted to wait till they were settled before they started a family, and then it had begun to look as if they'd left it too late. Three years of trying, the appointment already set up at the fertility clinic, then out of the blue Lynn had become pregnant. It felt like the first fresh start he'd had in twenty-five years.

  Alex turned away from the window. His life was going to change. And maybe, if he made a determined effort, he could loosen the grip of the past. Starting tonight. He'd book a table at the restaurant on the roof of the Museum of Scotland. Take Lynn out for a special meal, instead of sitting at home and brooding.

  As he reached out for the phone, it began to ring. Startled, Alex stared stupidly at it for a moment before he reached for it. "Alex Gilbey speaking."

  It took him a while to connect the voice on the other end with its owner. Not a stranger, but not someone he expected to call any afternoon, never mind this one in particular. "Alex, it's Paul. Paul Martin." The recognition was made all the more difficult by the caller's obvious agitation.

  Paul. Ziggy's Paul. A particle physicist, whatever that was, with the build of a quarterback. The man who'd been bringing a dazzle to Ziggy's face for the past ten years. "Hi, Paul. This is a surprise."

  "Alex, I don't know how to say this…" Paul's voice cracked. "I got bad news."

  "Ziggy?"

  "He's dead, Alex. Ziggy's dead."

  Alex nearly shook the phone, as if something mechanical had caused him to misapprehend Paul's words. "No," he said. "No, there must be some mistake."

  "I wish," Paul said. "There's no mistake, Alex. The house, it went on fire in the night. Burned to the ground. My Ziggy… he's dead."

  Alex stared at the wall, seeing nothing. Ziggy played guitar, his brain hummed pointlessly.

  Not anymore he didn't.

  21

  Although he'd spent half the day scribbling the date on assorted pieces of paper alongside his initials, James Lawson had managed entirely to avoid its significance. Then he came across a request from DC Parhatka for authorization of a DNA test on an emerging suspect in his inquiry. The combination of the date and the cold case review team made the tumblers of his mind clatter into place. There was no escape from the knowledge. Today was the twenty-fifth anniversary of Rosie Duff's death.

  He wondered how Graham Macfadyen was dealing with it, and the memory of their uncomfortable interview made Lawson shift 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.

  "And that's when she told 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 we
re 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.