The Distant Echo

by Val McDermid

  He could have wept. He had no idea where they were headed. Nothing in their perplexing morning offered any clues. He thought about going home, checking his computers to see if there was any fresh news. But he couldn't see the point. The Internet wasn't going to tell him where Gilbey and Mackie were.

  The only thing he could be sure of was that sooner or later they'd return to North Queensferry. Cursing himself for his inadequacy, Macfadyen decided he might as well make his way back there.

  * * *

  At the moment Graham Macfadyen was passing the turn-off that would have taken him home, Weird and Alex were sitting outside his house. "Happy?" Alex said. Weird had already stalked up the path and hammered on the door to no avail. Then he'd walked round the house, peering in at the windows. Alex was convinced that the police would turn up at any moment, alerted by some nosy neighbor. But this wasn't the sort of development where people were at home all day.

  "At least we know where to find him," Weird said. "It looks like he lives alone." "What makes you think that?"

  Weird gave him a look that said, Duh.

  "No feminine touches, eh?"

  "Not a one," Weird said. "OK, you were right. It was a waste of time." He glanced at his watch. "Let's go and find a decent pub, grab a bite of lunch. And then we can go back to bonnie Dundee."

  37

  Professor David Soanes was a chubby butterball of a man. Rosy-cheeked, with a fringe of curling white hair round a gleaming bald pate and blue eyes that actually twinkled, he bore a disconcerting resemblance to a clean-shaven Father Christmas. He ushered Alex and Weird into a tiny cubicle that barely had room enough for his desk and a couple of visitors' chairs. The room was spartan, its only decoration a certificate that proclaimed Soanes a freeman of the city of Srebrenica. Alex didn't want to think about what he might have had to do to earn that honor.

  Soanes waved them to the chairs and settled in behind his desk, his round belly butting up against the edge. He pursed his lips and considered them. "Fraser tells me you gentlemen wanted to discuss the Rosemary Duff case," he said after a long moment. His voice was as rich and plummy as a Dickensian Christmas pudding. "I have one or two questions for you first." He glanced down at a piece of paper. "Alex Gilbey and Tom Mackie. Is that right?"

  "That's right," Alex said.

  "And you're not journalists?"

  Alex fished out his business card and passed it over. "I run a company that makes greetings cards. Tom is a minister. We're not journalists."

  Soanes scrutinized the card, tilting it to check the embossing was real. He raised one bushy white eyebrow. "What is your interest in the Rosemary Duff case?" he asked abruptly.

  Weird leaned forward. "We are two of the four guys who discovered her dying body in the snow twenty-five years ago. You probably had our clothes under your microscope."

  Soanes inclined his head slightly to one side. The wrinkles at the corners of his eyes tightened almost imperceptibly. "That was a long time ago. Why are you here now?"

  "We think we're on somebody's hit list," Weird said.

  This time, both of Soanes's eyebrows rose. "You've lost me. What has that to do with me or Rosemary Duff?"

  Alex put a hand on Weird's arm. "Of the four of us who were there that night, two are dead. They died within the past six weeks. They were both murdered. I know that could just be coincidence. But at both funerals, there was an identical wreath saying, 'Rosemary for remembrance.' And we believe those wreaths were sent by Rosie Duff's son."

  Soanes frowned. "I think you're in the wrong place, gentlemen. You should be talking to Fife Police, who are currently conducting a review which includes this very case."

  Alex shook his head. "I've already tried that. ACC Lawson as good as told me that I'm paranoid. That coincidences happen and I should go away and stop worrying. But I think he's wrong. I think someone is killing us because they're convinced we murdered Rosie. And the only way I can see to get myself off the hook is to find out who really did."

  An impenetrable expression flickered across Soanes's face at the mention of Lawson's name. "All the same, I still don't quite understand what has brought you here. My personal involvement with the case ended twenty-five years ago."

  "That would be because they've lost the evidence," Weird interrupted, unable to do without the sound of his own voice for long.

  "I think you must be mistaken. We recently carried out some tests on an item. But our tests for DNA were negative."

  "You got the cardigan," Alex said. "But the important things, the clothes with the blood and semen on, they've gone missing."

  There was no mistaking the upsurge in Soanes's interest. "They've lost the original exhibits?"

  "That's what ACC Lawson told me," Alex said.

  Soanes shook his head in disbelief. "Terrifying," he said. "Though not entirely astonishing under this command." His forehead wrinkled in a disapproving frown. Alex wondered what else Fife Police had done that had failed to impress Soanes. "Well, without the principal physical evidence, I'm really not sure what you think I can do to help."

  Alex took a deep breath. "I know you did the original work on the case. And I understand that forensic experts don't always include every detail in their reports. I wondered if there was anything that maybe you hadn't written up at the time. I'm thinking particularly about paint. Because the one thing they haven't lost is the cardigan. And after they found that, they came and took paint samples from our house."

  "And why would I tell you about anything like that, always supposing there were anything like that? It's scarcely normal practice. After all, one could say you were suspects."

  "We were witnesses, not suspects," Weird said angrily. "And you should do it because if you don't and we are murdered, you'll have a difficult time squaring matters with God and your conscience."

  "And because scientists are supposed to care about the truth," Alex added. Timeto go outonalimb, he thought. "And I get the feeling that you're a man who sees truth as his province. As opposed to the police, who generally just seem to want a result."

  Soanes leaned an elbow on the desk and fingered his lower lip, revealing its inner moist fleshiness. He looked at them as if he was considering long and hard. Then he sat up decisively and flipped open the cardboard folder that was the only other item on his desk. He glanced at the contents then looked up and met their expectant eyes. "My report dealt principally with blood and semen. The blood was all Rosie Duff's, the semen was assumed to belong to her killer. Because whoever deposited the semen was a secretor, we were able to establish his blood group." He flipped over a couple of pages. "There was some fiber evidence. Cheap brown industrial carpet and a couple of fibers from a charcoal-gray carpet used by several vehicle manufacturers in their midrange cars. Some dog hairs that were compatible with the springer spaniel belonging to the landlord of the pub where she worked. All of that was covered fully in my report."

  He caught Alex's look of disappointment and gave a small smile. "And then there are my notes."

  He pulled out a sheaf of handwritten notes. He squinted at them for a moment, then took a pair of gold-rimmed half-moon glasses from his waistcoat pocket and perched them on his nose. "My writing has always been something of a trial," he said dryly. "I've not looked at this for years. Now, where are we…? Blood… semen… mud." He turned a couple of pages covered in a tiny, dense script. "Hairs… Here we go— paint." He stabbed the page with a finger. He looked up. "What do you know about paint?"

  "Emulsion for walls, gloss for woodwork," Weird said. "That's what I know about paint."

  Soanes smiled for the first time. "Paint consists of three principal components. There's the carrier, which is normally some sort of polymer. That's the solid stuff that ends up on your overalls if you don't clean it off straight away. Then there's the solvent, which is usually an organic liquid. The carrier is dissolved in the solvent to create a coating with a consistency suitable for a brush or roller. The solvent seldom has any forensic significa
nce because it will usually have evaporated long since. Finally, there's the pigment, which is what gives the color. Among the most commonly used pigments are titanium dioxide and zinc oxide for white, phthalocyanines for blue, zinc chromate for yellow and copper oxide for red. But every batch of paint has its own microscopic signature. So it's possible to analyze a paint stain and say what kind of paint it is. There are whole libraries of paint samples that we can compare individual examples to.

  "And of course, as well as the paint itself, we look at the physical stain. Is it a spatter? Is it a drop? Is it a scraping?" He held up his finger. "Before you ask anymore, I'm no expert here. This is not my area of specialism."

  "You could have fooled me," Weird said. "So what do your notes say about the paint on Rosie's cardie?"

  "Your friend does like to get to the point, does he not?" Soanes said to Alex, thankfully more amused than irritated.

  "We know how valuable your time is, that's all," Alex said, wincing inside at his sycophancy.

  Soanes returned to his notes. "True," he said. "The paint in question was a pale blue aliphatic polyurethane enamel. Not a common house paint. More the sort of thing you'd find on a boat, or something made of fiberglass. We didn't get any direct matches, though it did resemble a couple of marine paints in our reference library. What was most interesting about it was the profile of the droplets. They were shaped like minuscule teardrops."

  Alex frowned. "What does that mean?"

  "It means that the paint wasn't wet when it made its way on to the clothing. These were tiny, tiny drops of dried paint that were undoubtedly transferred to her clothes from a surface on which she was lying. Probably a carpet."

  "So somebody had been painting something in the place where she was lying? And they'd got paint on the carpet?" Weird asked.

  "Almost certainly. But I have to come back to the odd shape. If paint drips from a brush, or spatters on a carpet, the droplets would not look like this. And all of the droplets we looked at in this case shared the same profile."

  "Why didn't you put all that in your report?" Alex asked.

  "Because we couldn't explain it. It's very dangerous to the prosecution case to have an expert witness in the box answering, 'I don't know.' A good defense advocate would leave the questions about the paint to last, so what the jury would remember most clearly would have been my boss shaking his head and admitting he didn't know the answers." Soanes pushed his papers back into the folder. "So we left it out."

  Now for the only question that mattered, thought Alex. "If you looked at that evidence again, would you be able to come up with a different answer?"

  Soanes gazed at him over his glasses. "Me personally? No. But a forensic paint expert might well be able to provide a more useful analysis. Of course, your chances of finding a match twenty-five years later is negligible."

  "That's our problem," Weird said. "Can you do it? Will you do it?"

  Soanes shook his head. "As I said, I'm very far from being an expert in the area. But even if I were, I couldn't authorize tests without a request from Fife Police. And they didn't ask for tests on the paint." He closed his folder with an air of finality.

  "Why not?" Weird asked.

  "I would presume because they thought it was a waste of money. As I said, the chances of finding a match at this late stage are infinitesimal."

  Alex slumped down in his chair, deflated. "And I'm not going to be able to change Lawson's mind. Great. I think you just signed my death warrant."

  "I didn't say it was impossible to have some tests conducted," Soanes said gently. "What I said was that they couldn't be conducted here."

  "How can they be conducted anywhere else?" Weird said belligerently. "Nobody's got any samples."

  Soanes pulled at his lip again. Then he sighed. "We don't have any of the biological samples. But we do still have the paint. I checked before you came." He opened the folder again and took out a plastic sheet divided into pockets. Tucked inside were a dozen microscope slides. Soanes removed three of them and lined them up on the desk. Alex stared down at them hungrily. He couldn't quite believe his eyes. The specks of paint were like tiny flakes of blue cigarette ash.

  "Somebody could analyze these?" he said, barely daring to hope.

  "Of course," Soanes said. He took a paper bag from his drawer and placed it on top of the slides, pushing them a little closer to Alex and Weird. "Take them. We have others we can analyze independently, should anything come of it. You'll need to sign for them, of course."

  Weird's hand snaked out and enveloped the slides. He gently put them in the bag and slid it into his pocket. "Thanks," he said. "Where do I sign?"

  As Weird scribbled his name on the bottom of a log sheet, Alex looked curiously at Soanes. "Why are you doing this?" he said.

  Soanes took off his glasses and put them away carefully. "Because I hate unsolved puzzles," he said, getting to his feet. "Almost as much as I hate sloppy police work. And besides, I should hate to have your deaths on my conscience should your theory prove correct."

  * * *

  "Why are we turning off?" Weird asked as they hit the outskirts of Glenrothes and Alex signaled a right turn.

  "I want to tell Lawson about Macfadyen sending the wreaths. And I want to try and persuade him to get Soanes to test the samples he's got."

  "Waste of time," Weird grunted.

  "No more than going back to St. Monans to knock on the door of an empty house."

  Weird said nothing more, letting Alex drive to police headquarters. At the front desk, Alex asked to see Lawson. "It's in connection with the Rosemary Duff case," he said. They were directed to a waiting area, where they sat reading the posters about Colorado Beetle, missing persons and domestic violence. "Amazing how it makes you feel guilty, just being here," Alex muttered.

  "Not me," Weird said. "But then, I answer to a higher authority."

  After a few minutes, a stocky woman came across to them. "I'm DC Pirie," she said. "I'm afraid ACC Lawson is unavailable. But I'm the officer in charge of the Rosemary Duff case."

  Alex shook his head. "I want to see Lawson. I'll wait."

  "I'm afraid that won't be possible. He's actually on a couple of days' leave."

  "Gone fishing," Weird said ironically.

  Karen Pirie, caught by surprise, said, "Yes, as it happens. Loch—" before she could stop herself.

  Weird looked even more surprised. "Really? I was just using a figure of speech."

  Karen tried to cover her confusion. "It's Mr. Gilbey, isn't it?" she said, looking intently at Alex.

  "That's right. How did you…?"

  "I saw you at Dr. Kerr's funeral. I'm sorry for your loss."

  "That's why we're here," Weird said. "We believe the same person who killed David Kerr is planning to kill us."

  Karen took a deep breath. "ACC Lawson briefed me on his meeting with Mr. Gilbey. And as he told you then," she continued, looking at Alex, "there really is no basis for your fears."

  Weird gave a snort of exasperation. "What if we told you that Graham Macfadyen sent those wreaths?"

  "Wreaths?" Karen seemed puzzled.

  "I thought you said you'd been briefed?" Weird challenged her.

  Alex intervened, wondering momentarily how the sinners coped with Weird. He told Karen about the curious floral tributes and was gratified when she appeared to take them seriously.

  "That is strange, I'll grant you. But it's not an indication that Mr. Macfadyen is going around killing people."

  "How else would he know about the murders?" Alex asked, genuinely seeking an answer.

  "That's the question, isn't it?" Weird demanded.

  "He'd have seen Dr. Kerr's death in the papers. It was widely reported. And I imagine it wouldn't be hard to find out about Mr. Malkiewicz. The Internet has made it a very small world," Karen said.

  Alex felt that sinking feeling all over again. Why was everyone so resistant to what seemed obvious to him? "But why would he send the wreaths unless he though
t we were responsible for his mother's death?"

  "Believing you to be responsible is a long way from murder," Karen said. "I realize you feel under pressure, Mr. Gilbey. But there's nothing in what you've told me that leads me to think you're at risk."

  Weird looked apoplectic. "How many of us have to die before you start to take this seriously?"

  "Has anyone threatened you?"

  Weird scowled. "No."

  "Have you had any unexplained telephone hang-ups?"

  "No."

  "And have you noticed anyone hanging round your home?"

  Weird looked at Alex, who shook his head.

  "Then I'm sorry, there's nothing I can do."

  "Yes, there is," Alex said. "You can ask for a new analysis of the paint that was found on Rosie Duff's cardigan."

  Karen's eyes widened in astonishment. "How do you know about the paint?"

  Frustration lent an edge to Alex's voice. "We were witnesses. Suspects, in all but name. You think we didn't notice when your colleagues scraped our walls and stuck Sellotape all over our carpets? So how about it, DC Pirie? How about actually trying to find out who killed Rosie Duff?"

  Needled by his words, Karen drew herself up straight. "That's exactly what I've been doing for the past couple of months, sir. And the official view is that a paint analysis would not be cost effective, given the remoteness of the possibility of finding any sort of match after all this time."