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mother-in-law’s ample form squeezed into a fancy bathing suit that looked like an exhibit from the Chelsea Flower Show. She was building sandcastles with Amy and beaming with pride.
                  He had to hand it to Carol’s mum. She was great with kids. His own granny had barely laid down a fag for long enough to play with him or his sister. His Da’s parents were long dead. Andy couldn’t recall what they looked like at all.
                  Pouring a small whisky and setting the glass down on the coffee table, Andy looked closely at the photographs laid out before him. He’d dug out all the old boxes and albums he could find, selecting those shots which included his uncle.
                  There was one of Donald in his late teens, with Andy sitting on his lap. He must have been about four or five in this picture. To anyone coming across this snapshot, they’d assume the two boys were brothers.
                  His grandmother would have been a fair age when she had Donald – well into her forties. It was more common to be an older mum these days but would have been unusual back in the sixties. Andy wondered why there’d been such a big age gap between his father and Donald. He supposed it had simply happened that way. There were no IVF treatments in those days. You had a bairn whenever Nature decided it was acceptable.
                  Calder had a thought. Maybe there’d been miscarriages in between. The idea had honestly never occurred to him before. It wasn’t something that was on his radar as a young lad. Only since Carol had begun looking into fertility treatments had he started considering these things properly. It wasn’t a topic he would have dwelt on otherwise.
                  Andy glanced back at the photo. Don was wearing a pair of flared jeans and his dark hair was worn long and loose. Typical seventies get-up. Calder had adored his uncle. Don played the base guitar with a band for a while, when he was in his early twenties. Andy had thought he was a kind of Rock God. He couldn’t have been more impressed if the guy was Jim Kerr himself.
                  Calder chuckled quietly, taking a slug of Scotch. Then he felt the tears prickling at his eyes. He saw the image of his Da’s face before him, back when they were told that Don was missing. It was as if his bone structure had suddenly turned to jelly. Jack Calder was heartbroken. The jury was still out on whether Andy’s father had ever properly recovered.
                  He wiped the dampness away from his cheeks with the back of his hand, sifting through more of the photographs and papers. Only the Calder family ever knew that Don had suffered from depression in the months leading up to his disappearance. They agreed at the time not to tell the investigating officer. Andy’s uncle had never sought treatment for the condition, but his black moods were becoming more noticeable and frequent during the summer of 2005.
                  Mae remained adamant that her husband wouldn’t have taken his own life. Andy’s father was never so sure. Jack was certain that Don threw himself into White Cart Water, his body being swept into the wash of the Clyde and eventually out to sea.               But Mae insisted that the police should concentrate on finding Don alive, so she made the rest of the family swear they’d never speak of his battle with mental illness. Andy could see why she’d done it. The police may have stopped looking properly if they’d known, especially back then, when attitudes towards mental health problems were different than they were now.
                  Calder polished off the whisky and sat back against the sofa cushions, staring up at the ceiling, the heavy glass lying empty in his lap. This case in Giffnock changed everything. The circumstances were so similar it was startling. Andy had always