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pregnant, he had been kind. He had put
his arm round her and she had nestled into him, feeling his heart
thumping in his chest. He was trying to work out what the hell to
do next. She knew he would not want the baby. She was nineteen, he
was twenty-one. He had just graduated. A law firm had already
grabbed him, he was so good. He chose his words carefully. It was
the beginning of their life together, he said. They weren’t ready
for a baby. She had to finish her degree. Do her PhD. She thought
she felt the same way. She didn’t want a baby. She wanted a career.
And that’s what she got.
    Edward never
even came to the hospital (it was better that way, he explained).
Edward had never seen his son at all.
    Rhona could
hardly bear the memory of it all. This had not happened to her for
a long time. This thinking and feeling. Thinking about stuff that
could never be changed. And the guilt. She shook her head and her
eyes were so full of tears that the trees dissolved together,
leaves into branches, branches into trunks, in a crazy
kaleidoscope. This hadn’t happened for years. She had thought it
would never happen again. She looked in her pocket for something to
wipe her eyes. She should have stayed away from him. Well away.
Even professionally their paths rarely crossed. Edward was not a
criminal lawyer. Crimes of passion were not his style. They were
too messy. Like having a baby at the wrong time.
    Rhona sat down
on a bench and an old man looked round as if he might speak to her,
so she coughed into her hankie and wiped her nose and grinned at
him as he muttered something about the rain being on its way. Thank
God, she thought, for the shitey Scottish fucking weather. If it
rains, no one will see me cry.
    And it did.
Above her the clouds rolled in, thick and grey. She watched as it
speckled round her feet, felt the drops fall singly on her head,
then in multiples. She got up and began to walk, holding her face
up to the downpour.
    When she got
back to the lab, there was a message for her on the desk. She
looked guiltily at the clock above the door. Two o’clock. She must
have been wandering about for at least two hours. She hung up her
wet coat and went and washed her face and combed her hair, then sat
down at her desk.
    Chrissy’s
message on the pad was brief. Rhona could smell annoyance in the
sweep of the pen and the final period that threatened to pierce the
paper. Chrissy was peeved about her disappearance ‘when there was
urgent work to be done’. She had had to go over to the chemistry
lab with some flakes of paint she’d found in the jacket pocket and
she hadn’t had a chance to start on the semen stains. And DC Clarke
had been on the phone from DI Wilson’s office looking for
results.
    Rhona settled
down to do the work she should have been doing instead of listening
to Edward patronise her. Chrissy had meticulously entered the
results from her tests in the lab notebook. The rest was in her
notes. She’d examined the boy’s clothes in detail and taken samples
from the collar and cuffs of his jacket for DNA purposes.
Everything was standard teenage wear that could be bought in a
variety of shops throughout the country and so unlikely to help
them find out who he was. She had found some fibres on the jeans
which still had to be analysed. She had also established the boy’s
blood group from the sample taken from his arm the previous night
and compared it to the large bloodstain on the bed. There was no
surprise in the match. The boy was type A, as were approximately
forty-two per cent of the UK population. As for semen and other
blood samples on the cover, there was a lot of material still to
cover. Oh, and Dr Sissons had sent round the silk cord for them to
examine. He had finished with it now that he’d established the
cause of death.
    Rhona sat down
at the comparison microscope to check the control hair she’d taken
from the boy’s head against the two hairs (dark and blonde) she’d
found on his body.