Trott picked up his water glass. His hand shook.

  ‘That wasn’t all,’ McGuire continued. ‘A couple of days later, the sniffer dogs that were sent in . . . they’re quite remarkable, you know . . . they found a second skeleton. This one was female; not only that, she was a mother. Changes in the pelvic bone showed that she had given birth. The pathologist is quite clear about her cause of death. There was damage to her skull that indicated massive brain injuries.’ He paused and drew a breath. ‘Are you with me so far, Mr Trott?’

  The man nodded, but his eyes fell away from the camera.

  ‘Good, I’ll go on. Now, these trees were planted thirty years ago, so the bodies must go that far back at least. Back then we’d never have been able to identify them, not from what we found, but science is always advancing. Today we can get DNA from mostly anywhere, and our scientists have done just that. They established that the bodies were the children of a man called Moses Aaron Trott. We believe that Moses Trott is your father, Mr Trott. That’s correct isn’t it?’

  The man on screen nodded. There was sweat on his forehead.

  ‘For a while, we thought that body was you, Mr Trott, just as we believe that the female skeleton is that of your sister Naomi. But then something even more unexpected happened. We found a hair on the cloth that your sister was buried in, and the wonders of DNA told us that a second son had been born to your father but not recorded anywhere. We couldn’t find him, Mr Trott but now we’ve found you, so we know it wasn’t you wrapped up in those tree roots.’ McGuire unlaced his fingers and laid his hands palms down on the table. ‘We’ve also found your father,’ he said, pausing as he saw the man’s eyes widen. ‘Yes, he’s still alive, Mr Trott. He’s of no help to us, though, not only because he’s been mutilated and can’t speak, but because he’s got dementia. Translate that from its Latin origin and he is as it suggests. His mind’s gone.’

  He paused for almost half a minute, letting Trott consider what he had been told. ‘Summing up what we know,’ he said, when he was ready, ‘your sister and brother were murdered and buried in a place that became a forest soon afterwards. There is evidence that suggests you put them there or helped to do that, helped your father perhaps, given that he was imprisoned for a subsequent homicide.’

  He leaned back, taking his arms off the table and gazing once again at the man on the screen. ‘That’s what we’ve got, Mr Trott,’ he said, ‘and this is your chance, with no comeback, to tell us what happened that night. If you can’t, or won’t, we believe that whatever your lawyer may tell you we will have enough evidence to persuade the Australian court to extradite you, and when we get you back here, to charge you with murder. This is your chance, on the other hand, to persuade us that we shouldn’t do that. I’m going to pause this interview,’ he declared, ‘to give you ten minutes to think it over and also because it’s the middle of the night here and we need a coffee. Is that all right with you?’

  Wide-eyed and sweating, Samuel Trott shook his head. ‘It was my dad,’ he cried out. ‘He did it! He killed Naomi and Tony. And likely he’d have killed the bairn too, if I hadn’t come in and stopped him.’

  ‘Mr McGuire,’ Mullen, leaning close hissed in the DCC’s ear, ‘we need to caution him now.’

  ‘Shut up or leave the room,’ he whispered. ‘That’s a police order. This is a one-off chance. I really do need a coffee; you can save some face by getting me one. Large. Black. Please.’

  Two seconds passed, then she rose. ‘Sugar?’ she asked.

  ‘Don’t be disgusting. I’m half Italian.’

  He turned back to the screen. ‘Calm yourself, please,’ he said, ‘then tell us what happened.’

  ‘It was the day my dad got out of jail,’ Trott began. ‘I was at work; Tony was picking him up from Perth Prison.’

  McClair intervened ‘Explain exactly who Tony was, please. We know your father had another son, and we know that he and Tony were in court together, but Tony’s birth certificate shows someone else as his father.’

  ‘Maybe it does, but Tony was my brother all right. His other father, the name on the birth certificate, worked on big electrical installations. He was away for weeks at a time and my dad, you might say, deputised for him. Maybe the guy never figured it out, but everybody else did. The older Tony got the more he looked like my dad. Anyway,’ he continued, ‘the plan was that Tony would bring him home and then Naomi would bring the baby round for him to see. She was no more than a couple of weeks old, the wee one. They hadn’t even registered the birth yet. It all happened after my dad went away. Tony went to visit him inside, but we agreed that we wouldn’t tell him about it until he got out. A nice surprise, we thought, him being a grandad.’

  Trott shuddered; he sipped water, calming himself. ‘So we thought,’ he resumed, then fell silent for a few moments. ‘I came in from work,’ he said quietly, ‘and I walked into hell. There was my dad, with eyes like I’d never seen before. He was drunk, he had my baseball bat in his hands, and he was standing over the basket, where the baby was screaming. Naomi was on the floor. The back of her head was smashed in and I knew right away she was dead. Tony, he was on the sofa with a knife sticking out of him. I stared at my dad. “She’s a fuckin’ hoor!” he howled at me, “She’s a fuckin’ hoor!”’

  He stopped, taking a deep breath. ‘And then I realised,’ he sighed, ‘Naomi had always been his pride and joy, his only one. For her to have a kid without a husband . . . We should have known he wouldn’t like it, but we’d never have imagined that he’d go that crazy. My dad was a real monster; I’ve had thirty years since then to live with knowing that. I suppose I always knew, even from being a kid but I didn’t realise until that day just how much of a monster he was.’

  ‘What did you do that day, when you found him?’ McGuire asked, grasping the coffee that Mullen had given him.

  ‘I thumped him,’ Trott replied. ‘I knocked him into his chair. I might not look it now, but I was a hard boy then. Nobody messed with me. I took the bat off him and I told him that if he moved, his brains would be on the floor. Then I went to help Tony. He was still conscious; he told me what had happened, that Naomi had arrived with the baby. She gave my dad a big smile, and she said, “Look what I’ve got,” and that was it. He stared at her then he looked into the pram and he went berserk. Tony said his eyes stood out like organ stops. He said he picked up the bat and he hit her with it, once, twice, three times. When Tony grabbed the bat and tried to stop him, he said my dad picked up a steak knife off the table and stuck it in him.’ Trott’s face became a mask of horror. ‘And then Tony passed out,’ he said, ‘and a wee bit later he was dead too.’

  ‘And you?’ McClair gazed at the man, half a world away. ‘What did you do?’

  He stared back at her from the screen. ‘I did the only thing I could think to do. I called Mr McCullough.’

  ‘What made you do that?’ McGuire asked him, quietly, even though he knew what the answer could be.

  ‘He was the baby’s father,’ Sammy Trott replied. ‘He was my niece’s father. He and Naomi had been together for over a year. It happened after she left her job in the council and went to work in a casino, Juniper, it was called, as a trainee croupier. Mr McCullough owned it, he liked Naomi, she liked him and they got together. He came to the house once or twice. I liked him, he even got me work. After a few months he moved Naomi into a flat above the Juniper; lovely place it was, with a view back down the river. He was there a lot but he never moved in himself. Nobody talked about it, mind; very few folk even knew. I did, Tony did, but none of his family.’

  He sipped more water. ‘Mr McCullough was married,’ he continued. ‘He made no secret of it. But he also said he could never leave his wife, because they’d been together for ever and because she wasn’t well. One time he told me that she was clinically depressed and it was all their daughter’s fault. Inez, her name was; she’d been a few years behind me at the school and even in her early teens she was wild. She took after her aunt, who was a fucking hoodlum; most of the drugs in Dundee came into the city through her. She was banned from all of Mr McCullough’s places, but that never held her back, because his customers were nearly all straight folk.

  ‘Anyway,’ Trott went on, ‘when Naomi was pregnant and getting near her time, Mr McCullough moved her to another place he owned, beside Loch Lomond. She had the baby in a private clinic in Glasgow. They called her Cameron, after him. Naomi said that was her idea.’

  ‘When you called Mr McCullough,’ McClair continued, ‘what then?’

  ‘I told him what had happened. He was quiet for a while, then he told me to stay there, to look after the baby and keep my dad away from her until he got there. He sounded very calm, but I remember, I was scared. It was like I didn’t know him at all.’

  ‘When McCullough got there, what happened?’ she asked.

  Trott shuddered. ‘Something I wish I’d never seen, because I still have nightmares about it. He looked at Naomi, there on the floor, and he looked at Tony. Then he picked up the baby in her basket and the bag that Naomi had brought. There was milk in it. “Watch him,” he said, then he took the bairn away and he fed her; he gave her her bottle. I could see him through the kitchen door. When he was finished he put her back in the basket, gave her a wee kiss, and he came back into the living room. After that’s what still gives me nightmares.’

  Pure horror shone from the man’s eyes. ‘He never said a word, he just pulled the knife out of Tony’s side, got hold of my dad and carved a great big X into his forehead. Then, and this was the worst part of it, the bit I could never have imagined, he wrenched his mouth open and he cut out his tongue. He stood up; my dad was moaning, gurgling, making awful sounds and gagging on his own blood. Mr McCullough got a towel from the kitchen, stuffed it in his mouth, and told him to shut the fuck up. “That’s your life sentence,” he told him.’

  McGuire’s attention was drawn to AC Flatt, standing behind Trott. His tan had become pallid and his eyes registered shock. ‘Whose idea was it to bury the bodies?’ the DCC continued.

  ‘Mr McCullough said we had to. “If we don’t,” he said, “if all this comes out, my daughter will have to live her life knowing that her grandfather killed her mother just for having her. Jesus, Sammy,” he said, “what effect will that have on the poor wee darlin’?” He wasn’t worried about what he’d done to my dad. He knew he’d be too afraid to tell a soul who’d done it. All he was worried about was the baby, wee Cameron. He took her away then. I think he took her to the flat; he said he’d got Inez and told her to look after her or else. Funny, I was never worried about that; nobody on this earth would have crossed him that night.

  ‘When he came back, we took the bodies out the back, and put them in his Range Rover. I just huckled Tony out like he was drunk, but I found a table cloth and wrapped that around my sister. Mr McCullough drove us out towards Perth, to a place he said he was buying, and we buried them in a field there, after he’d stripped most of the clothes off Tony. Before, though,’ Trott shuddered, ‘he did something awful. He had a pair of garden shears and he cut off their fingertips. In case they were discovered quickly, he said. “Give me a few weeks,” he said, “and I’ll make sure they’re never discovered, but just in case . . .” He was well wrong about them never being found, it seems.’

  ‘Afterwards?’ McGuire persisted.

  ‘He told me to sit tight and let things settle. My dad was in hospital by then. Mr McCullough had told him to walk to Ninewells casualty. “Or jump in the river,” he said. “Say a word and that’s where you’ll wind up.” A couple of weeks later he came to see me. He gave me a plane ticket, one way, a bank book with enough Australian dollars in it to last me for a few years, a visa and an address in Melbourne where he said there would be a job waiting for me. He also told me never to get in touch with anyone back home. He said that if I did and it affected wee Cameron in any way, he’d have me fed to the fucking Aussie crocodiles . . . and he fucking meant it.’

  Having told his story, the tension and the fear seemed to have left Trott. ‘I kept my word,’ he said. ‘It’s not my fault they were found. How is Mr McCullough anyway?’

  ‘He’s dead,’ McGuire said. ‘A stroke, last year.’

  Trott frowned. ‘Shame,’ he said, looking as if he meant it. ‘How about my dad?’

  ‘He’ll be joining him soon.’

  ‘That’s a pity. He should have gone thirty years ago, the bastard. You know, and I say this to an audience of cops, my one regret is not killing him myself.’ He smiled. ‘And wee Cameron? My niece, how about her?’

  ‘She’s fine too, Sammy, but,’ the DCC added, ‘should you ever think about selling this story to the papers, in Australia or anywhere else, remember those fucking crocodiles.’

  Ninety-One

  ‘I can manage one more of these, before I get the shakes,’ Mario McGuire said as Sauce Haddock put a mug of black coffee on a coaster. ‘I’ll probably wind up doing the school run when I get home, so I’d better be careful. I might pull rank after that and get a car to take me to the office.’

  ‘You’ve been here all night,’ the DCI pointed out. ‘Are you not going to take the morning off?’

  The DCC shook his head. ‘I can’t do that. I need to brief the chief on the interview.’

  ‘What’s the next step? You appreciate I have an interest in this?’

  ‘Only too well, chum,’ he confirmed. ‘The next step is, Maria Mullen talks to her boss. Then he’ll talk to his boss, the Crown Agent, and so on until it winds up with the Lord Advocate. The question will be, what do we do about Sammy Trott?’

  ‘What do you think their answer will be?’ Haddock asked.

  McGuire shrugged. ‘I don’t know, Sauce. Yes, Sammy gave us a graphic account of the murders and of his part in what happened afterwards, but as we knew, evidentially it isn’t worth a damn. For that he’d need to repeat it under caution, and he’d be crazy if he did that under threat of prosecution. Okay, we can place him at the burial site, and connect him to the body of his sister. That would probably be enough to secure his extradition over any legal objection. Fine, but in a trial will it be enough on its own to persuade eight out of fifteen Scottish jurors to convict him of murder, or anything else? I doubt that very much.

  ‘You want my guess, which is also my hope? The Lord Advocate will ask Sammy to turn his story into a signed statement, with a guarantee that he’ll be treated as a Crown witness in any prosecution of Moses Trott. Of course that’ll never happen, one, because there’s no corroboration of Sammy’s story and, two, because old Moses isn’t fit to plead and never will be. Yes, the Advocate might say, “We’ve got Sammy, we’ve got grounds to charge him, so let a jury decide,” but I don’t think he will.’ He drained half of the mug.

  ‘And Grandpa?’ Haddock murmured.

  ‘Grandpa’s dead.’

  Sauce nodded. ‘Dead after a lifetime of being fucking Teflon whenever evidence of crimes pointed in his direction. He can’t be tried, but the Lord Advocate can do pretty much anything he fucking likes. Noele has to make a report on the findings of the Black Shield Lodge inquiry to the Crown Office, and he’s going to see it. He might want to set up a non-judicial commission to examine the evidence.’

  ‘He might want it,’ McGuire agreed, ‘but he’d need the Justice Secretary to agree, and he’d probably also need the First Minister to sign off on it. We could probably stop that. I think the chief could persuade them to let it lie, for the sake of your wife and child.’

  ‘Could the gaffer help with that? He’s tight with the First Minister.’

  ‘I wouldn’t want to involve him, Sauce. We’re talking about the news story of the century. He’d have a massive conflict of interests, given his job.’

  ‘That’s true,’ Haddock acknowledged. ‘Look, sir,’ he exclaimed, ‘Beyond that, Cheeky knows already that Naomi Trott was her real mother. She’s having a hard enough time coping with that so, how much of the rest of the story does she need to know? From what you’re saying to me, it’s not going to court, so she isn’t going to find out that way how her mother died. Does she need to know who her father was? Couldn’t that stay a mystery’?

  ‘Doesn’t she have the right to know, Sauce?’ McGuire asked.

  ‘Yes, but does she need to?’ he repeated.

  ‘And if she decides she does? Sauce, I knew the truth before I heard it from Sammy. The chief constable asked me to arrange a DNA comparison, Cheeky’s against Inez. It proved beyond a shadow of a reasonable doubt that they were sisters. Your wife is a smart woman, lad. Sooner rather than later she’s going to ask for the same test to be run. When she does, she’ll realise that we must have known and you didn’t tell her. I don’t think you have a choice.’ He drained his mug and stood. ‘And now,’ he declared, ‘the school run awaits.’

  Ninety-Two

  From the kitchen window, Skinner watched his son as he led his sister and her classmate out of the garden and on their way to school. A few weeks more at primary and Jazz would be off to senior school. ‘He looks like a second-year already,’ he murmured.

  He was still digesting the story that Mario McGuire had told him, in a tired early morning call. From his understanding of the investigation he had thought it likely from the beginning that the murders were domestic but he had been taken aback to learn that one of the victims was Cheeky McCullough’s real mother, and shocked when McGuire had told him that Cameron had been involved personally in the cover-up.

  The fact that Grandpa was actually Cheeky’s father had come as no surprise. Sammy Trott’s confession had pre-empted the result of a test that Skinner had commissioned on a hair taken from McCullough’s old hairbrush, that Mia had given him. He had recognised that was the only explanation for the ruse of having the unruly and usually absent Inez claim parentage of the infant. It had allowed Cameron to bring his love child up himself without bringing any hint of scandal or betrayal to the door of his beloved Abigail.