Disclosure

The file was never empty.

In December 2007 a bookmaker's cashier in Grangemouth was stabbed at closing time. Within two days the police had the man who did it. He confessed, a jury convicted him, and nobody has ever doubted the verdict, least of all him.

Detective Sergeant Morven Tait runs the Legacy Unit at Gartcosh, a small room that works through what a search across eight old police forces' paper turns up. Most of it is rubbish. Entry 183 is a phrase about a man's ear, in a closed Grangemouth file and an unsolved Edinburgh one.

Reading the Grangemouth file properly, the unit finds a statement from a fourteen-year-old girl who saw something nobody followed up. It was taken carefully. It was read. And it never reached the prosecutor.

There are two names written on it, in two different hands. One belongs to an officer who is now among the most senior in Scotland. The other belongs to the man who founded the Legacy Unit and has protected it ever since.

With its protector forced to step aside and a Bill to govern the unit going through Parliament, every careful person in the building has a reason to slow Tait down. To finish what the girl started, she will need a witness who no longer remembers what she saw, and a convicted man who has kept one secret for twenty-four years.

Disclosure is the third Legacy Unit novel: a Scottish police procedural about what institutions decide not to send, and what that decision costs.