She didn’t promise him sex afterwards, but Rhona hoped that had been implied.

Conscience assuaged, Rhona now checked for any updates on the investigation that had arrived in her absence. Finding nothing of significance, she switched back to the transcript of McCreadie’s interviews, looking specifically for those he’d conducted with Alec McLaughlin.

McNab had questioned McCreadie at the recent strategy meeting about McLaughlin’s reappearance and his suggestion that Mary had been pregnant. McCreadie had been dismissive of anything McLaughlin had said, calling him an inveterate liar, who also had an alibi for the time Mary had gone missing.

McCreadie’s notes on this were easy to find, because they were frequent. He’d obviously spoken to McLaughlin on a number of occasions but had been unable to disprove his alibi. The first mention of McLaughlin was shortly after the interviews with the two families.

McLaughlin was sixteen, but he seemed way older, both in looks and attitude. I confess I didn’t like him from the outset. He didn’t like the police either. He also didn’t like most folk on the street. He knew the missing girl ‘to look at’, but not any more than that. ‘She’s too young for me, anyway.’ He repeated that a few times. He was living with an aunt after abandonment by his mother at three, followed by time in the care system. ‘Fucking Catholic orphanage. You should be jailing them for what they did to kids like me. After that my mad auntie and her drunkard husband. I’m there to keep him off her.’ When I asked him to elaborate, he wouldn’t, just made a gesture that suggested they were ‘doing it’. I’ve met young blokes like him before and it always ends badly. For women in particular. I think he’s predatory. I know he’s been watching Mary and Karen when they play outside. Robbie the brother hates him, but is adamant that the priest is implicated, not creepy Alec. And he’s got an airtight alibi.

‘What is it?’ Rhona found herself saying. Whatever it was, it wasn’t mentioned here. Rhona did a word search and, jumping back in the document, she found it.

Alec maintains he was in the woods at the time Mary went missing. Robbie confirms he saw him there.

So Robbie McIntyre, later championed by DI McCreadie, was McLaughlin’s alibi. Rhona assumed McNab was aware of this; after all, he’d asked the former DI about McLaughlin’s announcement that he’d spotted Robbie in the woods that day.

Did Robbie acknowledge McLaughlin’s presence in the woods back then in exchange for his silence about what Robbie and his mate were doing there? Did Robert, as he now called himself, still maintain Alec McLaughlin’s alibi for that time? And had he stayed certain in his belief that the priest was the one to hold the truth of Mary’s abduction and death?

Whatever role McLaughlin had or hadn’t played in Mary’s disappearance, he was no longer capable of either lying or telling the truth about it now.