Stuart Pawson - Limestone Cowboy

"Oh, I see," I said. "And what about the grave? Have you verified that it was the right grave?"

"Oh, yes, we got the right grave, no doubt at all about that."

Hallelujah.

I dashed home, not content with the verbal report. I wanted to see it written down, neatly typed in appropriate language. Only then would I believe it.

My job is to catch criminals. Juries determine who is guilty, parliament decides on the penalties, judges apply them, prison officers carry them out. I just catch them. All the rest has nothing to do with me. A jobsworth, that's what I am; just another jobsworth.

Yesterday I came within an ace of handing Debra Grainger her gloves and telling her to take more care of them. Walking away. But then I remembered Mrs Norcup, banged up in some smelly secure ward with nothing to walk away from, no one to give her a break, so I did my job and left things to the courts.

And now this. The envelope was lying on the mat when I opened the door. I ripped it open and unfolded the single sheet of paper. I read it and re-read it, standing in the doorway. Then I read the conclusions again, looking for the weasel words or double negatives or a misplaced not, but there was nothing there. What it said was what it meant, and that was exactly what the cocky young scientist had told me on the phone. I re-folded the sheet, ran my thumbnail down the folds until they were as sharp as a blade and replaced it in the envelope. I pulled the door shut and walked back to the car.

I don't know why I came all the way up here. I had to go somewhere, get in the car and drive, and this was where it started. I parked at the end of the track and ducked under the barrier. The grass was longer and browner and the trees looked heavier, more sinister. Bethesda quarry is wedge-shaped, like a piece from a cake laid on its side, and a track made by a big-wheeled vehicle runs down one edge all the way to the bottom. Two burnt out cars stand at the top of the slope, slowly returning to nature. The body shells have disintegrated but the oil-covered engines are resisting change. They might last out for five or ten years, even twenty or a hundred, but in this temple to evolution that was nothing.

Long time ago I heard a definition of eternity. Imagine a rock a thousand miles high. Once every thousand years a bird lands on the rock, wipes its beak on it and flies off. When the bird had worn the rock away, that will be the first second of the dawn of eternity.

The sky was heavy with clouds the colour of ditchwater except for one patch of blue off to the south, almost perfectly rectangular in shape and edged in silver. If you painted a sky like that people would tell you it looked wrong. Rosie had said that these rocks were laid down three hundred million years ago. The bird had hardly started its work.

I was at the bottom. I searched until I found it, standing on end in a crack in the rock face like a miniature statue in a cathedral wall. It was smaller than I remembered, less impressive. Three nondescript fossils of long-extinct creatures crushed together in a chunk of limestone, enjoying their five minutes of fame after a long, dark wait. I rubbed my thumb over them and over the marks left by Rosie's chisel. One thing was certain: nobody would be doing the same to any of us after that length of time.

It was hot down there in the secret world of the quarry, the stone walls radiating the heat they had stored in the last few days. A square of rocks and a pile of ashes marked where someone had lit a fire, their empty beer cans mixed in with the dead embers. It sounded fun. A campfire and a couple of beers; what could be nicer? What was it Debra Grainger had said? Simple gifts? I turned and hurled the clump of fossils as hard as I could into the trees at the far side. It arced through the air, spinning, until I lost it against the shadows and then found it again as it rustled the leaves in its fall to earth, its return to obscurity. No birds flew away, startled by the intrusion, or maybe they couldn't be bothered.

A spot of rain fell on me. I found a boulder and sat on it, near where the class of '02 had hung on to every word the teacher said. Well, one of them had. I reached into» my inside pocket and removed two envelopes. One of them Held the tickets for that evening's performance at the Playhouse. I took them out, studied them for a long minute and then tore them into thin strips that I let flutter down around my feet. If nature could return a car to its organic state it would make short shrift of a couple of theatre tickets. The Dream had turned into a nightmare, and it fell upon me to deliver it.

The next envelope held the report from the lab, sitting on my doormat as innocently as a newborn sparrow when I returned home.

"The bad news," the scientist had told me on the telephone, "is that you got the wrong man. Abraham Barraclough didn't kill Glynis Williams." Then, when I'd finished wittering about the right or wrong grave, he'd added with an air of triumph: "But would you like me to tell you the good news?"

I preferred the dispassion of the report to his gloating tones, and unfolded the single A4 sheet.

The bones from A, it said, were examined using a sex test and ten variable regions ofDNA. They were male in origin.

The blood B from under the fingernails was examined and also found to be male in origin but it did not match the profile obtained from A, indicating that this blood could not have come from A.

That's all we wanted to know, but there was more:

However, the profile obtained from B did show 5 of the 10 alleles present in the sample from A. These are the results we would expect if B were the natural father or son of A, The DNAfrom sample C was examined and found to be female in origin and also showed half of the alleles present in sample A such that the results fully support the allegation that C is the natural daughter of A.

My head ached with the clunking of pieces falling into place.

Rosie's father was everything she believed he was, and a lot more. He was kind and courageous, compassionate and wise, and he burned with a love for his children.

But her brother, who ran away to sea, was a murderer.

Abraham Barraclough had seen his son come off the hillside that fateful evening, and later, after the girl's body was found, he'd seen the scratches on the boy's neck. When they started testing for blood groups he knew it was only a matter of time before the truth was revealed, so he took action to protect those he loved.

He probably grilled the boy — I didn't even know his name — until he dragged out of him a few intimate details, like the colour of Glynis's underwear. Then he scratched his own neck and went to the police station to confess to a murder. A joyful DCI Henry Ratcliffe recorded his statement and later that night Barraclough hanged himself. The case was closed.

I may have had a few details wrong, but there was no doubt about the overall truth of my theory. The son would be about forty-three now. Tomorrow, or the next day, or next week, wherever he was, two detectives from Dyfed would walk up his garden path, or ask his captain if they could see him, and he'd be arrested for a murder that he thought was long forgotten. Big blobs of rain were falling on the dry grass around my feet, stirring the stalks, promising a renewal of life.

And it was my job to tell his sister. A dog barked and I heard children laughing, somewhere outside the quarry. In a few days they'd all be back at school. It was the gala tomorrow but I wouldn't be there. I didn't know where I'd be. A magpie landed about twenty feet away, saw me and flew off, complaining loudly about the intrusion. I turned my face upwards to catch the raindrops. The square of blue sky had stretched out into a rhombus and a jetliner was crawling across it, leaving a silver trail behind like a snail across a window.