Habit and Repute

The records that marked him are the only records that can clear him.

Detective Sergeant Morven Tait runs the Legacy Unit at Gartcosh, a small room that works through what a search across eight old Scottish police forces' paper turns up. One overnight run puts forty-four old convictions on its register, and thirty-eight of them share a single word. It is not a method or a place. It is the word officers in the 1980s wrote down when the person in front of them was a Traveller.

The system is not broken. It has found, perfectly, what the files say.

Among the thirty-eight is a murder on the Black Isle in October 1988. A crofter's widow was killed in her cottage. An elderly neighbour told the police she had seen a young Traveller at the gate, and a nineteen-year-old was convicted on her evidence and a pair of boots. He served twenty-five years. He has not said a word to a police officer since, and nobody in his community has any reason to talk to Tait now.

There is nothing left to test. There is only paper: a statement taken in English from a woman who spoke Gaelic, through a constable doing his best, and an index card filled in by torchlight in a Perthshire lay-by, a hundred and twenty miles from the Black Isle.

Habit and Repute is the fourth Legacy Unit novel: a Scottish police procedural about who gets written down, and why.