Donald Murchison tried his hardest to keep at arms-length from the investigation into his son's disappearance, but after a very frustrating month, the lack of progress eventually spurred him into action.

Being a part prosecutor and part investigator, the Procurator Fiscal has a lot of leeway in what they do and how they do their job. Donald had become frustrated at the lack of progress by the Police. Their almost instant dismissal of the large bunch of red roses, as a major clue was just plain wrong in his eyes. He'd told the Police right at the outset that his son would never buy red roses for anyone, but they didn't act on this at all. No matter how much he protested, progress in the case stalled. Donald knew the next step would be to put it into the ‘Cold Case’ file and promptly forget all about it.

Donald was left with no other choice but to do some sleuthing on his own. His first step was to consult the ‘HOLMES’ [1] system.

What was little more than a hunch soon revealed itself to be very significant indeed. Just asking the system 'had there been any missing person cases where; a very large bunch of red roses was left behind' produced immediate results.

Seven different cases had involved the roses. Two cases were related to women who had gone missing on or around Valentine's day and had been resolved within a week. The remaining five, which included his son involved young adult males and none of them had been closed. What surprised Donald, even more, was the period over which the cases had been reported. The oldest dated back to 1986, some thirty years ago. To his mind, this meant that it was highly unlikely that a single person was behind the disappearances.

This discovery left Donald with a bit of a problem. By rights, he should have gone back to the Police and updated them about his discovery. Instead, he began to collate what information he could. He was convinced that all of these cases were linked. There was an itch that needed scratching.

To find out that there were several similar cases in just one search on HOLMES made Donald very annoyed. Why couldn't the Police have done the same search as him? It only took a few minutes but they didn't. This was all down to the tickbox regime that was modern policing. Thinking outside the box was a dying art at least in the Lothian Police Force.

Donald put those frustrations behind him and concentrated on the search results.

All the outstanding cases involved young men who were not high flyers in the business world. None of them had attended University for more than one term. Yet, none of them was in his eyes, an outright failures in their lives. None had a criminal record. Only one had a driving conviction which was a single fixed penalty notice for a faulty tyre. None of the more recent cases had any significant presence on social media. The picture he was getting was that of a group of very normal young men who were almost invisible in our increasingly connected society. They were all ‘loners’. To Donald, all these cases were linked but no matter how hard he tried, he could not fathom out why this was.

After even more reflection Donald began to admire these young men. To have such a small little internet footprint in the second decade of the 21st century was an admirable achievement.

The downside of their invisibility was that they were the ideal candidates for abduction. In four of the five cases, the disappearance had not been reported for almost a week after their last sighting. What was most worrying to him was that his son was the third disappearance in a little over a year.

Their geographic spread from Edinburgh to Newcastle to two towns south of London was troublesome. If organised crime, was behind this then it would need an organisation that had almost nationwide coverage and to his knowledge, no such organisation existed.

If they had been abducted then where were the ransom demands? There were none.

Donald sat on his findings until he returned home that evening when he briefed his wife.

At the end he said,
“Almost all of these other cases show the missing person travelling alone on public transport for several hours after they left home. To my mind, that rules out abduction unless blackmail was involved.”

“But William wasn’t gay, was he?” argued Heather.

“As far as we know he wasn’t.”
Then Donald remembered something.

“Remember how he’d stand looking at the window displays in Frazers and other stores along Princes Street? Weren’t they all women’s clothes he was looking at?”

Heather remembered her son over a decade ago being fascinated by women’s fashion. They’d put it down to puberty kicking in and, in any case, it hadn’t lasted.

“You don’t suppose…?” said Heather.
It was almost as if she was too scared to say the word.

“Suppose what?” asked Donald.

“Suppose he liked to dress up in women’s clothes?”

“Like a Transvestite?”

“Wouldn’t we have found some evidence of that in his clothes when we went through them?”

"Yes… Well, we should have but, there was nothing. No girly magazines either."

Heather laughed.

“Remember when you got caught with a copy of Playboy by your Father?”

Donald shuddered as the memory came back. It was not a pleasant one.
“Don’t remind me. That almost put me off women for life. I was grounded for a whole year and made to go to confession three times a week to ‘cleanse my body of evil thoughts’.”

“That didn’t stop us from meeting on the bus going to and from school, did it?”

Donald loved his wife dearly, and that love stemmed from how she'd helped him get through the punishment that had been dished out with a good deal of venom by his deeply religious parents.
That, and many other events had turned him away from religion. The last straw with his parents was compounded by the fact that he was marrying a protestant from the wrong side of the city. Even worse, they were getting married in a registry office. He'd been banished from his family ever since. Their loss of face in their world had been too much to bear.

Even the news of their grandson’s disappearance had not broken the ice between Donald and his now elderly parents. Every time Donald remembered his last encounter with them, the word 'excommunicate' rang around his brain. Both of his parents had decided to cease all contact with him. From then on, he was no longer their son. Every so often, he'd encounter families like that in his official capacity of Procurator Fiscal. Most of the time, the cases were pretty ugly before he got involved, and there was very little that he could do to rectify matters but every so often, his personal experience helped sort things out so that people could at least get on with their lives without threatening to kill each other.

Donald dragged his thoughts back to the here and now.
“There is a lot we didn’t know about William isn’t there despite our door always being open to him.”

"Telling your parents that you are gay is one thing, but telling them that you should have been born a different gender, is another thing entirely. Everything that the parents wished and hoped for their child, could very well be torn down in seconds."

“You sound as if you have experienced that at work?” asked Donald.

Heather was a teacher at the nearby ‘Trinity Academy’. She taught Maths to 15 and 16-year-olds.

"We had one case last year where a girl came out as trans and completed the year living as a boy. His parents split up over it, and the father took his own life just before easter last year."

"Oh yes. I remember it. I didn't take the case as coroner because the family lived in Dudley Crescent and had known them when I was growing up in Dudley Avenue. I read the reports after the case was over. It was very nasty.”

“We are speculating, aren’t we?” asked Heather.
“There is no evidence that William was like that at all?”

Donald held his wife of almost thirty years hand. He knew that she was troubled.
"I know, so don't worry yourself over anything. We just don't know what reason or reasons triggered William to disappear so suddenly."

“Do the Police have any idea where he went when he left here?”

"All they know is that he took the last train to Queen Street, and then he disappeared until just before six when he took the first train to Ayr. After that, he disappeared. There, is a fuzzy video of someone looking like William getting onto a ferry to Belfast a few hours later. They are waiting for any CCTV evidence from the PSNI, but I'm not holding out much hope."

“So, they don’t have a clue?” asked Heather.

“Not surprising with Clouseau in charge.”

‘Clouseau' was the nickname the Procurator Fiscal department had given to Chief Inspector Connors due to his almost innate ability to crash any of the force's cars, that he was allowed to drive. Now he had a constable assigned to drive him everywhere. The cost of that was less than the cost to the force of damaged police cars.

Heather looked worried.
"That tells me that HQ doesn't regard the son of the P-F going missing as a high priority.”

"Don't worry, my dear. I'm going to rope in some help."

“Help? Who will go against Clouseau, when his father is Minister of Justice at Holyrood?”

"No one here, and that's a racing certainty. That's why I'm going to give Lee Greenaway a call tomorrow."

“Lee? What can the FBI do?”

“I want him to search their files for any ‘Red Roses’ cases.”

Heather looked worried.
“Why on earth would there be?”

"Whoever is behind these disappearances is very well organised. William knew exactly, what to do, where to go when the Red Roses appeared. The same goes for the others if the information on HOLMES is correct. That needs organisation and a good one."

“And you think that there might be more cases like this?”

“There might be so. Isn't it worth asking the question? Besides, there is nothing to lose, is there?"

“I know but…”

"I'm worried as well, but I have to try to remove any emotion and think logically. If I don't, then, there not much is no hope in us finding William."

Heather looked sad but didn’t answer her husband. Both of them were thinking the unthinkable but dared not say it out loud.

Other duties got in the way of Donald calling his friend Lee Greenaway at the FBI. Lee was an instructor at the FBI HQ at Quantico near Washington D.C. They'd become friends when a US Army Captain, had been murdered during the Edinburgh Festival/Fringe about a decade earlier. Lee was, at the time, the FBI liaison officer at their Embassy in London and had travelled north to help out with the investigation. His job had been made more complicated because the suspected killer was a Corporal in his unit. The Corporal had gone AWOL from their base in Germany. It was later discovered that this was to get even with the captain, for apparently sleeping with his wife. Because of the thousands and thousands of people who flock to Edinburgh every August for the Festival and Fringe, Hotel beds for miles around were non-existent, so Donald had offered Lee a room at his home for the duration of his part of the investigation. They soon became firm friends and had remained in contact even after Lee's assignment in London had come to an end.

It was more than a day later before Donald had the time to make the call to Washington.
“Lee? Donald.”

"Yes, I'm fine, and so is Heather. How's Alice?"

“Good to know.”

“No, this is not a social call. I need a favour.”

“William has gone missing.”

“Yes, they are involved but… they are not very interested in a missing person when the juicy underbelly of political society, here in Scotland, is being exposed on an almost daily basis.”

"Yeah. That's right. Once the fairly notorious MSP, Gregor MacBain took a dive out of the window of a Grassmarket brothel while high on Skunk is far too juicy for the media and the Police to ignore, especially when his records show a plethora of government officials and politicians under his thumb. Twenty senior civil servants have already resigned. There will be a good number of politicians getting a bit itchy under the collar before this all blows over. By contrast, a missing person is just not on their list of things to do even if it is the son of the Procurator Fiscal."

“William just disappeared into thin air. No warning, no nothing.”

"The mystery was that he left without taking any clothes, credit cards and phone, but he did leave behind a large bunch of red roses. I mean large in that there were 30 stems in the bunch."

“HOLMES brought up five other possible cases. I was wondering if…”

"You got it in one, Lee. Is it possible?"

“I can make it official if you want?”

“I’ll send you an email right away.”

“I’d like for there to be zero hits on VICAP[2] or whatever you call it this week.”

"Thanks, Lee. I owe you one."

Donald heard nothing from Lee that day. He didn't expect it because he knew that Lee had other duties to perform, and it might be late that evening before he heard anything from Washington, even if it was just a message to say that it was 'work in progress.

It was more than a full day before Donald heard from Lee. As soon as Lee spoke, Donald knew that something was wrong.

"What's, wrong Lee?"

“What? How many?”

“But… Lee… Fifty-three similar cases in the past thirty years is serial killer land. Surely no one has thought to do that simple search before?”

“That makes things a little difficult. Perhaps we should forget the whole thing?”

“They have? You got my email requesting help?”

“Why? Do those people at the DOJ have something to hide?”

“Oh. I see. If one of those missing is the estranged son of a former Secretary of State, then I can see why it would want to be kept quiet especially, with the Presidential Election just a month and a half away.”

Donald thought for several seconds before answering Lee’s next question.
“Perhaps a leak to say the Guardian from this side of the Pond might make a few people get off their backsides and start investigating?”

"Ok, Lee. Just be discrete. I'll hold fire from this end, but it is clear that that there is a lot more to this than meets the eye."

"Give my love to the family. Don't be a stranger, ok. You know how much Alice liked the Festival and Fringe. Heather would love to have you stay with us next year even if this has not been resolved by then."

“Yeah. Bye.”

Donald put the phone down and began to think about what he should tell his wife. Heather had started to pester him about any results of the inquiries from the USA. One thing was very clear to Donald, in that he was not going to mention the Secretary of State to his wife.

He also considered asking to see the First Minister. She could formally ask for help from London, now that there was a clear connection between the UK and US cases.

Donald felt the frown lines on his face growing deeper by the minute. Not for the first time, he considered that it might be time to retire.

[to be continued]
[1] Home Office Large Major Enquiry System
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HOLMES_2
[2] VICAP is the FBI Violent Criminal Apprehension Programme.