Sufficiency

He told the Parole Board he did it. That is how he got out.

In 2001 a jury convicted Martin Keir of murdering a seventeen-year-old girl in Kirkcaldy, and the country has known his face ever since. The tabloids named him the Kirkcaldy Strangler. Her mother has campaigned in her name for twenty-nine years. In 2024, after more than two decades of denial, he told a parole tribunal that he accepted responsibility, and he was released to a recycling yard in Fife.

Detective Sergeant Morven Tait runs the Legacy Unit at Gartcosh, three desks that work through what a cross-archive search turns up in eight old police forces' paper. Most of it is rubbish. Entry 152 is a small thing: a badge on a cord, in a 1999 statement from Coatbridge and a 2003 statement from Lockerbie, two forces that never compared notes.

But the Coatbridge attack is part of the case against Keir. And under Scots law, the murder charge was only ever strong enough because of it.

If one half of a case falls, what is left of the other? Tait will need a jacket that has been missing from a warehouse for fourteen years, a retired detective in Dumfriesshire who kept a note, and the trust of a woman who was believed, honestly and completely, for thirty years. She will also need a man who does not want her help, a prosecutor whose own office built the case, and a mother who has every right to hate what the unit is doing.

Nobody will thank them for getting it right.

Sufficiency is the second Legacy Unit novel: a Scottish police procedural about evidence, belief, and the difference between being certain and having enough.