Eight police forces. One cupboard. Thirty-five years of paper nobody has read twice.When Police Scotland was assembled in 2013 out of eight legacy forces, their records did not become one thing. They stayed eight things in one building, in eight filing systems, in three warehouses. Now the last archive migration is finishing, and for the first time a single question can be put to all of it at once.The question is simple. Find me cases that resemble each other.Detective Sergeant Morven Tait has spent eleven months working the answers, and most of the answers are rubbish. She has learned to tell a genuine resemblance from two officers using the same form of words in different decades.Then flag 412 comes up on an ordinary Tuesday morning at Gartcosh. A murder in Lanarkshire in 1993, long closed, a man convicted. An attempted murder on the Angus coast in 1997, never solved. And in both files, in a productions schedule and a statement that no two people have ever read on the same day, the same small unexplained thing: both laces removed from a woman's shoes, one used, one taken away.There is no unit that owns a discovery like that. There is no procedure for it and, as a detective superintendent tells her in March, there is no form. There is only a man who has been in HMP Shotts since he was twenty-one, a woman in Arbroath who was told for thirty-one years that she was confused about her own boots, a shed in Dalmarnock with eleven metres of racking in it, and a rule of Scots law which holds that being certain proves nothing at all.To get anywhere, Tait will have to break one rule that she cannot take back.The Second Source is the first of the Legacy Unit novels: a Scottish police procedural about archives, corroboration, and the quiet administrative act of deciding that a question has already been answered. Read more
