by Val McDermid
Karen had expected a secretary or an assistant, but Giorsal herself came down to meet her at the reception desk. She hadn’t changed much. Her long hair was still obviously thick even though it was tied back in a ponytail, no apparent strands of silver in the brown yet. She was still slim to the point of skinny, though she’d filled out more in the bust. That was what child-bearing did for you, Karen thought without a shred of envy. The severe rectangular glasses were new, though. They raised Giorsal’s status, making her look like someone who took decisions and made things happen.
As the two women stepped into an awkward hug, Karen wondered what Giorsal saw. How much had she changed from that awkward overweight teenager who never seemed to know what to wear or how to style her hair? Now she was a slightly less overweight thirty-something who still stared into her wardrobe with an air of bewilderment and still never managed to make her hair look the same as it did when she walked out of the salon. She had more frown lines than Giorsal, which surprised her because she reckoned social workers were one of the few groups who were exposed to even more horrors than cops were.
‘Karen,’ Giorsal exclaimed, holding on to Karen’s shoulders and stepping back from the hug to look her up and down. ‘My God, I’d have known you anywhere.’
‘Check you out with your scary specs,’ Karen said. ‘You’re looking good.’
‘Liar. You could pack for a week’s holiday in the bags under my eyes.’ She let Karen go and waved an arm towards the stairs. ‘Come away up and we’ll have a proper blether.’
‘It’s good to see you,’ Karen said to Giorsal’s back as they climbed up to the first floor. ‘Whenever I’ve heard news of you over the years, I always felt sorry we’d lost touch.’
Giorsal gave a quick look over her shoulder. ‘I was so impressed when my mum told me you’d made DI. Serious business, that. And now DCI. Check you out, girl.’ She led the way into a small office. It was tidier than Karen could have managed. She expected to see photos of Giorsal’s kids on the desk and said so.
Giorsal dropped into her chair, gesturing towards the two visitors’ chairs facing her. She made a wry face. ‘I don’t like to shove my good fortune in people’s faces.’ Then she straightened up and leaned forward, forearms on the desk, face sombre. ‘I heard about your man,’ she said. ‘That’s a helluva thing to get past.’
‘I’m not there yet. Nothing like there, actually.’ Karen cleared her throat. She wasn’t ready to get into this with Giorsal. She half-hoped there would be a time when she would be, but it would be a way down the road. ‘Nice office, by the way.’
Giorsal snorted. ‘Make the most of it. We’re being shunted out of here in a few weeks. The council sold the building to CISWO for buttons and we’re joining the happy band at Fife House.’
‘CISWO?’
‘The Coal Industry Social Welfare Organisation.’
Karen nodded her understanding. Thirty years since Thatcher had killed off the Fife coalfield, and still the damage reverberated through the local economy and the communities who had depended on it. ‘Fair enough, I suppose,’ she said.
‘They need somewhere since the council decided to bulldoze their building to redevelop the town centre. But you didn’t come here to talk about town planning.’ She gave the engaging grin that Karen remembered, eyebrows steepling at an acute angle.
‘No. Look, Gus, I’d genuinely like to get together and have a proper catch-up, but I’ve picked up a case that I need to make some progress on, only it’s complicated and I don’t know my way through the complications and I think you probably do.’
Giorsal smiled. ‘If I can help, I will. On condition that we have a night out very soon.’
‘Deal.’
‘You said on the phone it was about adoption law?’
Karen gave Giorsal a swift but comprehensive outline of the situation Ross Garvie’s recklessness had provoked. ‘I thought I had nothing more to do than take a buccal swab from Stewart Garvie and I’d have an overnight result.’ She shook her head. ‘I should have known better. I’ve been doing cold cases long enough to know it’s seldom that easy.’
Giorsal made a rueful noise. ‘Well, when it comes to adoption law, you’re better off here than if you were down south, that’s one good thing.’
‘How’s that?’
‘OK, first the history lesson. Scots law enshrines the principle of forced heirship. In other words, you can’t disinherit your kids. They’re legally entitled to between a third and a half of what’s called your movable estate – cash, stocks and shares, that sort of thing. Until the law changed in the 1960s, that applied to all your biological children, even if they’d been adopted. It doesn’t apply to adopted children any longer, but the laws that were put in place to make it possible for them to uncover their history stayed the same even though their inheritance rights disappeared.’
‘OK, that sort of makes sense. So what’s the score?’
‘When an adoption takes place, a new birth certificate is issued in the names of the adopted parents and the first name of their choice. And an extract of that is held on the Adoption Register. That’s held separately from the births, marriages and deaths registers that the public can access.
‘Once the adopted person turns sixteen, they have the right to access their original birth certificate. The records will either be at the Court of Session in Edinburgh or the Sheriff Court that authorised the adoption or at General Register House in Edinburgh. You write a letter to the National Records of Scotland and they’ll tell you where to go looking. Then you rock up with photo ID and they’ll open up your original birth certificate extract.’
‘That’s all? Just the short form of the birth certificate?’
‘Yes. But that’s not the end of the story. You can go to the courts and ask for more information. You should be able to get your hands on the original petition to adopt, the report of the Court Reporter or Curator, the social work report, the circumstances of the birth mother, the reasons for the adoption, her address and where the birth took place. There might even be reports from the local authority or the adoption agency, if one was involved.’
Karen felt the warm glow that came with forward movement on a case. ‘I had no idea that adopted kids could access so much of their background.’
‘It’s a good thing, I think. Generally, the adoption records are well kept and pretty comprehensive.’
‘So, is it just the adopted person who can access the records?’
Giorsal pulled a face. ‘The general rule is that it’s only the adopted person or someone specifically authorised by them.’
‘That suggests there might be exceptions to the general rule?’ Karen wasn’t too hopeful, knowing only too well the hurdles of bureaucracy.
But before Giorsal could reply, a brisk tattoo of knocking broke into the conversation. Without waiting for a response, the door swung open and a tall thin man in black trousers, a black polo neck and a black leather jacket walked in. Salt-and-pepper hair en brosse, narrow sunbed-tanned face bisected by a perfectly trimmed Clark Gable moustache, Detective Inspector Alan Noble always made Karen think of the Milk Tray man, only more sinister. He looked surprised to see her, but didn’t let that break his stride.
‘Hello, ladies,’ he said, brisk as the wind off the North Sea. ‘Well, well, well, look what the breeze blew in. I didn’t expect to see you here, Karen. I thought you’d abandoned us for the fleshpots of the capital.’
Three sentences in and already she was weary of his overblown archness. ‘Hi, Alan. I needed a wee steer on adoption law, and who better to ask than a social worker?’
His face creased in a smile. ‘Aye. Like the old joke, eh? What’s the difference between a Rottweiler and a social worker?’ Both women sighed. ‘You can get your kids back off a Rottweiler.’ He giggled, a ridiculously high-pitched sound coming from a man with his image.
‘See
, the thing about jokes, Alan? They’re supposed to be funny,’ Karen said wearily. ‘Do you need me to step outside so you can talk to Giorsal?’
‘No, no. No need for that. Nothing confidential here.’ Without waiting for an invitation, he sat in the other visitor chair, carefully pinching the knees of his trousers to preserve their crease. ‘I’m only here for a bit of background. Like you, except my case isn’t cold yet.’
‘Is this about Gabriel Abbott?’ Giorsal cut in.
‘The same. First thought was a suicide then we decided it was a murder. Well, now the pathologist has had a look at the body and the gun and he thinks we might have been right in the first place.’
‘What? He thinks it’s a suicide after all?’
DI Noble gave a condescending nod. ‘Got it in one, Giorsal.’ He mispronounced it, enunciating each vowel with deliberate clarity, as if he despised her for being saddled with something so outlandish as a Gaelic name. ‘The suicide we thought was a murder turns out to be a suicide after all.’
11
Karen leaned back in her chair, crossing one leg over the other. Things that turned out not to be what they appeared were what she enjoyed most. The prospect of unravelling a tight, intractable knot was what had drawn her to cold cases. ‘What changed his mind?’ she asked.
Noble looked smug. ‘I did. I took another look at the gun. It’s just a wee one, a Smith and Wesson 457. They stopped making them nearly thirty years ago, but they were quite the thing for a few years. With it having a short barrel, it would be possible for Abbott to have shot himself in the right temple with the gun in his left hand. The bullet trajectory would have been angled a bit towards the back of his skull rather than straight across, so I asked the pathologist to check. And lo and behold’ – he spread both hands in a gesture of generous munificence – ‘it turns out I was absolutely spot on. And since we’ve no evidence of anybody else at the scene or in his company, I’d say suicide is definitely the more likely option. Especially since we already know we’re dealing with one of the mentally afflicted.’
‘I don’t like that terminology,’ Giorsal said.
Noble smirked. ‘I’ve never been awfully good at that political correctness thing, ladies.’
‘It’s not political correctness,’ Karen said. ‘It’s about dignity. Respect.’
‘Christ, Karen,’ Noble drawled. ‘The guy was in and out of mental institutions and residential care half his adult life.’
‘And now he’s dead. In my book, that entitles him to a wee bit of respect.’
Noble shrugged. ‘What. Ever. Bottom line is, I need to know what kind of frame of mind he was in lately. When I spoke to you before, you said you’d actually sat in on a meeting he had with his case worker recently?’
Giorsal nodded. ‘I’ve been trying to assess as many of my team in the field as I can. I met Gabriel with Ian Lesley, his key worker, about six weeks ago. By chance, I ran into Gabriel a couple of weeks ago in Kinross. He stopped me in the street and we had a bit of a chat. But I wouldn’t say I was an expert on his state of mind.’
‘How would you characterise his personality? His state of mind generally?’
‘Is this a formal interview?’ Giorsal said, frowning.
‘No, no. Just a wee off-the-record chat to help me see how the land lies.’ Noble raised his palms as if to ward off an attack. ‘Obviously, it might come to a more formal interview before the Fatal Accident Inquiry, but we’d do that down at the station. So, how would you describe him?’
Giorsal fiddled with a pen. Karen could see that she wasn’t entirely happy with the situation, but she would go along with it rather than get into a ruck with a senior police officer. Karen knew of old that Giorsal liked to keep her powder dry for the fights that really mattered. Talking about a man who was already dead by his own hand probably wasn’t one of those.
‘Gabriel had a major breakdown in his final year at university. He never really recovered. As you said, he’d often been in residential care when he couldn’t cope with taking care of himself and functioning in the outside world. He wasn’t schizophrenic but he did have episodes of paranoia where he was convinced he had been the victim of a conspiracy to destroy his life.’
Noble snorted. ‘What? He thought he was the rightful heir to the throne?’
Giorsal glared at him. ‘No. He was never very specific. If he was questioned, he’d veer away from the subject. He’d say it was too dangerous to talk openly about what had been done to him. You’re probably aware that his mother died when a plane she was travelling in was blown up by the IRA. I think that situation fed into his paranoid fantasies. Caroline Abbott was collateral damage in the bombing, but Gabriel seized on her death as evidence that he was in danger.’
‘But was he suicidal?’ Noble tapped the fingers of his right hand on his knee.
‘I didn’t see evidence of that,’ Giorsal said carefully.
‘But he had episodes of paranoia, you said. What if he killed himself and tried to make it look like murder as a way of saying, “See? I told you somebody was after me.”’
‘“I told you I was ill,”’ Karen muttered.
‘What?’ Noble swung round to face her, baffled.
‘Spike Milligan’s epitaph. Sorry, not an occasion for frivolity.’
‘You’re the last person I’d expect to be making jokes about death,’ Noble said acidly, pointedly turning away from her. ‘So, what do you think, Giorsal? Is that what was going on here?’
She sighed. ‘It’s a possible interpretation, I suppose.’
‘It’s a bit of a stretch,’ Karen said.
‘It fits the crime scene and the dead man’s mental history,’ Noble said stiffly.
And it lets you off the hook of a difficult murder inquiry, Karen thought but didn’t say. Impenetrable murder mysteries were fine for Scandinavian TV series on Saturday nights, but the reality was something few cops relished.
‘You should talk to Ian Lesley if you want a more nuanced picture of Gabriel’s mental state,’ Giorsal said. ‘If that’s all, DI Noble, I won’t keep you.’
Noble took his time getting to his feet, smoothing down his trousers and shrugging his shoulders to get the set of his jacket right. ‘We’ll be in touch,’ he said. ‘Thanks for your help in clearing this up.’
‘What about forensics? Gunshot residue?’ Karen asked when he was halfway to the door.
Noble turned back, his eyes narrow. ‘There was some GSR on his left hand.’
‘Aye, but the gun had just been fired. You’d expect to find some GSR transfer from it, regardless of whether he pulled the trigger. What about his clothing?’
Noble breathed heavily through his nose. ‘His jacket’s with the lab. I’m not expecting any surprises. Now, I’m sure you’ve got cases of your own to keep you occupied without sticking your nose in mine.’
Noble closed the door firmly behind him. Giorsal looked troubled. ‘I’m surprised,’ she said. ‘I didn’t think Gabriel was suicidal. But he had a history of emotional volatility, so it’s quite possible.’
‘Did he have any family? Could they cast any light on his state of mind?’
‘Not close. He had a brother, Will. He lives in London and runs a computer gaming company. Must be doing all right because he paid his brother’s rent and that wasn’t cheap. Gabriel lived in a cottage about quarter of a mile from the path round the loch. Just a wee place, but a very desirable location. He’d never have been able to afford it on benefits. He once said his brother was happy to pay the rent as long as it was far away from him and his family.’
‘How did he sound about that? Bitter? Angry?’
Giorsal shook her head. ‘Sad. He was a sad man, Gabriel. I did warm to him, though. He was obsessed with South East Asian history and politics. I don’t know why. Ian Lesley said once he got going on the subject he became a different person. Coher
ent, cogent. But you don’t want to hear about that. We hadn’t finished talking about adoption law. You were asking about exceptions?’
‘That’s right.’ Karen didn’t mind moving on. She was intrigued by Gabriel Abbott’s suicide/murder/suicide but not enough to divert her from her main concern. ‘Are there any?’
‘It’s very rare. The only incidences I’ve ever heard of have been on medical grounds when the person concerned wasn’t able to give consent.’
‘Ross Garvie can’t give consent.’
‘Yes, but accessing his adoption records won’t affect his medical state.’
‘So I’m screwed?’
Giorsal smoothed her hair back from her forehead. ‘Not necessarily. You can still go to court and ask for the extract of the original birth certificate to be opened for you.’
‘That would work?’
‘Maybe. The obvious argument against it is the European Convention on Human Rights, which is incorporated in the Scotland Act. You’d be in breach of Article 8 in respect of Ross Garvie, who is entitled to a private and family life. And as far as a future accused is concerned, it could be argued that you’re in breach of Article 6 – that’s the right to a fair trial. I think your suspect might complain that he’s being accused of a twenty-year-old offence on the basis of a process over which he’d had no consent.’