Out of Bounds

by Val McDermid

  44

  Karen caught her foot on an uneven paving stone and almost pitched to the ground, steadying herself at the last minute against the cottage wall. Between the bloody clouds and the high hedge that surrounded the small back garden, she couldn’t see a bloody thing. She felt her way along the wall, taking each step gingerly. The surface under her fingertips changed from rough harling to smooth wood. The back door. She slipped on a pair of blue nitrile gloves. The last thing she wanted was to leave her fingermarks all over Gabriel Abbott’s home.

  She flicked on the flashlight on her phone and shone it at the ground. Somewhere nearby there was a boot scraper and brush. According to Ian, Gabriel had kept his spare back-door key there. ‘I told him he should give someone a key in case of emergencies,’ he’d said. ‘But he insisted it was easier to hide one and tell me and his nearest neighbour where it was.’

  When Karen had revealed her plan, both Giorsal and Ian had wanted to come with her. She’d refused point-blank. ‘I’m a polis. If I get caught inside Gabriel’s house, I can blag my way out of it. You guys? No chance. Trust me, I won’t leave you out of the loop. But this is one I’ve got to do alone.’

  Karen spotted the boot scraper at the far side of the door and crouched down beside it. It was cast iron and heavier than it looked, but when she lifted one side, she saw the key in a shallow depression that had been hollowed out of the soil. She almost dropped it when a car suddenly revved as it passed the cottage, driving far too fast for the narrow lane.

  Minutes later, she was inside Gabriel’s kitchen, heart thudding even though she knew she had the place to herself. Adrenaline fizzed through her veins, setting every sense on high alert. The room smelled stale and there was a faint aroma of rotting cabbage. She could hear nothing over the sound of her own pulse.

  Even by the limited light from her phone, she could see the truth of Ian’s description of Gabriel as a hoarder. There was barely space on any of the worktops to prepare food. The surfaces were occupied by stacks of old newspapers and magazines, a pile of tightly folded plastic bags, Tupperware boxes of screws, nails and assorted bits of ironmongery. In spite of the clutter it was surprisingly clean, however. She’d expected a hob encrusted with dead food and splashed with fat and pasta sauce, but it was pristine, as was the tiny section of vacant worktop. Gabriel might have been flaky, but he had standards.

  Karen moved through the doorway into the living room. The cottage was isolated, with no near neighbours, so she decided to take a chance and pulled the curtains across before turning on the overhead light.

  The room was a dense chaos of books and papers. Shelves lined one wall, crammed end to end with books on the history, politics and geography of South East Asia. Instead of a mirror or a picture above the fireplace there was a huge map of the subcontinent, with coloured pins stuck all over it. To one side was a list of names and places that she quickly realised corresponded to the map pins. His correspondents? His contacts? A real network? Or a fantasy? She had no way of knowing. It was something she could come back to if she found any reason to consider it relevant to his death. A table by the window held a clunky old laptop, more papers and a stack of CDs. On the wall beside it was a carefully drawn family tree with neat boxes. Some were completed, others waited to be filled in. On a rickety set of shelves next to the desk, a photo album sat horizontally across a line of books.

  The front door opened directly on to the living room, and there was a scattered pile of mail on the doormat. Karen scooped up the post and sat down at the table to work her way through it. Junk mail, an electricity bill, an innocuous postcard from Vietnam from someone called Dusit. A thin blue airmail envelope with a return address in Manila. And a brown envelope with a crest that said, ‘Deventer Laboratories, Hemel Hempstead.’

  It looked like the answer had come too late for Gabriel. Karen knew she should leave it alone. ‘Step away from the envelope,’ she muttered. But even as manifestly she spoke, she knew she couldn’t. She turned it over and studied the flap. It was the kind that came with adhesive already applied, which was much more vulnerable to tampering than the old-school ones where you had to lick the flap.

  Karen raked around in the bottom of her bag and felt her fingers close on her penknife. No new-fangled Swiss army knife for her. This steel-cased twin-bladed knife had belonged to her grandfather. It had whittled ash twigs into arrows for the sapling bows she’d played with in the woods of childhood. It had cut the string on parcels that arrived from her great-uncle in Canada. It had been whetted on the leather strop that hung by the fireplace till it was sharp as the old man’s open razor. She kept it sharp, using the same steel that maintained the edge on her kitchen knives. It was the perfect tool for opening the envelope without leaving a trace.

  She laid the letter flat on the table and unfolded the smaller blade. With infinite patience, she slipped it under the edge of the flap and eased it along, careful not to cut the paper. Millimetre by millimetre, she worked the blade through the adhesive, holding her breath and trying to clear her mind of everything except the task in hand.

  At last the blade cleared the flap and she could open it without a sign of tampering. Karen breathed again. Carefully she pulled out the contents. There were three sheets of paper. A covering letter and two pages of graphics that she recognised as DNA analyses. She spread them out on the table and before she took note of their contents, she photographed each page.

  Then finally she let herself read what Deventer Laboratories had found out.

  Dear Mr Abbott,

  Thank you for using our analytical services to ensure swift and accurate DNA profiles. Our results are enclosed.

  In your letter, you stated that it was your belief that the two samples were related – that they were either full brothers or half-brothers with the same mother and different fathers. However, our analysis shows definitively that the two men whose samples you submitted are completely unrelated. There is no familial connection between Sample A and Sample B.

  Should you require further testing, we will be happy to oblige.

  Karen read the letter twice, to make sure she’d got it. Then she looked at the two DNA profiles side by side. Deventer Labs were right. There was no overlap between the two. Gabriel and Will Abbott didn’t just have different fathers. They had different mothers as well.

  45

  The more Karen discovered, the less she believed that Gabriel Abbott had killed himself. She sat at the table staring at the papers but seeing nothing, her mind racing. Her first instinct was to get out of the cottage and take the letter with her. If she left it behind, the chances were that it would fall into Will Abbott’s hands and that would be the end of that. The DNA tests – whatever they meant beyond the obvious – would disappear without trace, she felt sure.

  But if she stole the letter, it would have no evidentiary value. It could never be produced in a courtroom, if it ever came to that. At least this way she had a copy on her phone. If she needed to, she could get a warrant and demand a copy of the report from Deventer. She needed to leave it behind, on the mat, in the midst of a slither of junk mail.

  Karen squeezed her eyes shut and thought. What did it mean? Who were Gabriel Abbott’s parents and why had Caroline pretended to everyone – including her own son – that she was his mother?

  When she opened her eyes, she caught sight again of the photograph album. She reached for it and began to turn the pages. The photographs were neatly stuck in, captioned in the same neat capitals as the family tree and the map reference list. They looked as if they’d been scanned in and printed on a home printer. The first one showed Caroline holding a baby in her arms, grinning at the camera. She was sitting at a picnic table with a low building in the background that looked indefinably foreign. France, presumably. The caption read, Mum and me at two weeks old, Sercy-sur-mer. She turned the page, and there was Ellie holding the baby close to her chest, his head on her shoulder
, her hand supporting his neck, a look of infinite tenderness on her face. Ellie and me, six days old, Sercy-sur-mer.

  Karen had the advantage of knowing Caroline was not the mother of the baby in the photographs. But really, how had nobody understood that look on Ellie MacKinnon’s face? The answer to the question raised by the DNA test was right in front of her. Ellie MacKinnon, the devoted friend, the secret lover, the reliable babysitter, was manifestly so much more than that.

  She turned the pages and watched Gabriel grow up. The resemblance to Frank Sinclair grew stronger – and after all, it had been Ellie who had been Frank’s friend, not Caroline. How much more likely he would have been to oblige her than her girlfriend. And as Gabriel grew from babyhood to childhood, what was also obvious was that he didn’t look anything like Caroline or Will. He had Ellie’s colouring – her dark eyes, her raven hair, the skin that flushed pink at the first sun. And yet it didn’t seem to have crossed anyone’s mind that she was his real mother.

  It was always the way. People saw what they wanted to see. Karen thought about her own family. There was no doubt she favoured her father’s side of the family. The stocky build, the shaggy hair. She’d seen family photos taken in the Depression, when her great-grandmother had been forced to feed her family in the soup kitchens in their mining village. Yet all the Piries in the pictures were solidly built, even running to fat in some cases. ‘We’re good peasant stock,’ her father was fond of saying. ‘Fat in a time of famine.’ And yet, whenever she went to family parties, her mother’s side were always trying to claim her. ‘You’ve got your granny Welsh’s eyes,’ they’d tell her. Or, ‘You’re the spit of your great-auntie Meg that died in the war.’ So really, why be surprised that nobody had ever gone, ‘Bloody hell, that boy looks like the bastard love child of you and Frank Sinclair.’ It would almost have been more strange if they had. And of course, Ellie and Caroline were both dead and gone before Gabriel had grown into his features in his adolescence. And by then, there was nobody around to care who he looked like.

  Karen carried on flicking through the album. Then abruptly the photos ran out. Instead of pictures, there were words, printed on pale blue A4 paper.

  My first memory is fireworks. We are in the garden in our house in London and I’m strapped into my pushchair. Will is there too, so it must have been the year before he went off to Glencorsie House. There’s a giant box of fireworks a few yards away from us and Ellie is choosing what comes next. Then Mum comes up behind her and startles her, and she drops the taper into the box and before she can do anything about it, the fireworks start to go off. They’re dazzling, all the colours of the rainbow, shooting across the lawn in all directions and for a moment Mum panics and runs to me but Ellie shouts that it’s OK, we’re far enough away and she starts laughing and Mum starts laughing too and they’re roaring with laughter and Will starts crying because it’s all over in a matter of moments.

  That’s my first memory and it always makes me smile when I think about it. Most of my early memories are about good times. Ellie was always laughing and playing with me because that’s what she was good at. It was her job, but it was her job because she loved it. Mum was fun too but in a different way. She was more serious. She read me books and took me to museums and got me interested in other countries where they do things differently to us. Ellie took me to the zoo and the movies and we had adventures and that’s what I remember when I think of her. When they died, it was like the laughter died too.

  I don’t think I really understood what it meant when Mr Timmins sat me down in his study and told me my Mum and Ellie were dead. Dead wasn’t real to me. I was only eight years old, and dead was what happened on TV and films, only the person was still alive because they’d be in another film or a TV series before long. So I think I thought it was like that.

  I didn’t go to the funeral so I didn’t have any sense of closure, as the therapists always go on about. It was a few weeks later than Will came to the school with Aunt Maddie. They explained that, because Mum and Ellie were dead, I would have to stay at school for the holidays because Will wasn’t able to look after me. He was going off to university, but what he was also doing was setting up his company, Glengaming. He had it up and running before his first term at Imperial began. He’d wanted to do it before, but Mum said he should concentrate on his degree first. But then she died and he inherited all the money and the house, which was a good thing because he was able to start the business and it took his mind off the terrible thing that happened to Mum and Ellie. It was harder for him because he was that much older and he understood what had happened. Looking back, I’m really glad he was able to throw himself into Glengaming. Mum would have been really proud of him.

  I only really started to understand how much my life had changed when the end of term came and everybody went home except for me and Terrence Smith, whose parents were both scientists and working on the British Antarctic Survey. When they came back a few months later, they gave a brilliant talk with slides and everything about their time at the bottom of the world. And Terrence didn’t ever stay at school for the hols again.

  Mr Timmins and his wife looked after me for most of the holidays and they were very decent to me but they didn’t have kids of their own and they weren’t big on fun. I used to cry myself to sleep at night. I missed Mum and Ellie so much it was like a hand was squeezing my heart.

  That summer was when I started to get interested in South East Asia. Mrs Timmins – she keeps asking me to call her Briony, but that feels too weird – did Chinese and Geography at university and she spent her year abroad in Hong Kong and Shanghai. She talked to me about her time there and showed me slides of her trip. I think I was especially interested because my dad, who was a marine engineer, spent most of his working life out there, in Vietnam and Thailand and the Philippines. That’s been my main interest all my adult life. I tried to study the region at university, but that was when everything really went wrong for me.

  I suppose I managed to keep things together at school because it was familiar. People assume Mr and Mrs Timmins were like a second family to me, but it wasn’t really like that. They were very kind, but there was always a line between term time and holidays. In term time, I had to behave like I was any other pupil. I slept in the dorm and spent all my time with the other kids and the Timminses treated me exactly the same as everyone else. And then at the end of term, I’d move into one of the spare rooms in their annexe and I’d take my meals with them and we’d be all friendly. When I tell people this, they look at me as if they can’t imagine anything so weird.

  But when I left school I didn’t have a clue how to live. By then, Will was really successful. Glengaming had had a couple of big successes and he was riding high. He’d just got married to Lucy so he wasn’t very keen on me moving in with him. I had a place at St Andrews, so I decided to stick around in Scotland. Will helped me out with some money and I got a summer job in a bar in Kinross. And I really didn’t cope well. My head wasn’t right. I didn’t know what to do or how to be with people, and that was when my life stopped working properly. But I think it just took me a long time to catch up with the reality. My life really fell apart on 5 May 1994. That was when the love and the happiness and the laughter all died along with Mum and Ellie. And nothing has been right since.

  Karen felt tears pricking her eyes as she reached the abrupt end of Gabriel’s words. If DI Noble had done his job properly he’d have found this and used it to shore up his lazy push for a suicide call. She couldn’t imagine how Gabriel must have felt day in, day out, trapped in a world the joy had been sucked out of when he was only eight years old.

  Eight. Karen remembered eight. That was the year they’d gone to Butlins at Ayr with two sets of aunts and uncles and five of her cousins. The weather had been cloudy but it had mostly stayed dry and they’d spent hours on the beach and on the fairground rides at the holiday camp. Glamorous Granny competitions, and her dad com
ing second in the Knobbly Knees contest. Fresh fried doughnuts in the ballroom before bedtime and doing a duet on the talent night with her cousin Donny. Her idea of tragedy was losing a 10p piece down a siver, hearing the splash as it hit the water below. She’d grown up with people who loved her even if they hadn’t always understood what made her tick, even if they’d sometimes made her feel like shit without meaning to. She couldn’t begin to imagine what Gabriel Abbott’s life had been like.

  And his brother. What had gone on in Will Abbott’s selfish head that he’d left his little brother to sink or swim, all on his own, stripped of all the people he’d ever loved? Who the fuck did that to a wee boy who’s just lost the woman he thought was his mum and the real mum who devoted herself to giving him fun?

  She thought that was the end of the album’s revelations, but tucked right in at the back, tight against the spine, was a plain white envelope. Karen pulled it out, discovering it wasn’t sealed. Inside was a small bundle of newspaper cuttings, yellow and brittle with age. She spread them out in front of her and was unsurprised to see they were part of the original coverage of the crash. There was nothing to indicate who had provided them. Certainly Gabriel would have been too young to have clipped them himself, even supposing he’d had access to newspapers.

  There were front-page stories from the Daily Mail, the Scottish Daily Record and the Edinburgh Evening News. There was nothing there she didn’t already know. The four who had perished were photographed at the aerodrome before they took off on their fatal flight, grinning amiably at the camera. Ellie was giving a thumbs-up to the lens.

  The final cutting didn’t have a masthead to identify it. It read like local paper copy, probably from whatever weekly paper covered the Elstree airfield. It had the same photo as the other papers, but with one key difference. This was clearly an uncropped version of the picture. There was a fifth person standing on the edge of the group, next to Ellie.