Authors: Val McDermid
‘I’m from Police Scotland,’ Karen said quickly. ‘Not the press.’ She held up the ID she had at the ready.
The eyebrow lowered over the eye as Linda peered at it. ‘Oh, I’m sorry, I thought you were another journalist.’ The door opened wider to reveal the rest of her face, pinched with misery and lined with anxiety. She was a short, stout woman dressed in black trousers and a pink mohair sweater. Her hair looked dry and mussed, as if she’d slept on it and not bothered with a brush. She sighed. ‘You’d better come in.’
Karen stepped inside, intrigued that the woman hadn’t assumed their presence meant more bad news. In her shoes, Karen’s first thought would have been that the police were there to reveal that her son had died. Linda gestured vaguely to the doorway on the left of the hall. ‘In you go. Take a seat. Do you want a cup of tea or anything?’
‘We’re fine, thanks.’ Karen turned into a living room as neat as the front garden. A sofa, two armchairs, occasional tables set with coasters, a plasma TV hanging above the fireplace where previous generations would have had a mirror
or a picture. A display cabinet on the back wall contained glasses and bottles and a shelf of family photographs. Karen recognised the boy in the hospital bed.
Karen and the Mint perched side by side on the unforgiving sofa. It wasn’t a piece of furniture that encouraged slumping, she thought. Linda Garvie hovered for a moment, then lowered herself gingerly into an armchair, as if she expected it to bite her. She crossed her feet at the ankles and raised her chin in an attempt at defiant propriety. ‘We already spoke to the police,’ she said. ‘We had no idea what Ross was up to. He told us he was having a sleepover at his friend Grant’s house. We’ve met Grant’s parents, they seemed perfectly responsible, perfectly respectable. We had no idea the boys were drinking and going out to clubs.’ She shook her head. ‘He’s got a job. An apprenticeship.’ She screwed up her face, battling tears. ‘He’s had a wee bit of trouble in the past, but we thought he’d put all that behind him.’
A wee bit of trouble.
That was one way of putting it. Fourteen-year-old Ross Garvie had a nice line in breaking into garden sheds in Strathmartine, helping himself to whatever he could carry off. He hooked up with an older lad who had a clapped-out van and together they sold off Ross’s loot at Sunday-morning car boot sales when his parents thought their son was off playing tennis. When the police had finally rumbled the racket, Ross had been lucky to get off with a caution. There were no details of how he’d pulled that off, but Karen would have placed money on his parents and his school weighing in at his back. He’d stayed out of formal trouble since then, but she’d managed to track down the local intelligence officer, who had described Garvie as ‘one step away from everything going tits-up’. The boy had been on the fringes of the kind of small-time stuff that had eventually sucked him in and spat him out. And this buttoned-up wee woman in her buttoned-up house looked like she’d been forcing herself to be completely
clueless about that inevitability. It was an oblivion that she might well have chosen to apply to her husband as well as her son, Karen thought.
‘You must be worried sick about Ross,’ Karen said. ‘I’m sorry to be bothering you at a time like this.’
Linda stretched her lips in a parody of a smile. ‘I can’t sleep. I can’t concentrate on anything. I keep praying he’ll be all right, and then I think he’ll never be all right again. Not with his three friends on his conscience. And he’ll be going to the jail, won’t he? And that’ll be the end of everything.’
She was right about that, at least. Karen tried to look sympathetic. ‘I’m not actually here in relation to Ross’s accident,’ she said. ‘Detective Constable Murray and I are attached to Police Scotland’s Historic Cases Unit.’ That always sounded better than the more truthful,
We ARE Police Scotland’s HCU.
Linda folded her hands tightly in her lap and frowned. ‘I don’t understand.’
‘At the hospital, after the accident, a routine blood sample was taken from Ross. It has to be analysed so we know his blood alcohol level at the time of the crash. In these circumstances, it’s Police Scotland’s practice to do a DNA test as well. The results of that test are compared to the national DNA database—’
Linda’s fingers fiddled restlessly. ‘I still don’t understand,’ she interrupted. ‘Are you trying to pin some crime on Ross? Because he’s not a criminal. He’s just young and daft.’ Her voice cracked. She was trying hard to convince herself, but deep down that was a battle she knew she’d already lost. ‘We did our best for him.’ Her fists clenched and her eyes glistened.
‘I’m sure you did. But it’s not Ross we’re interested in. The blood sample that was taken from Ross is an indirect match for an outstanding crime.’
‘What do you mean, “an indirect match”?’ Linda butted
in again. One of those who could never manage to wait for the explanation to finish, Karen thought. She bet Stewart Garvie never got to finish a thought uninterrupted. ‘What outstanding crime?’
‘I know it’s hard to get your head round, but the DNA tells us that a close male relative of Ross was involved in a case a long time ago, a case that we didn’t manage to solve at the time,’ Karen said.
‘But we still have the evidence,’ the Mint added, trying to be helpful.
Linda shook her head. ‘You’ve come to the wrong place. Just because Ross did a bad thing, it doesn’t mean we’ve got anything to do with something that happened years ago.’
Karen tried again. ‘There’s no arguing with the science, Mrs Garvie. There’s no doubt about what the DNA is telling us. But before we speak to your husband, I need to ask you a few questions.’
‘This is ridiculous,’ Linda protested, getting to her feet and reaching out to steady herself on the chair. The colour had left her face, emphasising the dark bruises under her eyes. ‘You’re barking up the wrong tree. My Stewart has nothing to do with any crime you’re trying to pin on him.’
‘Were you actually married to Mr Garvie twenty years ago?’ the Mint barged in again. ‘Only, if you weren’t, you won’t have any notion of what he might have been doing then.’ He caught Karen’s withering look. ‘I’m only saying.’
‘You’re not listening to me,’ Linda said, her voice rising. ‘I don’t care what your DNA says, this has got nothing to do with Stewart. Some detectives you are. Whoever did your crime, it wasn’t my husband. And you know how I can be so sure of that? Because Stewart isn’t Ross’s father.’
K
aren’s
first thought was that Linda Garvie had apparently not always been quite so strait-laced. Had she had an affair? Or had she been a single mum when she married Stewart Garvie? She didn’t have long to wonder.
‘Ross was adopted. He came to us when he was five days old. We’re not his biological parents. Whoever your DNA connects to, it’s not Stewart.’ That explained why the boy in the photograph didn’t look like either of his parents. Linda had sounded almost triumphant. After a few days of everything going against her, she’d finally scored a point.
Karen was taken aback. Suddenly what had seemed like a straightforward march to resolving a cold case had turned into a multilayered problem that she had no idea how to attack.
For once, Jason got to the point ahead of her. ‘Where from?’ he asked.
‘What?’ Linda seemed distracted now.
‘Where did you get him from?’
‘Was it a private adoption or through a formal agency?’ Karen clarified.
Linda’s
face cleared. ‘It was a charity. I can give you the details. But I’m not sure if they still exist.’ She moved towards the door. ‘I’ll look them out, I know where they are.’
‘Before you do that, Mrs Garvie—’ Now Karen stood up too. ‘Do you know the name of Ross’s real father?’
Linda’s eyes narrowed in a hostile glare. ‘Stewart’s his real father.’
Karen was momentarily furious with herself for the kind of tactless misstep she’d have hammered Jason for. ‘I’m sorry. Of course. I meant his biological father.’
There was no relenting in Linda’s harsh expression. ‘We were never given those details. We didn’t want to know. As far as we were concerned, Ross was ours from the moment he was put in my arms. I don’t even know what his birth mother had named him.’
‘Has he never wanted to know?’ Jason said, scrambling to his feet as if he’d just realised he was the only one still seated.
Linda dropped the hard stare and turned away. ‘No. Because we never told him. As far as Ross knows, he’s our son. We never wanted him to feel like he didn’t belong.’
That had turned out well, Karen thought. All teenagers wanted to believe they were changelings, cuckoos dropped in some completely rubbish nest. If you really were an outsider, she suspected you must be conscious of that at some subliminal level. The logical result of that would be to wage war against the world you knew wasn’t yours. She wasn’t thinking to excuse Ross Garvie, but maybe the extent of his rebellion had its roots in this ill-fitting respectability. ‘And you never felt curious?’ she asked.
Linda met her eyes again. ‘I didn’t want to know. Everybody talks about nature versus nurture. Well, I knew we could nurture him better than his birth mother could.’ She gave a sharp, harsh bark of laughter. ‘I didn’t want to know if we had anything to fear from his nature. We were arrogant
enough to think that the home we gave him, the love we gave him was enough to overcome any bad blood that was in him.’ She shook her head, a bitter twist to her mouth. ‘Shows how stupid we were.’ Then with an abrupt, jerky movement, she hurried from the room.
‘Is that us buggered, then?’ The Mint spoke softly, leaning so close to Karen that she caught a whiff of bacon from his jacket.
‘Could well be. I know nothing about the legal position.’ Then she smiled. ‘But I’m pretty sure I know somebody who does.’
Giorsal Kennedy had always known she’d never move back to Fife until she’d made something of herself. Now she’d reached the lofty heights of Area Team Leader in the Social Work Department, she reckoned nobody could fold their arms across their chest, purse their lips and accuse her of returning with her tail between her legs. Even if her marriage had collapsed in a cacophony of recriminations, leaving her with two kids and a divorce settlement barely worthy of the name.
But moving back to Fife from Beckenham had meant her share of the equity in their tiny suburban box went a lot further. Their modern house in Glenrothes felt palatial after their cramped existence down south. They even had a garden backing on to a clump of conifers you could almost call woodland. Thirteen-year-old Jess and eleven-year-old Becca seemed to think having separate bedrooms as well as a TV and games room of their own was a reasonable trade-off for the absence of their father. Not least because he’d hardly ever been there. Apparently, being a shift leader in the Fire Service meant you had to play a lot of golf when you weren’t actually hanging around waiting to put out fires.
There was no doubt about one thing. She was getting a lot
more support with the kids now she’d ditched Victor than she had when they were married. Living a five-minute walk from their grandparents made childcare easier and there was no question that the girls liked hanging with Giorsal’s parents far better than any after-school club.
She’d been back a shade over a year now, and Giorsal was beginning to feel confident that she’d got the measure of her team. She’d accompanied them on home visits, sat in on client interviews and reviewed their strategic provisions. Based on what she’d seen and heard, she’d drawn up new guidelines and programmes for her staff to incorporate in their work. She’d been accused of micro-managing in the past but she considered herself merely to be thorough. It wasn’t her fault if other people were too lazy to know exactly what was happening on their patch. When some child was tortured and murdered by its mother’s boyfriend, or a paranoid schizophrenic jettisoned his medications and stabbed somebody on a bus, or an elderly person lay dead and undiscovered for weeks in their own home, time and time again it was the team leader who took the rap, not the frontline worker. Somehow, they could win sympathy by claiming overwhelming caseloads; managers were supposed to take that in their stride. So Giorsal made sure she knew exactly what the story was on her watch.
Now she’d come to terms with the workload and the personalities, it was time to build a social life. She’d been invited out by her colleagues for drinks, birthday meals, leaving dos. Even a Ladies Day trip to a Raith Rovers match, for God’s sake. As if there wasn’t enough suffering in the job. But Giorsal liked to have a private life that was separate from her professional world.
So she’d asked her mother who was still around from her schooldays. It was a good bet that there would be a fair few. A lot of Fifers were disinclined to move away from their
roots. She remembered a song her dad used to sing: ‘Fife’s got everything, just the place for tourists’. It had been darkly satirical, she recalled, but at its heart lay an unacknowledged truth that plenty of Fifers believed the chorus line to be nothing less than the reality. It had been no surprise when her mother rattled off half a dozen names without pause for thought.
Giorsal recognised them. Girls she’d been pals with lower down the school, but none she’d been close to. ‘And then there’s Karen Pirie.’ Etta Kennedy’s voice dropped, giving full weight to the syllables. ‘Did you see her in the papers?’
Even down south, it had been impossible to miss. The murder of a police officer was rare enough to be splashed on the front of every daily paper and most internet websites. Giorsal vaguely remembered Phil Parhatka – she’d been in the Guides with his sister – but she hadn’t realised till she’d seen the stories that he was Karen Pirie’s bidie-in. ‘That must have been terrible for her,’ she said. Karen as a teenager was vivid in her memory – quick with a quip, clever enough to get away with backchatting the teachers, a bit on the chubby side. Always looked like she’d been dragged through a hedge backwards, even in her best Saturday-night outfit. She liked Karen. They’d been pals, but never best pals. It had been a genuine surprise when someone with so little respect for authority had joined the police. Giorsal hadn’t known quite what to make of it. So when she’d gone off to university, they slipped out of touch.