Blood in the Water (Alice Rice 1)

by Gillian Galbraith

  The Senator was still on the Bench, two young Counsel arrayed in front of him. She listened as he ruthlessly exposed the weaknesses in the argument of the one addressing the court. The anxious advocate was clasping the lectern on which his notes rested so tightly that all his fingers had blanched. An ill-concealed smile was present on the face of his opponent. He must be even greener than me, she thought. Sure enough. After he had risen to his feet he hardly had time to finish his first short submission before he was interrupted from on high by the sort of remark designed to chill the blood of the most experienced Counsel.

  ‘Mr Swan, I have the advantage over you. I appeared for the pursuer in High versus Norton, the case upon which you seem to be founding, and it was purely concerned with quantum of damages. I fail to see what possible assistance it can be in any consideration of the relevancy of the pleadings, and that is, surely, the only question with which we are concerned today.’

  Mr Swan, not yet capable of reading the writing on the wall, simply recited another long extract from the same case report, apparently oblivious to the meaning of the Senator’s remarks.

  Finally, Lord Lawford’s patience broke and he bellowed: ‘Unless, Mr Swan, you have any other authorities you wish to bring to the attention of this court, I might as well tell you that I intend to grant Mr Rose’s motion on behalf of the pursuer.’

  ‘No, my Lord, I am content to rely on High versus Norton,’ came the now desperate reply.

  ‘Very well. Pursuer’s motion granted. Mr Rose, you will, no doubt, be seeking your expenses.’

  On hearing the expression ‘expenses’, Flora moved towards the Bar in readiness for her own appearance. At least, at this stage of the proceedings in her case she would have no opponent. She attempted to stop her hands from shaking, and for the third time re-ordered her papers. Lord Lawford would not have been her choice of judge. No one doubted his brilliance or his misanthropic tendencies. Female humanity was rumoured to rank particularly low in his estimation, and within the Faculty it was believed that he had concluded that the Bar was going to the dogs and that it was his duty to frighten away as many new members as possible prior to his retiral. To that end, no holds were barred; the simple bludgeoning with irate words, the stiletto thrust of the missed House of Lords’ case and the Delphic monologue which convinced its victim that he no longer understood English. All had been tried and tested by the newly elevated tyrant. Flora forced herself to speak, and as she was doing so she realised that, contrary to her earlier fears, she could not be embarrassed, could not be hurt. Her secret dread of breaking down in public was groundless. How could any of this matter compared to David’s death? What could the bewigged figure on the bench say to her that could wound? Nothing whatsoever.

  Emboldened by her new invulnerability she made three confident submissions in favour of the granting of interim interdict to her client, a tenant farmer from Argyll. She explained that the landlord’s unauthorised removal of gates from the meadowhead field had resulted in the entry of ten Highland cows into the tenant’s poly tunnels and the destruction of all the young plants therein. She was not harangued, she was not even interrupted. She was asked one polite question, to which she was able to give a sensible reply, and the interim interdict was pronounced in her client’s favour. As she squeezed out between the benches, clutching her authorities and papers, she was patted on the shoulder by her instructing solicitor, his face creased with delight at the good result, but it all passed her by. She found she was as unmoved by success as she had expected to be by failure.

  At lunchtime she went to the nearby Boots in Cockburn Street to collect newly processed photos. Image after image of David. The tears that had been held back with such effort finally made their escape and she took refuge in a nearby sandwich bar. With dismay she noted that there was only one empty seat in the whole place, and it was next to Colin Harvey QC. She would have retreated, but he had already caught her eye, smiling in recognition to signal the space. On spotting the tear stains on her face his embarrassment became evident, and she was at a loss as to whether to attempt to pass them off as some kind of allergy or to blame them on a death in the family. Without time to think she muttered something about her hay fever. For the next twenty minutes she dabbed her eyes and, as if a pact existed between them, they discussed the pollen count in winter and the most effective non-soporific antihistamines.

  Her two o’clock consultation passed quickly. Flora knew from the sheaf of papers that she had already seen that little could be done to help Mrs Davie. The client herself hardly said a word, sitting, ostensibly unmoved, as Flora and her strident instructing solicitor discussed the case. Mrs Davie’s only child, Kylie, had been taken into care by the local authority, and they had now applied to free the child for adoption. Mrs Davie did not want to lose her offspring, she did not want her daughter adopted and would not consent to such a course. The hearing was for the court to decide whether to dispense with the necessity for her agreement to the adoption procedure, but in order to fight the local authority they would have to have some ammunition. Kylie, now aged three, was already showing signs of severely disturbed behaviour: she was smearing her own excrement on the walls of the three-roomed council flat in which she lived, was almost completely speechless and spent hours sitting next to the washing machine, banging her head on it. In her short life she seemed to have developed every childhood disease known to the medical profession, and infestation with a rich zoo of lice, worms and other parasites. While Mr Davie had been part of the ‘family unit’ she had, in unexplained circumstances, also suffered a fractured skull and a burn to her left leg. Fortunately, Mrs Davie’s last precognition stated that he no longer formed part of the family.

  The woman appeared to have had the benefit of any and all parent-craft classes available and she was, as the entire Social Work Department admitted, always willing, but, sadly, never able. The explanation was simple. Her IQ was too low to enable her to look after a child, she could barely function at the level of a child herself and was illiterate, innumerate and incapable of caring for anyone. She was also pregnant. None of the psychiatrists approached so far on her behalf had been prepared to support her cause; the child’s paediatrician and general practitioner both believed that adoption would be in Kylie’s best interests; Mr Davie was now consenting to it and all the carers involved in ‘the Davie case’, without exception, were of the view that Mrs Davie was unable to look after Kylie.

  Flora looked at the dejected specimen sitting opposite her. The woman’s eyes, through their milkbottle-bottomed spectacles, never met her own, flickering restlessly from the central light to the water flask and back again. Her hands, resting before her on the table, had thick stubby fingers with nails chewed to the quick, old blood visible where loose skin had been bitten off. She might as well have had ‘loser’ tattooed on her forehead.

  ‘You’d like to keep Kylie?’ Flora asked her. She needed to know how her client would respond to cross-examination.

  ‘Aye.’ The dull-faced woman nodded.

  ‘Can you explain why?’

  ‘I love her tae death. She’s ma bairn.’

  ‘Do you think you would be able to look after her, if she was returned to you?’

  ‘Aye, wi’ help, I done it afore.’

  ‘But you’ve had a lot of help so far, and even with it you were unable to cope with Kylie?’

  ‘I’ve not had enough, I jist need that bit more.’

  ‘But you’ve had all that the Department say they can give you.’

  ‘Aye, fair enough, I’m getting better at the cooking and that.’

  ‘So, you had difficulty coping with Kylie when she was on her own and now you’ve got another child on the way. How do you think you’ll manage with two?’ She knew she was pressing on the knife, but their opponents would show no mercy.

  ‘We’ll get on fine, I ken whit I’m doing noo. The twa of them’ll play wi’ each other and Kylie can look after the babby, help wi’ its bottle an’ a
ll, gie it boiled sweets ’n other treats.’

  ‘You don’t think it’ll be more difficult giving Kylie the care and attention she needs with a new baby in the house?’

  ‘I’ll hae Ron there to help me too, mind.’

  ‘Ron?’

  ‘My husband, Ron Davie.’

  ‘I thought he’d left, I thought you’d split up for good this time?’

  ‘Naw, naw. We’ve got back tigether, he’s in the hoose the noo. He’ll gie us a hand, he’s the dad after all.’

  Flora looked enquiringly at the solicitor to see whether she had been aware of this development, but she shook her head, signalling her own surprise at the change in Mrs Davie’s household.

  ‘And does Ron still think it’s okay for Kylie to be adopted?’

  ‘Aye. He says it’ll gie us mair time for the wee un when it’s born.’

  ‘And is that true?’

  ‘Eh… aye, but Kylie’ll be a guid wee helper. She can help wi’ the nappies and everything.’

  ‘Is she out of nappies yet, Kylie herself?’

  ‘Naw. I took them off her the once but she jist made a mess, so I put them back.’

  With every question the impossibility of successfully defending the action became more certain, as time after time the mother had to rely on her mantra, ‘But she’s ma bairn and I love her’. No one could doubt the truth of the statement. The woman, despite her intellectual inadequacy, was fighting with every tool available to her to try to keep her child. She had refused to give up ‘the bairn’ in the face of heavy pressure from the Social Work Department to do so, she had defied her violent husband and, somehow, she had managed to contact a solicitor and explain her predicament to the professional. Her genuine affection for her child shone through, like an unquenchable flame, but it could not compensate for her total lack of competence in the most basic childcare. Flora’s only armaments were to be bows and arrows backed up, maybe, with slings and stones; the Council, her opponents, were in possession of pump-action machine guns and full body armour. The sheriff would have heard it all before, and after the pathetic creature had been given her chance to sway the court the order to free the child for adoption would be granted. Mrs Davie would go on to have her next baby and, in all probability, an application would be made after a few years by the local authority for a freeing in relation to it, and so on and so on, until one day Mrs Davie would have her tubes tied. Unthinkable for Mr Davie, or his replacement, to have the snip and, of course, contraception doesn’t work unless you have the wit to follow the instructions.

  Flora walked home in the company of Katie Mann. Nothing more than chance had led to this; they were both going out through Door Eleven of Parliament House and heading for home in the New Town at the same time; but no better companion could have been chosen by kind fate. Katie suffered from intractable verbal diarrhoea, and for a conversation to continue only the occasional nod or shake of the head was required; she would do the rest, gliding from one long, complicated digression to the next, rarely returning to her starting point, the momentum of her enthusiasm making her overshoot it time and time again. The first topic, as they crossed Parliament Square, was fox-hunting, and they progressed to hair dye, the Isle of Man, the sleeping partner of the last Accountant of Court and, finally, the closure of the local clap-clinic, seamlessly and with minimal input from Flora. Digression followed digression in Katie’s endless chatter, and Flora allowed the torrent of words to flow over her until, finally, they parted on Queen Street.

  The phone rang. It was Maria. ‘You alright?’

  ‘Yep. I survived Lord Lawford, and apart from an undignified episode over lunch with Colin Harvey I managed to keep the tears at bay. How did you get on in Glasgow?’

  ‘Fine, really. The professor behaved himself in the witness box, no mad speculation about suffocation despite the views he expressed at the consultation. The other side’s expert witness hadn’t seen all the child’s records or any of the professor’s reports, and wasn’t familiar with any of the latest literature. He must have been duffed up horribly in a court somewhere, as he was afraid to answer any questions in cross-examination and just kept repeating that he’d made it all clear in the examination-in-chief. Since he was so unashamedly partisan, I reckon he deserved everything he got. We’re back tomorrow, but we’ve only got one witness left. The sheriff wants written submissions, so we’re reconvening after Christmas for them. All in all, better than I could have hoped for. I’ve prepared the stuff for tomorrow already, so I wondered whether you fancied going to a film?’

  ‘I’d love to but I can’t. I promised Rattrays that I’d get a Note on the Line of Evidence to them in a case that’s already gone off the rails once, and I’ll have to do it tonight as I’ve got two consultations tomorrow, so I won’t have a moment then. What were you thinking we’d see anyway?’

  ‘I don’t really know, I’m open-minded. Maybe that arty Japanese ghost story or, possibly, the science fiction one about female humanity being descended from aliens as opposed to apes… You could choose. Go on, change your mind?’

  ‘No, I must keep my nose to the grindstone. I haven’t been getting through as much work as I should, as I keep thinking, obsessing, about David, but I’ll have to sort myself out. Mortgage to pay, bank manager to nurse, self to feed.’

  Flora returned to her desk. The written pleadings in the case, the Closed Record, made stomach-churning reading for anyone not familiar with the world of food production:

  ‘The pursuer, Mrs Duff, worked in the evisceration department of the chicken processing factory. Prior to about 1999 there were eight different stages in the evisceration process, namely, transferring, cropping, vents, drawing, gizzards, lunging, neck cutting and neck cleaning. Transferring involved reaching up and hanging up chickens on shackles at shoulder or neck level. Cropping involved the taking of the windpipe and crop of the bird. Vents involved cutting the bird up the back passage with scissors and a vent gun. Drawing involved the removal of the insides of the bird using a drawing stick. Gizzards were where the gallbladder, liver and gizzards were removed. Lunging involved the use of a suction gun to remove the lungs. Neck cutting secateurs were used to cut the neck. These processes were carried out on a production line moving at the rate of about seventy birds a minute. In the latter part of 1985 the defenders installed neck cleaning, cropping and evisceration machines. Later they introduced transferring machinery. Following the introduction of this machinery the jobs in that department consisted of the following, namely neck slitting (involving the cutting of the chicken necks with knives), cropping, transferring, back-up (involving operatives putting their hands inside the bird and with a twisting motion pulling out the innards. This was required only when the machinery was faulty), lungs (involving pulling lung remnants off, the bulk of which had been previously extracted by machines), gizzards, skinning (involving the use of a “whizzo”), cleaning insides, neck cleaning and autotransfer.’

  A plan of the premises had thoughtfully been provided with her papers showing machines described as ‘featherators’, and equipment which included ‘the blood bath’. The case was worth buttons, a repetitive strain injury producing a two-week episode of carpal-tunnel syndrome in a woman on the edge of retirement. Tens of thousands of pounds had already been spent by the Legal Aid Board on pursuing it, and many more would have to be expended before the woman was rewarded with her paltry compensation. Reminding herself of the steady stream of work provided to her by the pursuer’s agents, Flora attempted to rouse some enthusiasm for the case. She had just begun to apply her mind to the identity of the witnesses required for the proof—Mrs Duff herself, her three colleagues and their supervisor, the ergonomics expert, the orthopaedic consultant—when the doorbell rang. She left her study and went to answer it, thankful for the interruption; probably Maria calling to check up on her or trying to tempt her to go for a drink. She looked at her watch: nine-thirty pm, too late for the cinema.

  While Flora Erskine was addressing
Lord Lawford, hands behind her back, weight on her heels, written submissions disregarded with uncharacteristic élan, Alice Rice and Alastair Watt were being viewed with unconcealed rudeness by Paula Carruthers at Ian Melville’s flat. Alice watched with amusement as the woman, whose terse greeting had disclosed a horsey, received-pronunciation accent, adjusted her manner on hearing Alice’s equally rounded vowels, making it an iota more courteous. Paula Carruthers was unable to disguise her surprise at the voice answering her own—someone in the police force, of all places, with whom one might have been at pony club, teenage parties or, for heaven’s sake, school. The obscure etiquette governing such a situation seemed to be too much for Carruthers’ limited neurones, and she was unable to decide whether her visitors should be invited in, like friends or, at least, equals, or whether they should be required to wait at the door like Jehovah’s Witnesses, delivery men and petty officials. As the woman continued to ponder her social predicament, Alice spoke again. ‘It’s Mr Melville, Ian, that we’d like to speak to.’ Carruthers answered, still evidently preoccupied and decisionless, that he was in his studio and was not expected back until lunchtime at the earliest.