Free Out of Bounds by Val McDermid

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.
    Noblesmirked. ‘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 atuniversity. 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