Out of Bounds by Val McDermid Read Free Book Online Page A

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 mirroror 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 completelyclueless 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