Authors: Val McDermid
Out of Bounds
Val McDermid is a No. 1 bestseller whose novels have been translated into more than thirty languages, and have sold over eleven million copies. She has won many awards internationally, including the CWA Gold Dagger for best crime novel of the year and the
LA Times
Book of the Year Award. She was inducted into the ITV3 Crime Thriller Awards Hall of Fame in 2009, was the recipient of the CWA Cartier Diamond Dagger for 2010 and in 2011 she received the Lambda Literary Foundation Pioneer Award. In 2016, Val received the Outstanding Contribution to Crime Fiction Award at the Old Peculier Crime Writing Festival. She writes full time and divides her time between Cheshire and Edinburgh.
A Place of Execution
Killing the Shadows
The Distant Echo
The Grave Tattoo
A Darker Domain
Trick of the Dark
The Vanishing Point
The Skeleton Road
TONY HILL/CAROL JORDAN NOVELS
The Mermaids Singing
The Wire in the Blood
The Last Temptation
The Torment of Others
Beneath the Bleeding
Fever of the Bone
The Retribution
Cross and Burn
Splinter the Silence
KATE BRANNIGAN NOVELS
Dead Beat
Kick Back
Crack Down
Clean Break
Blue Genes
Star Struck
LINDSAY GORDON NOVELS
Report for Murder
Common Murder
Final Edition
Union Jack
Booked for Murder
Hostage to Murder
SHORT STORY COLLECTIONS
The Writing on the Wall
Stranded
Christmas is Murder (ebook only)
Gunpowder Plots (ebook only)
NON-FICTION
A Suitable Job for a Woman
Forensics
Published by Little, Brown
ISBN: 978-1-4087-0693-0
All characters and events in this publication, other than those clearly in the public domain, are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.
Copyright © 2016 Val McDermid
The moral right of the author has been asserted.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of the publisher.
The publisher is not responsible for websites (or their content) that are not owned by the publisher.
Little, Brown
Little, Brown Book Group
Carmelite House
50 Victoria Embankment
London EC4Y 0DZ
Contents
This is my 30th novel. And it’s for the indestructible, indefatigable, implacable Jane Gregory who has been my agent and my friend from the very beginning. Respected, feared and beloved in the literary world, she has fought my corner, had my back and through it all, her laughter has rocked my world.
‘S
ome
night, eh, boys?’ Ross Garvie flung a sweaty arm round the neck of Wee Grantie, his best mate in all the world.
‘Some night, right enough,’ Wee Grantie slurred. The two youths swung their hips in rough unison to the deep dark bass beat that shuddered through the club.
The two friends they’d been drinking with since they’d preloaded at Wee Grantie’s sister’s flat earlier jumped up and down, punching the air. ‘We are the boys,’ they chorused. ‘We are the Arab boys!’ Their Dundee United football shirts provided the explanation for their apparently bizarre chant, their team having scored a rare victory that afternoon.
‘Ah want to drive all night,’ Ross shouted, his body bouncing with the mix of Red Bull, vodka and some chemical cocktail that didn’t even have a name.
Wee Grantie slowed as the music segued into the Black Eyed Peas’ ‘I Gotta Feeling’. ‘You dinnae have a car. None of us has a car.’
Ross stopped. ‘Have you no ambition?’
Wee Grantie looked at his feet, knowing there was no right answer.
Tam
and Tozer, their partners in mayhem, punched each other in the shoulder. ‘That’s it,’ Tam shouted. ‘Tonight’s gonna be a good, good night. Like the song says. Gonnae do it, aye?’
Wee Grantie frowned. ‘How?’ He stuck his hands in his jogging bottoms and adjusted himself.
‘Come on, let’s get out of here. There’s no talent anyway. None of us is going to pull, we might as well hit the street.’ Ross was already halfway to the door, not needing to check whether his posse was on his tail.
Outside, urgency kicked in as the chill air wicked the heat from their bodies. The young men shivered. Tam and Tozer slapped their bodies with soft arms. Nobody else was around; it was still too early for punters to abandon a club they’d paid to enter.
‘Come on, Rossi boy, if you’re gonnae do it, do it before my balls climb so far inside my belly they’ll be sticking in my throat,’ Tozer whined.
Ross scanned the patch of rough ground that acted as a car park for the nightclub, looking for something easy to break into, simple to hotwire. The answer was in the middle row, high enough to be instantly visible above its compact companions. ‘There we go,’ he said, breaking into a run, jinking between parked cars till he got to the Land Rover Defender. One of the new generation, still clunky as fuck to drive, but a piece of piss to steal.
‘Find a rock,’ he called out to Wee Grantie, who obediently started frowning at the ground. He knew from experience what he was looking for – heavy enough to make an impact, pointed enough to break the toughened window glass. There were plenty of candidates compressed into the car park surface, but by the time he found one and heeled it out of the ground, the other three were dancing on their toes round the driver’s side of the vehicle.
Ross
snatched the rock from him and set it just right in his hand, balanced and steady. He pulled his arm back and with a swift straight jab, he smacked it into the driver’s side window. The glass cracked and starred but didn’t break. That took a second blow. Then they were all inside, bouncing on the seats like toddlers needing a toilet break, while Ross took out his Swiss army knife, adeptly freeing wires, cutting them and reconnecting the ones that made the engine cough into life.
‘Ya beauty,’ he yelled, switching the headlamps on and grinding the car into gear. Barely seventeen, no licence, no lessons, but Ross Garvie had all the confidence of a boy who’d been stealing motors since he could reach the pedals.
The Defender lurched backwards, crunching into the headlamps and radiator grille of a VW Golf. Then into first, leaping forward, glass tinkling in their wake. The tyres screamed as Ross whipped the unwieldy Defender out of the car park and into the street. He hammered through the city centre, running red lights and cutting up sedate late-night drivers who didn’t want to draw attention to themselves.
The city lights slid past in a blur. The three passengers whooped and yelled as Ross delivered all the thrills of a car chase without the pursuit, not caring when his handbrake turn smacked them into the hard edges of the door furniture.
And then they were on the Perth road, pedal to the metal, flat out. The Defender protested when the speedo needle hit eighty, but it felt a lot faster because of the lumbering sway of the two-ton monster. ‘Who needs a fucking Porsche?’ Ross yelled as they thundered towards a roundabout. ‘I’m going right over the top of that fucker. Off-roading here we fucking come.’
Hitting the roundabout kerb at top speed threw the four lads into the air and back down in disorganised heaps. Ross’s feet left the pedals and for a few seconds he felt he was in zero gravity, only his grip on the steering wheel keeping him in
contact with the earth. ‘Way-hey,’ he screamed as he hit the seat and hammered the gas again. Somehow the Defender stayed on all four wheels, ploughing deep furrows through grass and flower beds before emerging on the other side.
‘Fuck the Young Farmers,’ Tozer gasped. ‘We are the country boys.’
A wobble over the far kerb and they were back on the dual carriageway. But now they had distant company. Far back, Ross could see the faint shimmer of a flashing blue light. Some bastard had phoned them in and the five-oh were coming to get them. ‘No way,’ he shouted, crouching over the wheel, urging the Defender onward as if that would make a difference to its paltry turn of speed.
The next roundabout loomed, higher in the middle. He wasn’t daunted. He wasn’t wasting time going round when he could go over. But this time, he misjudged the obstacle. Beyond the kerb was a low wall that struck the Defender at precisely the wrong point. For a long moment, it seemed to teeter between the tipping point and stability, before gravity finally won. Once it started turning, momentum took over. The Land Rover rolled end to end twice, tumbling the four youths head over heels like dice in a cup.
Then it clipped the far side of the roundabout, which hurtled it sideways, catapulting it into another complete roll in a different direction. As it smashed into the crash barrier across the carriageway, the engine cut out amid a shower of sparks. The only sound was the creak and grind of metal on metal as the Defender settled.
The two-tone siren of a police traffic car split the quiet, braking to a halt, its blue strobing light bathing the battered vehicle in an unreal glow. It illuminated dark stripes, stains and spatters on the inside of the windows. ‘See that?’ the driver said to his rookie colleague.
‘Tell me that’s not blood?’ The rookie felt slightly dizzy.
‘It’s
blood all right. Stupid wee bastards. Looks like we’ll not need to bother with an ambulance.’
But as he spoke, the crumpled driver’s door of the Defender creaked open, spilling the ruined torso of Ross Garvie on to the tarmac.
‘Strike that,’ the cop sighed. ‘That’s what you call survival of the unfittest.’
K
inross
was a small town, but it was big enough to have more than one kind of pub. There were hotel bars that supplied food as well as a predictable offering of beers, wines and spirits. There was one where younger drinkers congregated to drink fruit ciders and vodka shots to the accompaniment of loud music. There was another where patrons played pool and darts and watched football on a giant TV screen, washed down with cheap generic beer. And there was Hazeldean’s, tucked away off the Kirkgate, its wood-panelled décor apparently unchanged since the 1950s, its regular customers held fast by a range of craft beers and an eye-watering selection of malt whiskies. The walls were lined with padded booths, the tables topped with beaten copper. Bar stools were lined up along one side of the L-shaped bar; the other side provided a brass rail for customers to rest one foot on as they drank at the counter. It was the kind of pub where everyone knew their place.