Out of Bounds Read Online Free PDF Page A

a cocktail glass in her hand. A tumbled halo of blonde hair surrounded a face that might charitably be described as heart-shaped, with a pointed chin and sharp features. Narrow shoulders and a dress that made the most of her breasts. Plenty of men would have found her attractive enough to chat up, Karen reckoned. The problem was that there was nothing particularly distinctive about her. She wouldn’t have stood out in a crowd. And that was why they’d had so much difficulty in finding any decent leads, she supposed.
    Karen printed out the photo sheet and collected it from the printer tray. She rearranged the contents of one of their whiteboards to make room for the new investigation and attached what little they had. With luck, Jason would bring something more substantial. And then they could get down to work.

6
    U suallywhen a new case hit the Historic Cases Unit, Karen had to be pried away from her desk at the end of the day. She always felt driven to absorb as much as she possibly could right from the start. First impressions were important; she would drill down into the detail afterwards, but she liked to have a sense of how the previous investigation had taken shape.
    But not on Mondays. Monday evenings were her time. Monday evenings were when she and Detective Chief Inspector Jimmy Hutton sat in her living room drinking gin and staring out across the glitter and swell of the Firth of Forth towards the clustered lights of the string of Fife towns from North Queensferry to Kirkcaldy. Karen had tried to tell Jimmy it wasn’t necessary any more. That she wasn’t going to fall apart. But Jimmy refused to take a telling. She suspected he needed their Monday evenings as much as she did.
    Long months before, Detective Sergeant Phil Parhatka had been killed in the line of duty. That was something thatalmost never happened in Scotland; there was no routine protocol for getting past it. Phil had been Karen’s partner. The love of her life. She’d fallen for him the first week they worked together and for years she’d been convinced it would never be reciprocated. And then it was.
    After they got together, Phil had moved from the HCU. He became Jimmy Hutton’s bagman, his trusted lieutenant in the quaintly named Murder Prevention Team. He’d been fascinated by his job and never imagined it would be the death of him. And then it was.
    After the funeral, Karen ignored the advice of everyone who told her not to make any major decisions for a year. She sold the house in Kirkcaldy that Phil had left to her. She sold her own house to the couple who had been renting it from her. With the proceeds, she’d put down a substantial deposit on the flat on the Western Harbour Breakwater with the sensational view and absolutely no memories.
    Two weeks after the funeral, Jimmy Hutton had turned up on her doorstep on a Monday. ‘I thought you could maybe do with some company,’ he’d said, proffering a bottle of gin – The Botanist from Islay.
    ‘I’m fine,’ she’d said. But she was leaning against the door for support. Kindness, she’d recently discovered, was her undoing.
    Jimmy had sighed. ‘No, you’re not. And neither am I. I’ve not come to be maudlin. We’ve both taken a body blow, and we’re neither of us in a position to let that show in the day-to-day. I could talk to Phil and so could you. I thought maybe we could talk to each other instead?’
    And so she’d opened the door wider, saying, ‘I’ve got Fevertree tonic in the fridge.’ It had since become a Monday evening ritual. Gin sampling and conversation. They didn’t talk much about Phil. They didn’t need to; they’d both absorbed the terrible blow of his death and understood thecost of his loss. But when they did touch on him it was with affection and wry smiles. What they talked about instead was their work. Each had become a sounding board for the other. And in the process they’d worked their way through a series of interesting and sometimes