Free Hostage to Murder by Val McDermid

crash through her life like an express train on speed,” she sighed.
    Rory shook her head vigorously, droplets of moisture scattering from her sweat-darkened hair. “Hey, she’s a grown up. She can make her own choices. I don’t force myself on anyone.”
    Sandra snorted. “Little miss butter wouldn’t melt. Rory, just for once, leave it alone. You know you don’t do relationships. You’re the emotional equivalent of a hit and run driver. You never get hurt yourself, you just leave a trail of wreckage in your rear view mirror.”
    Rory pulled a face. “Yeah, well. When the only relationship you’ve ever seen close up was as fucked as my mum and dad’s was, you’d be mental to think it was as easy as falling in love. Dive in, dive deep and then climb back out and dry off before you catch a cold, that’s what works for me. And if it makes you any happier, I promise not to make a move on Lindsay. OK?”

    Sandra put an arm round her friend and hugged her close. “It’s not about making me happy. It’s about you making yourself happy.”
    â€œWhich I do, with lots of girlies.” Rory’s smile was wry. “Only, never for very long.”
    â€œJust remember that if Lindsay starts looking like Mount Everest.”
    â€œEh?”
    â€œYou don’t have to climb it just because it’s there. You’ll have more fun in the long run working with her.”
    â€œSandra, are you sure you’re not Jewish?”
    Sandra gave her an affectionate punch in the ribs. “Fuck off, Rory. C’mon, let’s go and have a last dance and see if I can pick myself up some wee boy who wants to be initiated into the secret world of the older woman.”
    Rory chuckled as she got to her feet. “And you’ve got the nerve to talk about me.”
    Sandra rumpled Rory’s damp hair. “Difference is, I can do the serious thing just as well as I do the playing.” She pushed past and made for the stairs leading to the main dance floor, entirely missing the momentary flash of sadness and longing that crossed Rory’s face.
    Â 
    The raw cold ate into Kevin’s bones. Michael seemed oblivious to the weather, as affected by the penetrating damp as were the concrete and glass of the primary school they were watching. The school was near the Botanic Gardens, in a quiet side street lined with tall sandstone tenements, which posed something of a problem for them. There was no convenient bus shelter or phone box to use as a surveillance point. Nor was there a handy café with windows overlooking the school entrance. And in these days of paedophile paranoia, nothing would provoke a call to the police faster than two men standing on a street corner scrutinising the children arriving at a primary school.
    If it had been up to Kevin, they would have gone back to bed after their preliminary reconnaissance at half past seven had demonstrated how apparently impossible was the task facing
them. But this was the school nearest the supermarket where Bernadette Dooley had been spotted, so they had to start here, Michael decreed. And besides, he had spent long enough on the front line to have honed his improvisational skills. As they had walked up Byres Road towards the school, he’d noticed two youths by the Underground entrance handing out copies of a free newspaper to the commuters hurrying into the station. When he realised how exposed the school was from a surveillance point of view, he’d remembered the newspaper distributors.
    He’d marched Kevin back down to the station and gone into a huddle with the youths. A threatening look from his amber eyes would probably have been enough to achieve his goal, but Michael didn’t want to be fixed in anyone’s memory as a bad lad. Not just yet, anyway. So a couple of tenners were swapped for two bundles of freesheets and they walked back to the school, where they took up