Birthdays for the Dead

by Stuart MacBride

  Traffic was barely moving, crawling along, then stopping, then crawling again. Why could no bastard drive any more?

  ‘—are you even listening to me?’

  ‘What?’ I blinked. ‘Yeah … not a lot we can do about it, though, is there?’ A hole opened up in the other lane, and I put my foot down, but the rusty old Renault barely noticed. Should have held out for one of the pool cars. ‘Come on you little sod…’

  A Tesco eighteen-wheeler thundered past into the gap, dirty spray turning the Renault’s windscreen opaque until the wipers scraped it into twin khaki-coloured rainbows. ‘Bastard!’

  ‘Where are you?’

  ‘Just coming into Dundee – by the Toyota garage. Traffic’s awful.’

  ‘Right, let’s try this again: remember I told you to play nice with Sergeant Smith? Well, it’s not a request any more, it’s an order. Turns out the slimy tosser was PSD in Grampian before we got him.’

  Professional Standards? Sodding hell…

  Actually, that made sense – DS Smith looked the type who’d clype on his colleagues, then get a hard-on while he stitched them up.

  The traffic lurched forwards another couple of car-lengths. ‘Why have we got him then?’

  ‘Exactly.’

  ‘Might be an idea if everyone kept their heads down for a while.’

  ‘You think?’ Silence on the other end. And then Weber was back. ‘Professional Standards. From Aberdeen.’

  ‘I know.’

  ‘Means they don’t trust us to police ourselves. Which – to be honest – is fair enough, but still, there’s the principle of the thing. We need a result, sharpish.’ A clunk and Weber was gone.

  Yeah, we’d get a result sharpish, because that’s how it worked. Didn’t matter that the official task force had been after the bastard for eight years: Weber needed a result to keep Grampian and Tayside from finding out that all the rumours about Oldcastle CID were true, so one would miraculously appear.

  I turned the radio back up, and some sort of boy-band crap droned out of the speakers.

  ‘Ooh, baby, swear you love me,

  don’t say maybe.

  Ooh-ooh – say we – can make it right…’

  The phone went again, its old-fashioned ringing noise a lot more tuneful than the garbage on the radio. I stabbed the button and wedged the mobile back between my ear and shoulder. ‘Forget something?’

  A small pause, then an Irish accent, female: ‘I think it’s yerself that’s forgotten somethin’, don’t ye?’

  Oh God… I swallowed. Wrapped my hands tighter around the steering wheel. Mrs Kerrigan. Sod. Why did I answer the bloody phone? Always check the display before picking up.

  ‘Baby, let’s not fight tonight,

  let’s do it, do it, do it right…’

  I cleared my throat. ‘I was … going to call you.’

  ‘Aye, I’ll bet ye were. Yez are late. Mr Inglis is very disappointed.’

  ‘Let’s do it right, tonight!’ Instrumental break.

  ‘I need a little time to—’

  ‘Do ye not think five years is enough? ’Cos I’m startin’ to think ye’re takin’ the piss here. I’m wantin’ three thousand bills by Tuesday lunch, OK? Or I’ll have yer feckin’ hole in flitters.’

  Three grand by tomorrow lunchtime? Where was I supposed to get three grand by tomorrow lunchtime? It wasn’t possible. They were going to break my legs…

  ‘No problem. Three thousand. Tomorrow.’

  ‘That’d be bleedin’ deadly, ta.’ And she hung up.

  I folded forwards, resting my forehead against the steering wheel. The plastic surface was rough, as if someone had been chewing at it.

  Should just keep on going. Drive right through Dundee and sod off down south. Birmingham maybe, or Newcastle: stay with Brett and his boyfriend. After all, what were brothers for? As long as they didn’t make me help plan the wedding. Which they would. Bloody seating arrangements, floral centrepieces, and vol-au-vents…

  Bugger that.

  ‘Let’s do it right, Baby,

  let’s do it tonight!’ Big finish.

  A horn blared out somewhere behind me. I looked up and saw the gap in front of the Renault’s bonnet, goosed the accelerator and coasted in behind the Audi again.

  ‘You’re listening to Tay FM, and that was Mr Bones, with “Tonight Baby”. We’ve got the Great Overgate Giveaway coming up, but first Nicole Gifford wants to wish her fiancé Dave good luck in his new job. Here’s Celine Dion singing “Just Walk Away”…’

  Or better yet: run like buggery. I switched off the radio.

  Three grand by tomorrow. Never mind the other sixteen…

  There was always extortion: go back to Oldcastle and lean on a few people. Pay Willie McNaughton a visit – see if he was still flogging GHB to school kids. That should be worth at least a couple of hundred. Karen Turner had that brothel on Shepard Lane. And Fat Jimmy Campbell was probably still growing weed in his loft… Throw in another dozen ‘house calls’ and I could pull in a grand and a half, maybe two tops.

  Over a thousand pounds short, and nothing left to sell.

  Maybe Mrs Kerrigan would go easy on me and they’d only break one of my legs. And next week the compound interest would set in, along with the compound fractures.

  The car park was nearly empty, just a handful of silver rep-mobiles and hire cars clustered around the hotel entrance. I pulled into a space, killed the engine, then sat there, staring off into the middle distance as the rain drummed on the car roof.

  Maybe Newcastle wasn’t such a bad idea after—

  Clunk, clunk, clunk.

  I turned in my seat. A chubby face was peering in through the passenger window: narrow mouth, stubble-covered jowls, bald head dripping and shiny, dark bags under the eyes, blueish grey skin. Big round shoulders hunched up around his ears. The accent was pure Liverpool: ‘You coming in, or wha?’

  I closed my eyes, counted to five, then climbed out into the rain.

  Those teeny little lips turned down at the edges. ‘Jesus, look at the state of you. Be frightenin’ old ladies, face like that.’ He had a brown paper bag clutched in one hand, the Burger King logo smeared with something red.

  ‘Thought the Met would’ve beaten the Scouse out of you by now.’

  ‘You kidding? Like a stick of Blackpool rock me: cut us in half and it’s “Sabir loves Merseyside” all the way down.’ He pointed a chunky finger at my face. ‘What’s the other bloke look like?’

  ‘Almost as ugly as you.’

  A smile. ‘Well your mam never complains when I’m givin’ her one.’

  ‘To be fair, she’s got a lot less fussy since she died.’ I locked the car, rain pattering on the shoulders of my leather jacket. ‘The McMillans here?’

  ‘Nah: home. We’re keepin’ our end low key, didn’t think they’d want a Crown Office task force camped out on their doorstep, like.’ Sabir turned and lumbered towards the hotel entrance, wide hips rolling from side to side, feet out at ten-to-two, like a duck. ‘The father’s just about holdin’ it together, but the mother’s in pieces. How ’bout your lot?’

  I followed him through the automatic doors into a bland lobby. The receptionist was slumped over her phone, doodling on a day planner. ‘I know… Yeah… Well, it’s only ’cos she’s jealous…’

  Sabir led the way to the lifts and mashed the button with his thumb. ‘We’re on the fifth floor. Great view: Tesco car park on one side, dual carriageway on the other. Like Venice in spring, that.’ The numbers counted their way down from nine. ‘So: you here on a social, or you after a favour?’

  I handed him a photograph. The doors slid open, but Sabir didn’t move. He stared at the picture, mouth hanging open.

  A snort from the reception desk. ‘No… I swear I never… No… Told you: she’s jealous.’

  The doors slid shut again.

  Sabir breathed out. ‘Holy crap…’

 
; Chapter 3

  The bitter smell of percolating coffee filled the fifth-floor conference room. One wall was solid glass – patio doors at the far end opening out onto a balcony – the others festooned with scribble-covered flip charts and whiteboards.

  Sabir unfurled the top of his Burger King bag and pulled out a handful of fries as he lumbered across the beige carpet. I followed him.

  Two men and two women were clustered at the far end of the room, perching on the edge of tables, gathered around a stocky man with salt-and-ginger hair and a face gouged deep with creases and wrinkles. Detective Chief Superintendent Dickie. He hooked a thumb at the nearest whiteboard. ‘Aye, and make sure you pull all the CCTV footage they’ve got, this time, Maggie. Don’t let the buggers fob you off; should all still be on file.’

  One of the women nodded – no-nonsense pageboy haircut bobbing around her long, thin face. ‘Yes, Chief.’ She scribbled something down in a notebook.

  DCS Dickie settled back in his seat and smiled at a lump of muscle with no chin. ‘Byron?’

  ‘Yes, right…’ The huge sergeant straightened his wire-rimmed glasses. ‘When Helen went missing last year, Tayside Police talked to all of her friends, classmates, and everyone at the hairdressers she worked in on Saturdays. No one saw anything. Stable enough home life, wanted to go to university to study law. No boyfriend. Liked gerbils, Lady Gaga, and reading.’ He turned and pointed at a corkboard covered in about thirty head-and-shoulder shots of young girls, all reported missing within the last twelve months: just before their thirteenth birthday.

  Rebecca’s photograph used to be up there…

  One of the pictures had a red border around it – ribbon held in place with brass thumbtacks. That would be Helen McMillan: hair like polished copper, grinning, wearing a white shirt and what looked like a school tie.

  A frown crossed Byron’s face. ‘According to Bremner, she was only a twenty-five per cent match with the victim profile.’

  Sitting on the other side of the group, DS Gillis ran a hand down his chest-length Viking beard, long blond curls tied in a ponytail at the back of his head. When he spoke, it was in a Morningside-sixty-Benson-&-Hedges-a-day growl. ‘Far as we know, Helen’s never kept a diary, so we’ve no idea if she was planning to meet anyone the day she was abducted. Told her mother she was going window shopping after the hairdressers shut on Saturday – wanted a new phone for her birthday. Last sighting we have is her leaving the Vodaphone shop in the Overgate Centre at five thirty-seven. After that: nothing.’

  Dickie made a note on the whiteboard. ‘Our boy seems to have a thing for shopping centres. What about social networking?’

  Sabir cleared his throat. ‘Goin’ through everything again: got this new pattern-recognition software that spiders her friends too. So far it’s all about who’s gorra crush on who, and aren’t Five Star Six dreeeemy.’ He clapped a hand down on my shoulder. It smelled of chips. ‘In other news.’

  Everyone looked, and nodded – well, except for that hairy tosser, DS Gillis – a couple even waved.

  A smile deepened the wrinkles around the chief superintendent’s mouth. ‘Detective Constable Ash Henderson, as I live and wheeze. To what do we owe…’ Then quickly faded. ‘Something’s happened, hasn’t it?’

  ‘At two thirty yesterday afternoon, a team of council workers were repairing a sewage main in Castleview.’ I pulled out the photograph I’d shown Sabir and handed it to Dickie. It was an eight-by-ten big glossy blow-up of a trench. The earth was dark, almost black, in sharp contrast to the bright yellow council digger in the background. A tattered fringe of black plastic surrounded a scattered mess of pale bone, ribs and femurs and tibia all scraped into a jumble by the digger’s back hoe. The skull lay on its side, the right temple crushed and gouged. ‘We got a match on the dental records last night. It’s Hannah Kelly.’

  ‘Holy, crap…’ DS Gillis tugged at his Viking beard, grinning. ‘We got one! We finally got one.’

  ‘Bloody brilliant.’ Dickie stood and grabbed my hand, pumping it up and down. ‘Finally some forensic evidence. Real, proper, physical evidence. Not half-remembered interviews, or grainy security camera footage showing sod all: actual evidence.’ He let go of my hand and for a moment it looked as if he was moving in for a hug.

  I backed up a step. ‘We found another body at three this morning. Same area.’

  Sabir flipped a laptop open with one hand, the other clutching a half-eaten burger. ‘Where?’ The fingers of his left hand danced across the keyboard and a ceiling-mounted projector whirred into life, turning the wall by the door into one big screen: Google Earth booting up.

  I settled on the edge of a desk. ‘McDermid Avenue.’

  ‘McDermid Avenue…’ A rattle of keys and the map swooped in on the north-east of Scotland, then Oldcastle: the glittering curl of the Kings River cutting it in half. Then closer, until Castle Hill covered the whole wall – the twisted cobbled streets surrounding the castle, the green expanse of King’s Park, the rectangular Sixties bulk of the hospital. Closer – streets lined with trees, terraced sandstone houses with slate roofs and long back gardens. McDermid Avenue appeared dead centre, growing until it was big enough to make out individual cars. The houses backed onto a rectangle of scrub, bushes, and trees – an overgrown park criss-crossed with paths.

  DCS Dickie walked over, until he was close enough to throw a shadow across the projected street. ‘Where’s the burial site?’ He shifted from foot to foot, rubbing his fingertips together.

  Probably thought this was it: all we needed to do was ID the house where the bodies were buried, find out who lived there nine years ago, arrest them, and everyone could go home. Poor sod.

  I nudged Sabir to the side, brushed sesame seeds off the laptop’s keyboard, then swirled the mouse pointer over the parkland behind the houses. Double clicked about an inch away from the ruins of a bandstand, deep inside a patch of brambles. The screen lurched in again, but this time the satellite photo resolution wasn’t high enough, so everything turned into large fuzzy pixels.

  Dickie’s shoulders slumped a little. ‘Oh…’

  Not quite so easy.

  I zoomed out, until McDermid Avenue was joined on the screen by another cluster of streets: Jordan Place, Hill Terrace, and Gordon Street, all of them backing onto the park.

  The woman with the bowl haircut whistled. ‘Got be, what, sixty … eighty houses there?’

  I shook my head. ‘A lot of these places got subdivided up into flats in the seventies, you’re looking at about three hundred households with access to the park.’

  ‘Shite.’

  A small pause, then Byron jerked his chin up. ‘Yes, but we’ve got somewhere to start now, don’t we? We’ve got three hundred possible leads instead of none at all. This is still a result.’

  I rolled the lump of Blu-Tack in my palms until it was sticky, then tore it into four bits and stuck the sheet of paper on the wall, completing the set. Eight homemade birthday cards, blown up to A3 on the hotel photocopier. I’d laid them out in two rows of four, the oldest top left, the latest one bottom right. All the Polaroids had a number scratched into the top-left corner of the picture: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8. One every year, for eight years.

  The first card showed Hannah Kelly strapped to a chair in a filthy room, eyes wide, tears shining on her cheeks, a rectangle of silver duct tape covering her mouth. She was fully dressed in this one, wearing the same clothes she’d had on the day she’d gone missing: tan-leather cropped jacket, strappy pink top with some sort of logo on it, a pink tartan miniskirt, black tights, and biker boots. Cable-ties were just visible against the dark leather around her ankles, both hands behind her back.

  She still had all her hair – long, midnight black, poker straight.

  She’d been missing for twelve months and four days by the time the card arrived in the post.

  Hannah wasn’t naked until number five. Not fully anyway. And by then she was a mass of cuts a
nd bruises, little circular burns angry-red on her pale skin.

  That familiar cold weight settled in my chest.

  Eight cards. This was what the future was going to look like: Rebecca’s photo, year after year, getting worse. Making sure I knew what he’d done to her. Making sure I saw every—

  ‘Ash, are you OK?’ Dickie was staring at me.

  I cleared my throat. ‘Yeah, just … long night last night, waiting for those dental results.’ I went and helped myself to the stewed coffee in the conference-room percolator, leaving everyone else to stare at the time-lapse torture session. Then one by one they drifted away, until there was no one left but DCS Dickie and the only member of the team I didn’t recognize. The other woman – the one who’d sat quietly, taking notes while everyone else had celebrated the discovery of Hannah Kelly’s body. The only one who didn’t look like a police officer.

  She was peering up at the cards through a pair of heavy-framed glasses, one hand fidgeting with a long strand of curly brown hair. Her other arm was wrapped around herself, as if she was trying to hold something in. Stripy grey top, blue jeans, and red Converse Hi-tops, a tan leather satchel slung over one shoulder. Standing next to Dickie, she made it look like bring-your-daughter-to-work-day.

  Maybe granddaughter – she couldn’t have been a day over twenty-two.

  I joined them. Heat leached out of the coffee mug and into my fingers, soothing grating joints. ‘Hannah’s parents don’t know yet.’

  Dickie stared at the last photograph in the set, the one that arrived two months ago on Hannah’s birthday. She was slumped in the chair, her long black hair shaved off, her scalp a mess of cuts and bruises, the word ‘Bitch’ carved into her forehead, eyes screwed shut, tears making glistening trails through the blood on her cheeks. Dickie sniffed. ‘Do you want me to tell them?’

  I sighed. Shook my head. ‘I’ll do it when I get back to Oldcastle. They know me.’

  ‘Hmm…’ A pause. ‘Speaking of which…’ Dickie nodded at the young woman in the stripy top. ‘You two met?’