Birthdays for the Dead

by Stuart MacBride

  ‘I think we should meet up before the post mortems this morning, it’s going to be really odd, isn’t it, I mean normally it’s all about finding out how the victim died, but we’ve already got photos of it happening, don’t you think that’s odd?’

  I closed my eyes. Rested my forehead against the cool front door. ‘Actually, I’ve got a couple of things on this morning.’ Also known as visiting some dodgy bastards and squeezing as much cash out of them as possible to pay off Mrs Kerrigan before she breaks my legs at lunchtime.

  ‘It’s all right, I cleared it with DCI Weber, we’re a team now, isn’t that great? I thought we should maybe get some breakfast or something first, because I’m guessing it’s going to be a pretty long day, I mean with three bodies to post mortem, though I suppose it might be a bit quicker as they’re all just bones.’

  A team… Oh joy. ‘You start the day with a double espresso, don’t you.’ I unsnibbed the heavy Yale lock. ‘Going to take me at least an hour, hour and a half to get to you, so why don’t we meet up at the hospital?’ That should be enough time for a little light extortion. ‘PMs don’t start till nine anyway, so…’ I hauled the door open.

  There was a patrol car sitting outside my house, headlights gleaming in the dark. Dr McDonald stood in front of it, bundled up in a duffle coat, a woolly hat pulled down over her ears with an explosion of brown curls sticking out from underneath. She waved, still holding the mobile phone to her ear. ‘I got a lift.’

  The smell of sizzling bacon and hot chip fat filled the air.

  ‘…warn that the following report contains disturbing images and flash photography.’ The TV mounted above the counter glowed through a thin film of fluff and grease. The picture jumped to a press conference: DCS Dickie shared the stage with Helen McMillan’s parents and a senior officer in full dress uniform.

  Jane McMillan clasped her husband’s hand, blinking in the media strobelight. She was wearing the same floral frock she’d had on yesterday, her eyes red, nose shiny, bottom lip wobbling. She looked as if someone had taken away her innards and replaced them with broken glass. ‘I … I want you to know that our Helen was a special girl. If anyone knows who took her: you have to go to the police. You have to.’

  I clunked two huge mugs of tea down on the red Formica tabletop.

  The Tartan Bunnet wasn’t that busy for a Tuesday morning – normally the little café would be full of nightshift CID and uniform, but everyone was on overtime: searching Cameron Park, or going door-to-door, or trying to track down whoever lived in the area nine years ago.

  Dr McDonald took a sip of tea, made smacking noises with her lips. She had the café’s copy of the Daily Mail laid out on the table: ‘HELEN’S BIRTHDAY HORROR’ was stretched across the front page, above a close-up of the birthday card. Helen McMillan, tied to a chair, cheeks streaked with tears.

  ‘Please, we just want our Helen back…’

  ‘I know they have to put out an appeal and they have to believe it’s going to make a difference, but it really isn’t, Helen’s father was right: she’s already dead, she’s been dead for a year.’

  ‘What else can they do?’ I settled into the seat opposite, facing the window. The sun was crawling over the horizon making the rooftops glisten. A pair of white chimneys poked up above the surrounding streets – Castle Hill Infirmary’s incinerator, twin trails of steam glowing against the heavy purple clouds.

  ‘And it’s not like someone’s going to come forward and say, “Hey, I know who the Birthday Boy is,” because no one knows who he is, he’s clever and he’s careful and he’s been doing this for at least nine years, he’s good at blending in with the normal people, that’s why he’s got away with it for so long.’

  A man’s voice replaced Jane McMillan’s, not Dickie or the father so it had to be the guy in the dress uniform. ‘I want to assure the public that Tayside Police are following several lines of enquiry. But we need your help: if you saw Helen the day she disappeared…’

  Dr McDonald produced a black Sharpie and sketched a map of Britain on the newspaper, adding two squares roughly where Oldcastle would be, one over Dundee, Inverness, Bristol, Newcastle, Cardiff, and Glasgow, and two for London. ‘Five girls taken from Scotland, four from England, one from Wales. All mainland UK.’

  Almost right.

  ‘Meanwhile, in Oldcastle, police continue to excavate Cameron Park…’

  She scrawled a rough approximation of the motorway network on her map, joining the squares. Then looked up at me. ‘You don’t have a red pen or something, do you, only if I keep adding stuff in black it’s going to get a bit confusing.’

  There was a clatter from the counter behind us, then a gravelly voice. ‘One poached egg on toast. One coronary classic.’

  I turned and put a hand up. A baggy-faced woman in a chequered apron shuffled over, carrying two plates. She stood over the table, thin grey hair plastered to her shiny forehead. ‘Who’s gettin’ the coronary?’

  Dr McDonald bounced up and down in her seat. ‘Ooh, that’s me, thanks.’

  The plate was about the size of a hubcap, heaped with toast, sausages, grilled tomato, streaky bacon, mushrooms, two fried eggs, two slices of black pudding floating on a sea of baked beans, and a mound of golden chips.

  I took the other plate. ‘Thanks, Effie.’

  ‘Sure you don’t want me to do you some chips, son?’

  ‘Honestly, I’m fine.’

  ‘Hmmph.’ She hoisted up her bosoms. ‘Well, don’t blame me when you waste away.’ She shuffled off.

  Dr McDonald hacked off a chunk of sausage, dipped it in yolk, then stuffed it into her mouth. Talking as she chewed. ‘The interesting thing is when you overlay the abduction dates on the map – I did it last night with noodles and prawns – he’s taking most of them in the latter third of the year: both Oldcastle ones are in September, the London ones in October, so there’s probably an external stressor operating around then, maybe job-related.’

  ‘A four-month seasonal stressor?’ I popped my egg yolk with my knife; golden yellow oozed out onto the toast.

  She grabbed the tomato sauce from the garrison of condiments at the end of the table and liberally decorated her plate with it. ‘I’d say he definitely has to travel for work, and maybe spends pretty big chunks of time away from home, so it’s worth looking at lorry drivers, perhaps long-distance bus drivers too.’ She wolfed down bacon. Mushroom. Toast. Beans. It was like watching bin men hurling black bags into a skip. ‘And that leaves us with the puzzle of Amber O’Neil, victim number one, she was grabbed in May, does that not seem odd to you, that she’s the only one grabbed in the summer, when everyone else is taken September to December?’

  ‘Maybe.’

  Chew, munch, shovel, mumble. ‘When we finish with the post mortems today I want to go through everything they’ve got on Amber O’Neil’s disappearance, actually I’d like everything they’ve got on everyone, do you think Detective Chief Superintendent Dickie would let me take it to Shetland, could he burn it all onto a disk or something?’

  I looked at her, bean juice dribbling down her chin, and fought the impulse to spit into a napkin and wipe it off. ‘Do you have any idea how much paper there is on a single Birthday Boy victim? We’ve got three boxes on Hannah Kelly alone. We’d need to head up the road in a Transit van.’

  ‘Oh…’ A shrug, then back to the sausages.

  ‘What about the locations? Five in Scotland, five not. Might be a local lad?’

  ‘Mmmm…’ More chewing. ‘Do you really visit Hannah’s parents every year, so they won’t have to deal with the birthday card on their own?’

  I mopped up the last of my egg with the final chunk of toast. ‘You’ve got bean juice on your chin.’

  Silence from the other side of the table.

  Outside the window, the Number 14 rumbled past, ferrying bleary-eyed suits-and-ties to work.

  Dr McDonald wiped a hand across her chin, then licked the p
alm. ‘In case you’re wondering, this is the bit where we share things about ourselves and bond over communal experiences.’

  No thanks.

  More silence.

  She sliced a circle of black pudding in two, then stuffed it in. ‘I’ll go first. My name isn’t really Alice, it’s Charlotte, but I hate it because it’s the same as that spider in the book about the pig; I came top of my class at Edinburgh University, my thesis was in aberrant psycho-sexual behaviour in repeat offenders; I’ve helped catch three rapists, a paedophile ring, and a woman who killed her four children and two in-laws; I like raspberries, but I’m allergic to them; I have a fiancé who’s a systems analyst, but I’m pretty sure he’s having an affair, I mean that cow Nigella from his office was all over him at the last Christmas party like I wasn’t even there; I was born in Peebles; and I’ve never been to France.’

  OK…

  She piled beans onto toast into mouth. ‘Your turn.’

  ‘I’d rather not.’

  ‘I’ll do it for you, if you like?’ She actually put her knife and fork down. Then wrapped an arm around herself, the other hand twiddling with her hair. ‘Let’s see… You were married, but the job got in the way, your wife resented always having to come second; you tried to fix it by having children, and it almost worked, but then your first daughter ran away from home and the marriage fell apart, and you didn’t get custody of the other girl and now she’s growing away from you; you’re living in a crummy house in a crummy neighbourhood and you drive a crummy car, so you’ve got money worries… Gambling?’

  ‘Do we really have to—’

  ‘You’re obviously used to people doing what you say, which is pretty unusual for a detective constable, so you used to have a much higher rank, but something happened and they demoted you, and you wanted to quit, but you need the money; life hasn’t turned out anything like you’d hoped, so you’re trying to recapture your lost youth by sleeping your way through a string of younger women, because you can’t afford a sports car or a motorbike.’ She paused for breath. ‘How did I do?’

  I kept my eyes on the window. ‘You must be a big hit at parties.’

  ‘Top of my class, remember?’

  ‘A: I can see my daughter, Katie, whenever I like – and for your information we get on fine. B: I kicked the living shit out of a detective inspector called Cunningham. And C: I’m not “sleeping my way through a string of younger women”, it’s one woman and her name’s Susanne.’

  Dr McDonald nodded, picked up her cutlery again and went back to work. ‘There we go, we’re bonding, isn’t it nice?’

  Fruitloop.

  Mushrooms, egg, chips. ‘So … this Susanne: is she old enough to vote?’

  ‘OK, this bonding session is now officially over.’

  She just grinned and chewed.

  Chapter 11

  The corridors under Castle Hill Infirmary stretch for miles, a tangled maze lined with pipes and cables. It smelled of damp, disinfectant, and something floral and cloying. When I was wee, Jane Moir’s dad worked maintenance for the council and he swore blind the tunnels went all the way out to the river, so medical students could buy dead bodies from smugglers to dissect. But then he was done for fiddling with girl guides eight years later, so I wouldn’t put too much faith in it.

  ‘It’s creepy down here, what happens if we get lost and end up wandering the corridors for days in the dark?’ Dr McDonald inched closer until she bumped against me with every other step. Sticking close.

  The hospital throbbed above us, distant clanks and bangs echoing back from the concrete walls.

  She slipped her arm through mine. ‘Lost forever in the dark…’

  The corridor split up ahead. On the right, the black line disappeared under a set of dark-green doors marked ‘MORTUARY’, the metal bumper plates scuffed and dented by the passage of the dead. But Dr McDonald was staring the other way.

  Her grip on my arm tightened.

  The corridor on the left stretched away into patchy gloom – half the bulbs were blown, plunging sections into thick shadow, others were stuck in the process of warming up, never getting beyond the blinking stage.

  Someone stood in one of the dark spots, about fifteen feet away. That cloying floral air-freshener smell was even stronger.

  Whoever it was stared at us, eyes glinting in the shadows. Big, hunched shoulders, a wheeled cart… The light directly above them flickered and buzzed. It was a woman in a slate-grey boilersuit and scabby trainers. Face like a slab of meat, deep creases around her mouth and eyes. Her cart looked like a hostess trolley. Only instead of the box to keep food in, there was a large metal cage. Something furry moved inside: pointed noses, long pink tails. Rats. The bottom of the cart was piled with traps and a big bag with ‘BAIT’ written on it.

  Another buzz, and the light died again.

  Singing echoed down the corridor from somewhere behind us. A man’s voice, getting louder, accompanied by the grinding squeak-squeak-squeak of a dodgy wheel.

  ‘Ooh, baby, swear you love me,

  doo-dee-doo, oooh-ooh,

  something la-la … right…’

  The rat catcher didn’t move.

  ‘Baby, let’s not fight, da-dada, night…

  let’s do it, do it, do it…’

  The singing drifted to a halt. ‘Ah, there you are.’

  I turned. Alf: hair scraped back in a ponytail, high forehead gleaming in the flickering light, beard neatly trimmed, wearing pale blue scrubs, and hauling a hospital gurney behind him. Its occupant was covered in a white plastic sheet. Alf popped an earbud out and smiled. ‘Was about to send a search party for you guys. You know what the Prof’s like if he can’t start bang on nine.’

  Alf nodded towards the mortuary. ‘Can you get the door for us? Bloody gurney’s like a wonky shopping trolley today.’

  And when I turned back, the rat catcher was gone.

  ‘Break on the left tibia and fibula show approximately eight years of bone growth…’ Professor Mervin Twining, AKA: Teaboy, ran a gloved finger along the stained bone. His dark floppy hair hung over his forehead – with the square jaw, dimple, and little wire-rim glasses he looked like an extra from a period spy drama.

  The skeleton laid out on the dissecting table in front of him had been cleaned of dirt and mud, but it was still the reddish-brown colour of stewed tea. They’d put the head back where it belonged.

  Alf looked up from a set of notes, earbuds dangling loose from the neck of his scrubs. ‘Lauren Burges fell off her bike when she was five, treated for broken left leg.’

  Castle Hill mortuary was a Victorian monstrosity. Cracked black tiles on the floor, grout turned grey by generations’ worth of bleach, formaldehyde, and disinfectant. Drainage channels leading to wire-mesh grilles and the sewers beyond. The walls had probably been white once, but their tiles had aged to a dirty ivory. Harsh overhead lighting glittered off stainless-steel work surfaces, a wall of refrigerated drawers, and the dissecting tables.

  Three of them, each with an inch-high lip, a drain, a tap, a hose, and a blood-coloured set of bones.

  Half a dozen flip charts were arranged around the room in pairs, one of each set was covered with copies of the victim’s birthday cards – the other with medical notes, X-Rays, and dental charts.

  It was cold too, almost as cold as it was outside. Dr McDonald’s nose was going pink, the woolly hat still pulled down over her ears, duffle coat toggled up to her chin, shoulders hunched, hands in her pockets. ‘Shouldn’t we be wearing masks and safety goggles and things?’

  Professor Twining looked up from the remains. ‘Not a huge amount of point, I’m afraid: no soft tissue, no DNA, just bones. And they’ve been cleaned by the soil science people, so there’s nothing left for us to contaminate. Can I have the corresponding X-ray, please, Alf? … Thank you.’

  Twining worked his way through Lauren Burges’s skeletal remains, comparing the damage to her medical records
and the photos on the birthday cards. Confirming her identity.

  Three sets of bones on three separate cutting tables. It wouldn’t be long before the SEB turned up the other victims. Only they’d get one more than they were expecting: Rebecca, laid out on a cold metal slab. My little girl, reduced to a collection of mud-stained bones. Chipped and scarred where he slashed and stabbed and broke…

  The mortuary air was like cold treacle, sticking in my throat.

  I thrust my hands in my pockets. Clenched my jaw.

  No one knew: there was still time to find the bastard.

  So why couldn’t I breathe?

  Think about something else. Anything else. Anything but Rebecca.

  Money. Think about the money. About how utterly and completely screwed I was.

  That was better…

  OK, so I didn’t get the chance to squeeze money out of anyone before the post mortems, but there was still time, wasn’t there? Slip out for a couple of hours while they were examining the other remains. Plenty of time.

  Yeah, plenty of time…

  ‘…median damage and periosteal hematoma evident on the left humerus, anterior…’

  There was no way in hell I’d ever get enough money. Turn up at the Westing with a fistful of fivers and Mrs Kerrigan’s goons would send me home in a wheelchair.

  ‘…compound fracture of the right radius and ulna, seven centimetres from the wrist joint…’

  So don’t. Don’t turn up at all. As long as I kept my head down till the ferry left Aberdeen at seven tonight, I’d be fine.

  ‘…striated scarring on the fourth and fifth ribs consistent with a serrated blade…’

  Well, maybe not fine, but it’d buy some time.

  And all this would still be waiting for me when I got back.

  The hands on the mortuary clock clicked around to eleven thirty: two and a half hours of watching Professor Twining pick his way through a murdered girl’s bones.

  ‘…and one tea: milk, no sugar.’ Alf handed me a mug with ‘World’s Greatest Proctologist!’ printed on the side.