Birthdays for the Dead

by Stuart MacBride

  Silence.

  I clenched my fists – the knuckles grumbled and creaked. Punch the bastard. So what if he was a sergeant: wouldn’t be the first time—

  Dr McDonald stepped into the doorway, right between us. ‘This is a pickle, isn’t it, well, not literally, that would be silly, but figuratively, I mean we’re all working towards the same ends, but we’ve got different pressures and expectations.’ She smiled up at the sergeant as he backed away. ‘Being a Family Liaison officer must be incredibly high pressure, my name’s Dr Alice McDonald, I’m a criminal psychologist, well, I don’t mean I’m a psychologist who commits crimes – that kind of thing only ever happens in the movies, and in books and things I suppose, but not in real life – is it OK if we come in?’

  And all the time the sergeant was retreating down the hallway, his eyes flicking from left to right, as if looking for somewhere safe to hide from the tsunami of crazy advancing across the beige-coloured carpet.

  His back bumped into a door. Nowhere left to run. No option but to drown… He turned and wrenched it open.

  The living room was full of shelves and units, all covered with vases, postcards, decorative glassware, stacks of envelopes, bits of polished rock… The furniture looked as if it came from Ikea, but the clutter was car-boot-sale chic. Three people: one man, two women.

  It wasn’t difficult to tell which one was the journalist – she was the middle-aged go-getter in the moderately priced suit, eyebrows furrowed, mouth set in a grim line. I feel your pain, it’s all so terrible, a tragedy… But the corners of her lips twitched, as if she was trying really hard not to grin. An exclusive like this wouldn’t come along every day.

  The sergeant stepped into the lounge and cleared his throat. ‘Ian, Jane, this is Dr McDonald, she’s a … psychologist. She wants to talk to you about … er…’ He looked back at her.

  She walked right in. ‘I’m so sorry about Helen. I know this is difficult, but I need to ask you a few questions about her – try to get a feeling for what she’s like.’

  What happened to the rambling?

  The father, Ian, scowled at Dr McDonald, his thick eyebrows drawing together like the doors on a battleship. Trackie-bottoms in Dundee United orange, a Mr Men T-shirt, close-cropped hair, arms folded across his chest.

  His wife was … huge. Not just wide, but tall: a floral-print behemoth with long brown hair and puffy pink eyes. She cleared her throat. ‘I was about to make some tea, would you—’

  ‘They’re no’ staying.’ Ian plonked down on the sofa and stared at Dr McDonald. ‘You want to know what Helen’s like? Helen’s dead. That’s what she’s like.’

  Jane tugged at a handkerchief in her lap. ‘Ian, please, we don’t know for—’

  ‘Of course she’s bloody deid.’ He jerked his chin in our direction. ‘Ask them. Go on, ask them what happened to the other poor cows.’

  She licked her lips. ‘I… I’m sorry, he’s upset, it’s been a horrible shock. And—’

  ‘They’re dead. He grabs them, he tortures them, he kills them.’ Ian twisted his hands together so tightly the fingertips turned pale. ‘End of story.’

  Dr McDonald looked at the carpet for a moment. ‘Ian, I won’t lie to you, it’s—’

  ‘Actually…’ I squeezed into the room, keeping my eyes fixed on the reporter. ‘Perhaps we could talk about this in private?’

  Ian shook his head. ‘Anything you say to us we’re gonnae tell her anyway. She’s gonnae tell the world what it’s really like, no’ that press-release pish you dole out. The truth.’

  The reporter stood, held out her hand. ‘Jean Buchanan, freelance. I want you to know that I’ve got the utmost respect for the police in this difficult—’

  ‘Mr McMillan, this is an ongoing investigation and if we’re going to catch the person responsible for abducting—’

  ‘—in the public interest to report—’

  ‘—stop this happening again; and we can’t do that if these parasites are reporting everything we—’

  ‘Parasites?’ The professional voice slipped. She jabbed a finger at me. ‘Listen up, Sunshine: Jane and Ian are entitled to compensation for their stories, you can’t censor—’

  ‘—surely want to stop other families having to go through this!’

  Ian glowered at me. ‘Fuck them. Fuck the lot of them, it’s not gonnae bring Helen back, is it? She’s dead; he killed her a year ago. There’s bugger all we can do to change that.’ He bit his lip, stared at the window blinds. ‘Doesn’t matter what we want: papers are gonnae write about it anyway. Least this way we get… Why should we give our pain away for free?’

  His wife sat down next to him, reached out and held his hand. They stayed like that, in silence.

  Maybe he was right: why should he let the jackals pick over his daughter’s life for nothing? Money wasn’t going to bring Helen back, but at least it would be something. Show they weren’t powerless. Stop them wrenching awake in the middle of the night, drenched with sweat, shivering… But I doubted it.

  The reporter cleared her throat, jerked her chin in the air, then settled back into her seat and scribbled in a notebook.

  Dr McDonald hunkered down in front of the couch, then placed a hand on Ian’s knee. ‘It’s OK. Everyone deals with things in their own way. If this is what’s best for you … well, we’ll do what we can to help. Now, tell me about Helen…’

  I backed out of the room.

  Chapter 5

  Helen McMillan had the same kind of posters on the wall as Katie. OK, so the bands were from the insipid-plastic-X-Factor school of music instead of the pretentious-angsty-emo-rock Katie liked, but other than that the sentiment was the same. These are the things that I like, this defines who I am.

  With Rebecca it was Nickelback and the Pussycat Dolls… She always was a strange kid.

  ‘Find anything?’

  ‘Hmm?’ I looked up from the cluttered desk in the corner of the bedroom.

  Dr McDonald was standing in the doorway. ‘Did you find anything?’

  ‘Still looking…’

  A big pink fuzzy unicorn sat in the middle of the single bed, surrounded by brightly coloured teddy bears, all neatly arranged. The duvet cover and pillow slips were smooth and crisp, as if they were still changed regularly – probably no point searching under the mattress for hidden secrets, if they were still making Helen’s bed a year after she went missing anything would have been uncovered ages ago. But I checked anyway. Just wooden slats, and the plastic under-bed storage boxes I’d already been through.

  ‘Ash, are you OK?’

  The mattress thumped back down on its wooden frame. ‘They say anything useful?’

  ‘You don’t mind if I call you Ash, do you, because we’re going to be working together and calling you Detective Constable Henderson seems awfully formal and you look worried, or maybe concerned, and a bit depressed actually, was it the argument with the journalist, because I think she came on too strong, don’t you, it’s really not—’

  ‘That’ll be a “no” then.’ I tucked the sheet back in and straightened the duvet. So it would look a little less like I’d violated their daughter’s bedroom. ‘The first card’s the worst… Well, they’re all fucking horrible, but that first card – that’s when you know your daughter hasn’t run away, that what’s happening is…’ I cleared my throat. ‘It must be horrible.’

  ‘They said Helen was a quiet girl who liked her books and her gerbils and going to see her nan on a Sunday for lunch. She wasn’t a wild child, she wasn’t into drinking or drugs or boys, don’t you think it’s sad that we live in a time when people have to ask if a twelve-year-old is getting hammered and doing drugs, and you said, “That’s when you know your daughter—”’

  ‘Figure of speech.’ I scanned the room again. No sign of a cage. ‘What happened to the gerbils?’

  ‘They died. Ian’s body language got very defensive when he talked about it… He probably lo
oked after them for three or four months after she went missing, starts off as a duty, turns into a bargain – if I keep the gerbils alive she’ll come back to us – and the longer it goes on the more desperate they get, the gerbils become symbolic of Helen’s disappearance, then they become responsible for it, and gradually Ian stops feeding them and they die.’

  ‘What a lovely—’

  ‘Or perhaps one night he got drunk and battered them all to death with a hammer…’ She fiddled with her glasses. ‘Detective Chief Superintendent Dickie tells me you’re still in touch with Hannah Kelly’s parents?’

  ‘Hannah didn’t have any gerbils.’

  ‘Is her house like this, have they kept it like a shrine to her memory, do they expect her to just turn up one day like nothing ever happened?’

  The pink unicorn had fallen on the floor while I’d been shifting the mattress. I picked it up. Fuzzy. Soft. Warm. ‘Her parents don’t live there any more. Must’ve moved about five times in the last eight years, and he still finds them. Every sixteenth of September: another card.’

  Dr McDonald wrapped an arm around herself, head on one side, frowning at the bookshelves on the wall above the desk. They were full of hardbacks: a couple with leather bindings – Dickens, C. S. Lewis – others in faded dust jackets – Ian Fleming, Jilly Cooper, Harper Lee – some that looked as if they’d been wrapped in clear plastic sheeting – Anthony Horowitz, Gabriel King, a couple of Harry Potters, some vampire bollocks. She pulled Moonraker from the shelf and flicked through it, the creases between her eyebrows getting deeper. Then she did the same with The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, chewing on her bottom lip.

  ‘I’ve been through them, no hidden messages tucked in between the pages.’ I checked my watch. ‘Time to make a move.’

  Nothing. She was still squinting at the book.

  ‘Hello? You in?’

  A blink. ‘Yes, right, time…’ Dr McDonald slid the book back onto the shelf, then picked up a framed photograph from the chest of drawers. It was a little girl in a pink princess party dress complete with tiara, magic wand, and a pair of fairy wings. Big grin. Two missing teeth. Bright ginger hair swept up in a sort of bun. She was holding a turnip lantern, a candle glowing inside its jagged mouth. ‘When I was eight Aunty Jan made me this all-in-one suit for Halloween: black, with a white tummy and paws, a swishy tail, and a three-foot-tall stripy red-and-white hat. All my friends wanted to be Disney princesses.’

  ‘Rebecca was a zombie. Katie went as Hannibal Lecter. We got her an orange jumpsuit and Michelle made this little straitjacket from an old blanket.’ A smile broke free. ‘I got her a restraint mask, and we pushed her about on one of those two-wheeled trolley things, Rebecca shambling along behind us, growling “Brainssssss” at everyone… Tell you, they ate so many Sherbet Fountains and little Mars Bars they were sick for days.’ I ran a hand through the unicorn’s soft pink fur. ‘Was the best Halloween we ever had.’ And the last. Before the bastard took Rebecca and everything went to shit. I put the fuzzy unicorn back on the bed and arranged the Multicoloured Bear Gang around it, then dug my hands into my pockets. Shrugged. ‘Anyway…’

  Dr McDonald put the photo frame back on the chest of drawers.

  Silence.

  I cleared my throat. ‘We’d better get going.’

  The windscreen wipers sounded like someone rubbing a balloon along a window, back and forth, leaving one greasy arc across the glass where the rain refused to shift. Squeak, squeal, squeak, squeal.

  Dr McDonald wriggled in her seat. ‘Of course it was never his fault – you know what some pathologists are like, kings of their own little kingdom and anyone who shows the slightest backbone, or contradicts them in any way, has to get this huge lecture about how things are done in the “real world”, and I mean how can they even say that—’

  On and on, all the way from Dundee – the rain, and the squealing wipers, and the roar of tyres on the road, and the grumbling engine, building up into a headache that must have registered on seismographs on the other side of the bloody world.

  A green road sign loomed out of the rain: Oldcastle 5.

  Thank Christ.

  ‘—so when I turned around and showed him the injection site hidden in the bite marks on her breast I thought he was actually going to explode, boom, right then and there—’

  A huge Asda eighteen-wheeler roared past in the outside lane, and the crappy little Renault rocked on its springs, caught in the backdraught. The windscreen disappeared under a wall of spray.

  ‘—I mean psychologically it was the obvious place to look, given the indicators, but try telling him that—’

  On and on.

  I tightened my grip on the steering wheel: imagine it’s her neck and squeeze…

  ‘Ash?’

  Keep squeezing.

  Silence – nothing but the engine and the road and the radio and the rain.

  She coughed. ‘You don’t really like me, do you? Every time you look at me, there’s this little pause, like you’re trying not to beat me to death. Do I threaten you, or am I just really annoying? I bet it’s annoying, I annoy people when I’m nervous and new people make me nervous, especially when they’re all covered in bruises.’

  ‘Maybe… Maybe we could listen to the radio for a little bit.’

  More silence, then a little, ‘OK.’ She reached out and turned the volume up. A song by one of those emo bands Katie liked crackled out of the speakers, all guitars and angsty vocals.

  I glanced over at the passenger seat. Dr McDonald was staring out of the side window, both arms wrapped around herself, as if she might split down the middle and this was the only way to hold both halves together. Probably sulking.

  As long as she did it quietly it was OK with me.

  The road climbed up Pearl Hill, past the huge Costco, then down again. The valley opened out in front of the car as the dual carriageway dipped towards Oldcastle. Amber streetlights mapped out the city, even though it had only just gone twelve. Up on Castle Hill, floodlights caught a squall of rain as it hammered the crumbling ramparts. On the other side of the river, warning lights blinked red on top of the Blackwall transmitter. The high-rise blocks and grimy council houses of Kingsmeath loomed up the side of the hill, as if a tidal wave of concrete was about to crash down and sweep everything away. The sky looked like a battered wife.

  Welcome home.

  I pulled the crumbling Renault into the kerb and killed the engine. McDermid Avenue was a dirty-beige terrace of four-storey buildings with railings to keep the pavement at bay and steps up to the front door. Satellite dishes pimpled the sandstone walls like blackheads on a teenager. Bay windows, fanlights, gnarled oak and beech trees lined the road, their naked branches dripping in the rain.

  The twin chimneys of Castle Hill Infirmary’s incinerator poked up in the background, trailing plumes of white steam into the bruised sky.

  Dr McDonald peered out through the windscreen. ‘Oh dear…’

  A pair of outside broadcast vans, the battered BBC Scotland Volvo, and a collection of crappy hatchbacks were parked in front of a patrol car – blocking the road about a third of the way down. Most of the journos were still in their cars, staying out of the rain, but the TV crews had set up on the pavement with the barricade in the background, doing serious-faced pieces for the next news bulletin, clutching umbrellas and microphones, trying not to look as if they were creaming themselves with excitement.

  Bastards.

  I opened the door and climbed out. Icy rain stinging my ears and forehead. ‘Just keep your head down, and your mouth shut.’

  She clambered out after me, pulling on her leather satchel – the strap diagonally across her chest, like her own private seatbelt – following as I marched towards the line of blue-and-white ‘Police’ tape. With any luck we’d get through into the scene before anyone noticed us.

  PC Duguid stood on the other side of the cordon, in front of the patrol car; glaring o
ut from beneath the peak of an oversized cap. His fluorescent-yellow high-vis jacket was all slick and shiny. Like his face. Only not as ugly.

  Duguid jerked his chin up and tapped two fingers against his nose. A car door clunked shut behind me. Then another one. Then an English accent, all marbles and plums, at my shoulder: ‘Officer Henderson? Hello?’

  I kept walking.

  A duffle-coated woman waddled alongside, thrusting a microphone under my nose. ‘Is it true you’ve uncovered a second set of remains?’

  Someone else: ‘Have you identified the first body?’

  ‘Any comment on the new Dundee victim, Helen McMillan? Will Douglas Kelly be speaking to her parents?’

  ‘Your own daughter went missing, does that give you special insight into how the victims’ families are feeling?’

  I kept going: just three more feet till the safety of the police tape. ‘We’re pursuing several avenues of enquiry.’ Never give the bastards anything they can quote.

  A squat man barged in front, ears like knots of gristle, broken nose, little digital recorder in hand. ‘How do you respond to criticism that your botched investigation into Hannah Kelly’s abduction eight years ago left the Birthday Boy free to kill— Hey!’

  I shoved him to one side and ducked under the cordon, holding it up so Dr McDonald could follow. PC Duguid leaned back against the bonnet of the patrol car, grinning. Gave a wee salute. ‘Morning, Guv. Like the bruises: very fashionable.’

  ‘You tipped the bastards off, didn’t you?’

  The grin grew wider, pulling his chubby cheeks with it. ‘Bottle of Macallan, Guv. What’s a boy to do?’

  I marched past, didn’t give him the satisfaction. Or a knee in the balls.

  Dr McDonald trotted up beside me. ‘Did he really tip off those reporters for a bottle of whisky, what kind of police officer takes bribes like that, I mean it’s not right, is it, we should report him…’

  Yeah, see how much good that’d do.

  A dirt track led away from the road, grass growing down the middle, disappearing into the gap between two sandstone buildings.