Birthdays for the Dead

by Stuart MacBride

  ‘I have no idea what you’re on about, OK? Can we discuss it like adults for a—’

  ‘Don’t you dare talk to me like I’m the one being unreasonable! We had a deal, Ash Henderson!’

  ‘What am I supposed to have—’

  ‘I’m her mother, for Christ’s sake! Why can’t you ever think about anyone but yourself? At least you could’ve called me and let me know everything was OK!’

  ‘It—’

  ‘Do you have any idea how worried I was?’

  The morning was getting lighter, gold rippling across the water. ‘I don’t understand what you’re—’

  ‘You can’t have Katie stay the night without telling me! I was worried sick!’

  Stay the night?

  ‘It… I don’t—’

  ‘You’re impossible.’ Michelle hung up.

  Stay the night? How the hell could she stay the night, I wasn’t even there!

  Katie’s number was on speed-dial. It rang, and rang, and—

  ‘Daddy, I was just thinking about you!’

  ‘Your mother’s been on the phone.’ Dealing with kids is exactly the same as dealing with criminals: never let on how much you do or don’t know.

  A pause. ‘Has she? Is she OK, I was—’

  ‘Why does your mother think you stayed at my house last night?’

  ‘Does she? Wow, how weird is that?’ Another pause, as if Katie was giving it some serious thought. Then she was back, every sentence sounding as if it was a question. ‘Oh, you know what happened: she must’ve misheard me? I told her I was staying with my friend Ashley and her dad? And Mum must’ve thought I meant—’

  ‘You do know I’m a police officer, right, Katie? It’s my job to spot when someone’s lying their arse off.’

  ‘Ah…’ Deep breath. ‘I really was round Ashley’s house, but Mum hates Ashley’s parents ’cos they’re Tories, and sometimes they let us stay up late watching horror films and drinking Red Bull and you know what Mum’s like about Tories and horror films. Ashley’s mum and dad were in the house the whole time, so we were always safe and looked after and it was only a little teensy-weensy white lie… I didn’t want Mum getting all upset.’

  ‘I don’t—’

  ‘You can ask Ashley’s dad if you like? He’s really nice, not as cool as you, but he’s OK, and he’ll tell you we did our homework first and everything! Hold on, he’s right here…’

  Some rustling, then a smoker’s voice: Oldcastle accent, trying hard to sound posh. What Michelle would call a typical Tennent’s Lager Tory. ‘Hello?’

  ‘You Ashley’s father?’

  ‘Is something wrong?’

  ‘I’m Katie Henderson’s dad.’

  ‘Ah, right, lovely kid. Good as gold last night: pizza and a Freddy Krueger marathon. Sweet.’

  ‘Just wanted to check she’d behaved herself. Can you put her back on?’

  ‘Here we go…’

  ‘See, Daddy? You won’t tell Mum, will you? She’ll freak, you know what she’s like.’

  So the choice was: land Katie in it, or say nothing and pretend I’m a complete tosser who couldn’t be arsed telling her mother she wasn’t going to be home last night.

  Well, it wasn’t as if Michelle could actually hate me any more than she already did.

  ‘OK, but only on the condition that you’re nicer to your mum. I know she can be a bit…’ There was no way to end that sentence well. ‘Be good, all right? For me?’

  ‘I promise.’ The little girl voice again. ‘Daddy, can we go pony trekking for my birthday?’

  Pony trekking? How the hell was I supposed to organize that?

  ‘We’ll see.’

  ‘Oops: got to go, Daddy, Ashley’s dad’s giving us a lift to school. Love you!’

  ‘Be nice to your mother.’

  I jammed the phone in my pocket and turned back to the tiny patrol car. Dr McDonald was peering out over the top of her big red suitcase. Her glasses were on squint, it made her head look lopsided.

  Why did every woman in my life have to be a card-carrying nutcase?

  I got back in the car.

  We stopped at the Scalloway Hotel to drop off our suitcases and check in, then it was a five-minute drive through the dark streets to a house on the outskirts of town, overlooking the bay. The garden was a mix of overgrown bushes and stunted trees, their bare branches clawing at each other, fighting for space. Moss had colonized the pantile roof, lichen speckled the walls, and both front windows were jagged holes fringed with broken glass.

  PC Clark hauled on the handbrake. ‘Not again…’

  I climbed out into the cold morning.

  A sign was bolted to the garden wall: ‘FREIBERG TOWERS’. I pushed through into the garden and marched up the path as Royce called it in.

  ‘Sarge? Lima One Six: we’re out at the Forrester place… Yeah, looks like Burges has been at it again.’

  The doorbell sounded a dismal two-tone chime from somewhere deep inside. I cupped my hands and blew into them, shifting from foot to foot. Then tried again.

  ‘…both windows panned in… Uh-huh… Uh-huh… Don’t know…’

  I forced my way through the grabbing skeleton of a rose bush and peered into the lounge. A chunk of breeze block lay in the wreckage of a coffee table, carpet covered in glittering cubes of glass. ‘Henry?’

  It was dark inside – no sign of life.

  ‘…has he not called it in? … Ah, OK. Well, I’ve got the camera in the car anyway. You want me to dust for prints too?’

  I fought my way back to the front door – locked – then around the side of the house. The damp fingers of an ancient leylandii pawed at me as I waded through knee-high weeds to a tall wooden gate. The hinges squealed as I shouldered it open.

  The back garden was a riot of thistles, docken, and grass. It followed the slope of the hill, the top corner just catching the first rays of dawn. A small pond choked with reeds, a greenhouse with no glass left in it, and an outbuilding that needed a coat of paint and a new roof.

  I took the path along the back of the building to the bedroom window. Dark. Probably had the curtains drawn. The kitchen door was locked like the front one, but…

  Up on my tiptoes, fingers spidering along the top of the architrave. Bingo: a little ceramic puffin, the black and white paint flaking and brittle. A Yale key was wedged inside. I pulled it out and unlocked the kitchen door.

  ‘Henry? Henry, it’s Ash. Ash Henderson? You in? You awake? You sober?’ Nothing but silence from the dead house. ‘Henry? You still alive, or have you pickled yourself to death, you daft old bugger…?’

  No answer.

  The kitchen was disappearing under a layer of dust. Piles of newspapers and unopened letters covered a small breakfast bar, four stools tucked beneath the worktop.

  ‘Henry?’

  Through into the hallway, breath streaming out in a thin grey fog. It was colder in here than outside.

  ‘Henry?’

  The stairs led up to a small landing, but I went for the back bedroom instead. Knocked, waited, then eased the door open. Darkness. The smell of rancid garlic and stale booze underpinned something foul and rotting. ‘Henry?’

  I felt for the light switch and flicked it on.

  Henry was lying on the bed, flat on his back, dressed in a black suit, white shirt and black tie. Grey hair made a rumpled tonsure around a bald crown speckled with liver spots. His face was slack, like a sock-puppet without a hand, his features too big for that little head. A bottle of Bells lay beside one thin hand, only a third of it left.

  A small plastic bottle of pills sat on the bedside cabinet.

  The silly old git… He’d finally done it.

  Chapter 17

  I stared at the ceiling for a minute, then settled down on the stool in front of the vanity unit.

  So much for getting Henry’s help catching the Birthday Boy: looked as if Dr McDonald was on her own… />
  Which wasn’t exactly fair. The poor old sod deserved better than this, rotting away in a cold and lonely house, until the booze, an aneurism, or hypothermia finished the job.

  Let’s be honest, the end probably came as a bit of a relief.

  ‘Henry, could you not have waited till—’

  A dry squeak came from the corpse, followed by the smell of death. Or rotten eggs. Or a mouldering otter… Not dead, just farting.

  ‘Agh, not you too!’ What was it with psychologists?

  I stuck a hand over my mouth, marched over to the curtains and threw them open, then did the same with the window, letting the cold air in and the smell of whatever was festering in Henry’s bum out.

  ‘Henry!’

  ‘Mmmmmph… Nrm slppn…’ Pale gums in a slack mouth.

  ‘Henry, you manky-arsed bugger: up! You’ve got visitors.’

  He cracked an eye open and blinked at the ceiling. ‘Sodding hell…’ His voice sounded like a handful of walnuts being slowly crushed, the Aberdeen accent twisting the vowels out of shape. ‘Fit time is it?’

  ‘Nearly eight.’

  ‘Tuesday?’

  ‘Wednesday.’

  ‘Near enough.’ He looked as if he was trying to sit up, then flopped back on top of the duvet. ‘Am I dead?’

  ‘You smell like it.’

  ‘Oh… In that case, give us a hand?’

  I hauled him out of bed, and propped him up against the wardrobe, trying not to breathe through my nose. ‘God almighty, when did you last have a bath?’

  ‘You look like a punch bag.’ A long, rattling cough. ‘Where did I leave my teeth?’

  The little plastic bottle of pills rattled when I shook it. A printed label on the side: ‘FLUVOXAMINE 50MG. TWO PILLS TWICE A DAY TO BE TAKEN WITH FOOD. AVOID ALCOHOL.’

  ‘You shouldn’t be drinking with these.’

  ‘Ah, there they are.’ Henry picked a tumbler off the windowsill – a set of dentures were floating in what looked like old urine. He fished his teeth out and popped them in, then drank the rest of the liquid, and sighed. The unmistakable reek of whisky. ‘Ash, much though I’ve missed you like an amputated limb, I’m guessing you want something…’ His eyes narrowed. Then closed completely. His shoulders slumped. ‘Of course, I’m sorry. Rebecca’s birthday was Monday, wasn’t it? I meant to call, but…’

  ‘It’s OK.’

  ‘No, it’s not.’ He clicked his false teeth together a couple of times. ‘I used to be a psychologist, not an idiot.’ He snatched the bottle of Bells from the bed and slouched through to the kitchen. ‘Put the kettle on, I need to wrestle my prostate into a decent morning piss for a change…’

  By the time he came back from the toilet, I had four mugs of coffee sitting on the dusty kitchen worktop, the big ring on the gas stove turned up full to take the chill out of the air.

  Henry froze in the doorway, frowning at Dr McDonald. ‘Who’s this? I thought you…’ A sniff. ‘And what’s that bloody racket?’

  The strains of Bohemian Rhapsody came through the kitchen wall – Royce, whistling away to himself in the lounge. I didn’t have the heart to tell him to knock it off.

  ‘Dr Forrester, this is Dr McDonald, she has a tendency to babble and her hangover farts smell even worse than yours.’

  Pink bloomed on her cheeks. ‘He’s not exactly … it’s … this isn’t really the first impression I wanted to make, I mean we’ve come all the way up here and now you think I’m some sort of drunkard, when really I was trying to dis-inhibit my normal thinking patterns so I could examine the case from the offender’s perspective.’

  Henry raised an eyebrow. ‘Well, aren’t you … delightfully quirky.’ He settled onto one of the breakfast-bar stools. ‘What makes you think I’m hungover?’

  I clunked a mug of black coffee down in front of him. ‘You’ve no milk.’

  His hands shook as he picked it up and slurped. Then topped it off with Bells, the neck of the bottle clattering around the mug’s rim. ‘Before you say anything: it’s the Fluvoxamine – stops your body breaking down caffeine properly, gives you the tremors. And you’re not my mother. I’m seventy-two, I can drink what I want, when I want.’

  Another slurp, then more whisky.

  ‘What happened to your windows?’

  Henry peered over the rim of his mug. ‘Tell me, Dr McDonald, do you always binge drink when you’re working on a profile?’

  She pulled out a stool and sat opposite him. ‘Actually, we call it “behavioural evidence analysis” now, everyone was watching all those television shows where the FBI come in and give a profile and it’s bang on and they catch the serial killer every time, and—’

  ‘Do you drink, or don’t you?’

  She swallowed. ‘Sometimes … it helps loosen things up.’

  He nodded, then tipped half the remaining Bells into her mug. ‘This isn’t a social visit: you’re here about a case. And as you’re here with DI Henderson, I’m going to assume it’s the Birthday Boy. We worked a couple of rapes together, but … I think they both died in prison?’

  Heat leached through my mug into my aching fingers. ‘Crouch got shanked in Barlinnie, Chambers drank a whole thing of bleach.’

  ‘So it’s the Birthday Boy.’ Another slurp, and this time when the whisky bottle went back on the breakfast bar it was empty. ‘Can’t help you.’

  A knock at the door and Royce stuck his head in from the hall. ‘I’ve photoed and fingerprinted everything, so you can clean up if you like. Watch yourself though, there’s glass and dog shit all over the place…’ He grinned at me. ‘Any chance of a coffee? I’m freezing.’

  Henry’s mouth turned down at the edges. ‘Lucky me.’ He clapped his hands against his legs. ‘Sheba? Sheeeeeee-ba?’

  I handed the last mug to Royce. Frowned. ‘You said: “Burges has been at it again.” Not, Arnold Burges?’

  ‘Yeah, that’s him: tall, fat, bald, big beard like he’s eating a badger? Works one of the fish farms out by Calders Lea, he’s been—’

  ‘Constable Clark,’ Henry pointed at a door in the corner of the room, ‘if you want to make yourself useful there’s a dustpan and brush in the cupboard. Some bin-bags too. And no more bloody whistling!’

  A wobbly dog shuffled into the kitchen, moving one leg at a time, its claws clicking and clacking on the floor. It bumped its head against Henry’s leg and he reached down to rub a greying ear. The dog groaned.

  ‘Sheba, what did I tell you about crapping in the house?’

  More groans; one back leg twitched.

  ‘Crap in the kitchen, it’s easier to clean up…’ He stopped rubbing and looked at me. ‘Well, she’s old, what do you expect?’

  Dr McDonald sniffed her coffee, as if there was something sinister lurking at the bottom. ‘Fluvoxamine’s an antidepressant. Mixing it with alcohol can cause … problems.’

  Henry shrugged. ‘Still better than Paroxetine: side effects include diarrhoea and erectile dysfunction. Talk about putting the kybosh on your sex life. And don’t get me started on Escitalopram.’

  Royce slouched out of the room, taking the dustpan and brush, bin-bags, and his coffee with him. Muttering.

  She tilted her head to one side, and stared at Henry. ‘If you’re depressed, it might help to talk to someone, I mean, you’re dressed in funereal black, you’re mixing your medication with whisky, but it’s nothing to be ashamed of: we all have times when it feels like we can’t cope, and I’m—’

  ‘You remember Detective Inspector Pearson, Ash?’

  ‘Strathclyde, wasn’t it? Retired to Aviemore; lives with his granddaughter.’

  ‘Not any more.’ Henry dug something out of his jacket pocket and handed it over.

  It was an order of service, folded in half lengthways: ‘IN LOVING MEMORY OF ALBERT PEARSON’ in gothic script above a photograph of a beady-eyed grey-haired man in full dress uniform.

  ‘Buried him Monday in Clyde
bank. Nice service, very upbeat. Horrible sausage rolls at the reception.’ Henry tugged at the lapels of his black suit. ‘Hence the…?’

  Dr McDonald fidgeted with the newspapers covering the breakfast bar. ‘You weren’t trying to kill yourself?’

  ‘Oh, I’ve thought about it. After Ellie passed I thought about little else. But maybe not quite yet.’ He gave the ancient dog’s ears another rub. ‘Sheba would miss me, wouldn’t you, girl? Couldn’t do that to her, she’s all I’ve got left.’

  Sheba’s back end lowered to the floor, and she sat there with her chin on his knee, gazing up at him with milky eyes, dribbling onto his trousers.

  Henry swished a mouthful of coffee back and forwards through his false teeth. Swallowed. ‘Albert and I used to meet up a couple of times a year and chew over the cases we never managed to solve, trying to work out what we missed. A six-year-old girl strangled and dumped at the side of the road when her parents couldn’t pay the ransom. The accountant who died in the Royal after someone cut off his hands. The family of four on holiday in Dingwall, battered to death in their caravan. The eighteen-year-old receptionist strung up by her ankles in Knapdale Forest and gutted…’ He sighed, then threw back the rest of his coffee. ‘Licking old wounds, then rubbing salt into them.’

  I laid the order of service on the worktop. ‘The Party Crashers’ last psychologist screwed up all the notes, then topped himself.’

  ‘All of them?’ Henry raised an eyebrow. ‘How did he—’

  ‘Buggered the server too: nine years’ worth of interviews, assessments, profiles, the whole lot. There’s nothing left.’

  A nod. Then Henry reached into the nearest kitchen cupboard and pulled out a fresh bottle. Grouse this time. ‘Then you’re in luck, Dr McDonald, you get to start with a clean slate. None of that legacy thinking from useless old farts like me to get in your way.’ He twisted the top off and threw it over his shoulder. ‘You’re not drinking your coffee.’

  Silly old bugger. ‘Is this about Denis Chakrabarti?’

  ‘I don’t do profiling any more. I retired.’ Henry pointed at the draining board, where half a dozen cut-glass tumblers were lined up on the stainless steel. ‘Pass me three of those, will you?’