Birthdays for the Dead. Stuart MacBride

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 palm. ‘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?’