Birthdays for the Dead. Stuart MacBride

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 percent 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 and 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.