Birthdays for the Dead. Stuart MacBride

phone rang as I got to the front door. The display read ‘DR MCFRUITLOOP’. ‘Hello?’

      ‘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