Stuart MacBride: Ash Henderson 2-book Crime Thriller Collection. Stuart MacBride
the ferry we have to be out of here by about … half four? Five at the latest.’
‘I mean I’ve been to post mortems before, but it’s always the same: I spend so much time trying to empathize with killers … I have to stand there and pretend I’m him, imagining what it’d be like, how good it would feel to do all those horrible things.’ Another sniff. ‘And then it’s over and I can’t help …’ She stared at the ground.
‘You don’t have to be here for the rest of this. Go back to your aunt’s house, put your feet up. Crack open a bottle of wine. I’ll catch you up when we’re done.’
Dr McDonald shook her head, dark brown curls bouncing around her puffy face. ‘I’m not abandoning them.’
‘Far as we can tell anyway.’ I sat back in the creaky plastic chair.
Dickie’s image nodded on the laptop’s screen. ‘Fair enough. We’re packing up here tomorrow, so we should be in town mid-afternoon-ish.’
DCI Weber drummed his fingertips on the desk. ‘You’re going to march in and take over my investigation?’
Weber’s office was one of the nicer ones in the building – a proper corner job with big windows looking out on the boarded-up cinema opposite.
Dr McDonald’s laptop was perched on Weber’s desk, where everyone could see the screen, and the webcam could see us. But she was gazing out of the window, one arm wrapped around her chest, the other hand fiddling with her hair.
Dickie sighed. ‘Don’t be like that Gregor, you know how this works. I’m carrying the can for everything the Birthday Boy does, whether I like it or not.’ He frowned. ‘Did I tell you about my ulcer?’
‘I don’t care about your ulcer, I’ve got—’
‘How about this: if we get anything, you sit next to me at the press conference. We both make the announcement: you get half the credit, twelve-year-old girls get to grow up without some sick bastard torturing them to death, and I get to retire and put the whole bloody mess behind me.’
Weber took off his glasses and polished them on his hanky. ‘Well, in the interests of interagency cooperation, I suppose we could come to some operational understanding.’
Dickie didn’t even bother trying to smile. ‘Dr McDonald?’
Gaze, twiddle.
‘Dr McDonald, do you have anything to add? Hello? … Someone give her a poke, for Christ’s sake.’
I did and she jumped, eyes wide. ‘Aagh. What was that for?’
‘DCS Dickie wants to know if you’ve got anything to add.’
‘Oh, right, yes, well …’ She scooted her chair forwards, closer to the laptop. ‘Did Helen McMillan’s parents say anything about where she got her books from?’
On the little screen, Dickie opened his mouth, then shut it again. Frowning. ‘Books?’
‘Did they say where she got them, I mean did she have a rich relative who collected them, and then died and left them to Helen, or something?’
OK, Dr McDonald had been on fairly shaky mental ground to begin with, but it looked as if that bash on the head yesterday had knocked something loose.
‘Books?’
Weber sat back in his chair. ‘Is this really relevant to—’
‘Do you still have that Family Liaison officer at her house, because if you do, can you get him to check the books in Helen’s room? The ones on the shelf.’
The frown got deeper. ‘Dr McDonald … Alice, I know this has all been very stressful for you, and you’re doing your best, but maybe it’d be better if we found someone more suited—’
‘I mean when we were in her room I remember thinking it was a strange collection for a twelve-year-old girl, and I think they were first editions.’ She turned to me. ‘They were, weren’t they, you looked at them too, and—’
‘No idea. They were just books.’
‘Signed first editions. Do you have any idea how much they’re worth? The Chamber of Secrets is about one and a half thousand, The Prisoner of Azkaban: two to three thousand, depending on which version it is, and God knows what a Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe or the Dickens would cost.’
Dickie’s face went an alarming magenta colour, but that might have been the screen. ‘Ah … I see.’
Dr McDonald wrapped her arm back around herself again, the fingers of her other hand making tight little curls through her hair. ‘What’s a twelve-year-old girl doing with twenty or thirty thousand pounds’ worth of books?’
‘If we don’t go now we’re going to be late. What if we can’t get there in time and miss the ferry, what are we going to do then, you said we had to leave at half past four!’
I pulled the next statement from the pile. ‘You moaning about it doesn’t make this go any faster. Read a magazine or something.’
The room was jammed with a dozen tatty Formica desks and towers of paperwork. Magnolia walls, carpet tiles curling at the edges and covered in suspicious stains, bulging in-and-out trays, the bitter-leather fug of BO. Someone had patched the sagging ceiling tiles with diarrhoea-brown parcel tape.
A handful of uniform had clumped in the far corner – by the kettle and fridge – hammering data into ancient beige computers, everyone else was in plainclothes.
DS Smith marched up and down, hands behind his back, playing general. ‘This simply isn’t good enough!’ He turned to face the huge whiteboard that stretched the length of the CID office. ‘Do I really have to tell you people how important the first twenty-four hours are in a murder enquiry?’
As if this was the first time we’d dealt with a body dumpsite.
Dr McDonald fidgeted with her leather satchel. ‘I mean it’s nearly half four now, what if we miss the ferry and have to stay in Aberdeen, what if we can’t get a hotel at short notice, I had a friend who left it too late and had to sleep in her car, I don’t want to sleep in a car, what if someone comes?’
DS Smith pulled a marker pen from his pocket and scrawled something up on the whiteboard. Strips of black electrical tape divided the surface into columns headed with things like ‘BODY RECOVERY’, ‘VICTIMOLOGY’, ‘LOCI OF OFFENCE’, and ‘PSYCHOLOGICAL INDICATORS’, with bullet points listed underneath. The new boy, making his mark. Teaching the parochial thickies how Grampian Police did things.
He tapped the whiteboard with a marker pen. ‘The question you need to be asking yourself is, “Where were they held prior to being buried?”’
No shit.
Rhona looked up from her computer monitor and saw me. She curled her top lip, then nodded over her shoulder at DS Smith, mouthed the word ‘wanker’ and made the accompanying hand gesture. Then stood and worked her way between the crowded desks, until she’d reached mine. ‘What a dickhead.’ Keeping her voice low. ‘Lording it over the rest of us like he’s God’s bloody gift.’
She settled on the edge of the desk, close enough to Dr McDonald to make the psychologist shuffle her chair back a good six inches.
‘We heard back from Tayside, Guv: the books in Helen McMillan’s bedroom are all signed first editions. Soon as he found out they were worth something, the dad checked online. The older stuff isn’t exactly mint, but all together you’re looking at about thirty-two thousand quid’s worth.’
‘Thirty-two—’