Стюарт Макбрайд - The Coffinmaker’s Garden

‘The cops aren’t the only ones who keep tabs on missing people.’

‘Ash Henderson, I thought you were dead!’ Vera Abbot held her arms wide for a hug. A spattering of stains marred the front of her flouncy paisley-patterned blouse, dog hairs on the legs of her baggy red trousers, a pair of knee-high boots that probably hadn’t seen a lick of shoe polish since she’d bought them some time in the eighties. The long brown hair was gone, instead it was a short-back-and-sides in shades of grey and white, making her ears stick out even more than normal, dangly gold earrings hanging from the lobes. Dark eyes and a slightly ratty smile, emphasised by the collection of creases and laughter lines.

Up close she exuded the mismatched scents of sharp Olbas Oil and stale cigarettes, as she planted a ‘mmmwah’ on both my cheeks.

Then stepped back to give me a proper once-over. ‘You’re far too thin. How’s Michelle? Or are you still seeing that stripper, Susie?’

‘Susanne, and no.’

‘Oh, too bad. I know how middle-aged men like you put great store in boinking a twenty-four-year-old.’

Vera’s office was a sea of paperwork: shelves on the walls, groaning with stacks and stacks of it, file boxes lining the room — three deep and four high in places. A drift of printouts and newspaper cuttings buried her desk. More on the windowsills, blocking off the bottom half of a view out over the Crossgate to the Chinese restaurant opposite.

She bent double, patting her hands on her knees, and beamed at Henry. ‘And who’s this handsome wee lad?’

‘My sidekick. Police Scotland just can’t get the staff any more.’

‘True.’ Vera thumped back into her office chair, setting it rocking on groaning springs. ‘Tea?’ Dipping into a desk drawer and coming out with a bottle of Glenfiddich. ‘Or something stronger, perhaps?’

I cleared a stack of newspapers off the room’s only other chair and eased myself into it. ‘Can’t: pills. And it’s not even ten o’clock, yet.’

‘True, shouldn’t be a cliché, should we?’ She popped the whisky back in her desk. Then took a deep breath. ‘SANDY! TWO TEAS! AND NIP DOWN THE BAKER’S FOR A COUPLE OF SAUSAGE BUTTIES!’ Vera winked at Henry. ‘AND AN EXTRA SAUSAGE!’

A loud teenager groan rattled out from somewhere down the hall, followed by a grudging, ‘All right, all right...’ and a door thunking shut.

‘The joy of interns.’ Vera creaked her seat from side to side, smiling at me like a deranged squirrel. ‘Now, I’m guessing you didn’t come here to chat about the good old days, and it’s too early for a booty call, so what can the Fife Daily Examiner do for you? Is this about those murdered little boys? Saw another one went missing yester—’

‘You still keep that big file full of missing persons?’

Her eyes widened at me, eyebrows going up. ‘You have piqued my interest, Mr Henderson. And would there be an exclusive in it for me?’

‘Depends.’

‘You know what the other really lovely thing about interns is? You can get them to do all sorts and call it work experience.’ Vera gave a wee nonchalant shrug. ‘Like digitising the entire archive. Fancy a wee squint?’

Damn right I did.

I polished off the last mouthful of sausage butty and washed it down with milky tea as a young man in a tartan shirt and polka-dot tie poked at the keyboard on a shiny new laptop. It looked as if he’d modelled his haircut on Vera’s, only with a vaguely obscene quiff. Peering through small round glasses at the array of black-and-white images on his screen. An accent so Fife you could’ve designed rollercoasters with it — up and down and up and down and up again. ‘See, the real trick is getting the metadata right when you’re putting the stuff into the database in the first place.’

Vera leaned back against an overflowing filing cabinet in what passed for the Fife Daily Examiner ’s newsroom — barely big enough to fit in yet more towers of file boxes, an old dining table, and four wooden chairs. ‘You still haven’t said why we’re looking for this woman, Ash.’

‘Haven’t I?’

The young man poked at the keyboard some more. ‘Right, so if we eliminate anyone from the last fifteen years, male, blonde, or over thirty...’ The images refreshed on his screen, narrowing down the field. ‘Then we cut off anything more than sixty years ago...’ They changed again. ‘And that gives us fifty-six possibles.’ He looked up at me with a wee swaggery wobble to his head. ‘You want me to flick through them?’

No, I was standing here for the good of my health.

‘Please.’

‘Right.’ A woman’s face filled the screen — too old to be standing on one leg and with completely the wrong shape of nose. ‘Well?’

‘Keep going, I’ll tell you when to stop.’

Face after face clicked past, each one staying there for no more than a couple of seconds, their names flashing up underneath the pictures. A list of info down the side: names, dates, all that kind of stuff. Some were professional photo-studio jobs, others were more informal, some blurry and grainy, some done down the local nick with a height chart in the background, some wedding pics, and some were those cheesy end-of-year ones they used to do in secondary schools.

‘Stop!’ I leaned in. ‘Go back a couple.’

He did.

And there she was: Julia Kennedy. Fifteen years old — definitely younger than she looked — grinning out at us in front of a mottled background. Blue blazer with the school crest on the breast pocket, white shirt, blue tie with yellow-and-red diagonal stripes, straight skirt. A butterfly hairgrip, holding her side parting in place. Missing for the last thirty-five years.

Took some doing, but I kept my face as still as possible. As if it didn’t really matter one way or another that we’d found her.

The printer in the corner creaked and whirred into life, chugging out three or four sheets of A4.

Vera wheeched them out of the tray. Pursed her lips as she frowned at them. ‘I remember this one: her mother was in absolute bits for years. DI Dickie fancied the stepdad for it, kept waiting for Julia’s remains to turn up, but they never did.’ A grey eyebrow waggled at me. ‘Until now? Is that why you’re here, you’ve found her body?’

‘Nope. We found her photo and wanted to know who she was.’ I held my hand out and, eventually, Vera handed the printouts over. ‘You know what investigations are like these days: every stupid little thing has to be followed up.’

‘Because if you’ve found her body and you’re not telling me, I’d—’

‘We haven’t found her body.’ Which was true. ‘And I promise if anything comes up, I’ll let you know.’ The folded sheets went in my pocket. ‘In the meantime, do me a favour and stay away from the family. No point getting their hopes up for nothing.’

Vera narrowed her eyes and squinted at me for a while in silence. Then nodded. ‘Deal. But you better not stiff me, Ash Henderson.’

‘Would I?’

‘Yes, you bloody well would!’

‘Don’t know why you’re glowering at me. I IDed our victim, didn’t I?’ I pushed my seat back, reclining it and stretching out my right leg. Trying to work the crackling knots out of the tortured ankle as Franklin scowled her way along the M8.

Her suit might have started the day a smart shade of black, but it’d developed an off-grey patina, spotted with the occasional clump of fluff. ‘I was digging through those bloody boxes for ages, while you were swanning about having sausage butties and cups of tea!’

‘Well, one of us had to take the official route, didn’t they? Besides, we got a result — that’s all that matters.’ Trying to rub some life back into my calf.