A Song for the Dying. Stuart MacBride

the killer took the bus here, hauled the dead girl over his shoulder, and stomped off into the woods? Do dead bodies have to pay full fare, or do they count as luggage?’

      A sigh. ‘You may mock, but what about this …?’ He made his way around to the back of the bus shelter, giving the side a wide berth, and pointed. ‘See?’

      I followed, placing my feet in his footsteps, minimizing disturbance to the scene. A single smear of red-brown ran for six inches along the shelter’s bottom edge, just above the grass.

      ‘See? How much would you like to wager that it’s a DNA match with our victim?’ He moved over to the left, peering at a flattened patch in the scrubland. The grass was stained and darkened. ‘She probably died here. There’s not enough for a full bleed-out, but I imagine a lot of it would have clotted inside the body cavity by the time she got here. Hence the relative cleanliness.’

      Alice hadn’t moved from the roadside. ‘Why bother though?’ She curled an arm around herself, the other hand playing with her hair again. ‘I mean he could’ve just left her there, behind the bus shelter, why pick her up again and carry her all the way through the woods to the bit of waste ground where she was found, doesn’t that seem like a bit of a waste of time?’

      I reached into my pocket and pulled out a pair of gloves from Dr Constantine’s investigation kit. Tore open the sterile packaging, and snapped them on. Scuffed through the weeds and grass to the far side of the flattened area – taking the long way around to avoid treading on any evidence. ‘Have you got a photo of this?’

      Huntly sniffed. ‘Of what?’

      ‘Syringe.’ It lay in a clump of dockens, lined with frost, its yellow cap about a foot away.

      ‘Ah …’ He followed the path I’d made, his digital camera at the ready. ‘Say cheese.’

      Alice still hadn’t moved. ‘Unsub-Fifteen tried to save her. He got Claire all the way out here, then he takes the cry for help he made her record and goes to call an ambulance, but she crashes. She’s not breathing. So he gives her … maybe something like adrenaline? Tries to start her heart again. He doesn’t want them to die, he wants us to get to them in time, like Laura Strachan, Marie Jordan, and Ruth Laughlin. Claire was meant to live. This was a failure.’

      Huntly took another couple of shots. ‘And he didn’t want us to connect her body with this place, in case he’d left something of himself behind. So he moved the remains.’ The digital camera went back into Huntly’s pocket. ‘Of course, he didn’t reckon on tangling with someone of my calibre. They never do.’ He grinned. ‘Here’s a fun fact for you: one of the ambulance men who saved Laura Strachan, himself went on to become the last ever victim of another serial killer: the Nightmare Man. Personally, if I lived in Oldcastle, I’d move.’

      Damp grass scuffed around my ankles as I made for the telephone box. The door squealed as I dragged it open. A new-car stench of burnt plastic slumped against me, underpinned with a bleachy tang. The phone itself looked reasonably intact, under all the black-marker swear words and cocks scratched into the metal. I picked the handset up and held it so the mouthpiece was nowhere near my lips. The dialling tone burred in my ear.

      Still working. I punched in 1471, looking for the last number dialled, but the LCD display came up ‘— BARRED NUMBER —’ The handset went back into its cradle then I stepped out into the unburnt air again. Pulled out my new official phone and powered it up. It’d been pre-programmed with a half-dozen numbers, ‘~ THE BOSS!’ sitting at the top of the list, above ‘ALICE’, ‘BERNARD’, ‘HAMISH’, ‘SHEILA’, and ‘X – DOMINO’S PIZZA’. My finger hovered over the first entry. Of course, by rights it should be Control, not Jacobson getting the first call. Then again, Control couldn’t send me back to prison.

      And there was no way I was risking that. Not when I was so close …

      The phone rang for a bit, then Jacobson picked up, listened while I filled him in. Then, ‘Excellent. Bernard might be a pain in the arse, but he’s worth it. Get as many photos as you can, then call Ness – get her to send out a Scenes Examination Branch team. I want that scene cordoned off and picked over with an electron microscope. Tell them Bernard’s in charge, and if they give him any grief I’ll have them. OK?’