Field of Blood

by Denise Mina

  ‘The shape of your beliefs is exactly the same as it was when you were practising,’ Paddy continued. ‘The only difference is that you’ve replaced the basic text. Classic failed-Catholic mistake. You’re probably more religious than I am.’

  The door behind her opened suddenly, banging off the wall, and a gust of cold air blasted into the room, curling the grey smoke. Terry Hewitt’s black hair was shaved tight like an American soldier, cut right into the wood so that pale pink scars on his scalp showed through. It made him seem a little bit dangerous. He was plump with disproportionately short legs but there was an air about him, an aura of dirty-bad man, that made Paddy’s mouth water when she dared to look at him. She imagined him going home every night to a comfortable house with parents who read novels and encouraged his ambition. He’d never have to worry about losing his monthly Transcard or wear cheap shoes that let in the rain.

  ‘Hoi, Hewitt!’ shouted Dr Pete, waving his hand in front of his face. ‘Shut that door. This good woman’s trying to coax Richards back to the chapel.’

  The men laughed as Paddy carried the pint to the door, calling after her to stay, Woman, save us all.

  She turned back to them. ‘You know, one day all your livers are going to explode simultaneously and it’ll look like Jonestown in here.’

  The men screamed with delight as Paddy backed out of the door. She was pleased. Being a lowly copyboy was a precarious position: a bad choice here or a vulnerable moment there could mark her out for a lifetime of bullying. It was just as the door was swinging shut behind her that she heard Terry Hewitt ask,‘Who is that fat lassie?’

  II

  She sat on the top deck, chewing through her third consecutive boiled egg as she looked down on the bustle in the street. It was a disgusting diet and she wasn’t even sure it was working.

  Outside, pedestrians were wrapped up warm, closing their faces against a needle-sharp wind that found its way through scarves and tights and buttonholes. The wind buffeted the high side of the double-decker bus on open stretches of road, making passengers grab at the back of the seat in front, smiling sheepishly around when their alarm passed.

  Richards had annoyed her. She kept rerunning the conversation in her head, thinking of better, faster retorts, reshaping her speech so that it better reflected his. She had made the point well, she thought, even though Terry Hewitt’s remarks had ruined the effect entirely. Classic failed-Pape mistake.

  The phrase rolled around her mind, catching its tail, rolling and repeating in the lug-bugga-lug rhythm of the bus. She knew all about replacing the central text. At least Richards’ substitution had made him more useful to the world. She couldn’t tell any one of the people she loved about the black hole at the heart of her faith. She couldn’t tell Sean, her fiance, or her favourite sister, Mary Ann, and her parents must never know, it would break their hearts. The bus swung on the sharp turn into Rutherglen Main Street, hurrying to catch the green light. Paddy stood up and made her way downstairs. She was on her way to the rosary at Sean’s dead grandmother’s house, ready to perjure herself once more.

  Granny Annie had died aged eighty-four. She wasn’t a warm woman, or even an especially pleasant one. When Sean cried for her Paddy knew he was really grieving for his father who had died of a heart attack four years before. Despite his broad shoulders and deep voice he was a boy at eighteen, still eating lunchtime rolls made by his mum and wearing the underpants she left out for him at night.

  The old woman’s death was a big event in Rutherglen. Some nights the rosary was so busy that a portion of the mourners had to keep their coats on and stand in the street, praying towards the house. As they chanted the prayers for the repose of Annie’s soul, the young kept their voices low while the older ones sent up their sighs in Irish accents, copying the priests who had taught them.

  Annie Ogilvy had been brought to Eastfield in a hand cart in the dying years of the last century. Paddy’s family, the Meehans, arrived from Donegal in the same year and had stayed close to the Ogilvys ever since: religious duties and odd immigrant habits bound the two families together, and the limited job opportunities for Catholics meant that most of the men were workmates in the mines or foundries.

  Annie grew up in Glasgow but always affected an Irish accent, as was the fashion among immigrant girls in her day. Over the years her accent got thicker, shifting a few miles every year, from a Dublinesque soft brogue to a strangulated Ulster gargle. In her old age her children took her on an Irish coach tour and found that no-one there could understand her either. All her tastes and songs and cooking, although distantly related to things in Ireland, were reproduced nowhere. Annie had yearned her whole life for a fond remembered home that never was.

  The presence of the corpse in the house gave Paddy the creeps and she stayed well away from it. When they settled down for prayers she sat on the front-room floor, facing the settee, each night staring at a different configuration of puffy legs in support stockings, mottled blue papery skin chopped into links by pop-sock rims.

  The bus was approaching the end of the Main Street. It was an open-backed bus and the cold, windy night battled hard with the warmth from the heated cabin. Paddy put a foot on either side of the pole, resting her hip against it, letting her weight swing her out of the open back of the bus into the windy void. Crosswinds whipped her short hair, making it even messier. She could already see the crowd gathering in front of the small council house across the road.

  She wasn’t through the garden gate before someone caught her arm. Matt Sinclair was short and fifty and wore glasses with dark lenses.

  ‘There’s my wee girlfriend there,’ he said, eyes like dead televisions. He shifted his fag into the other hand and took Paddy’s hand, pumping it hard. ‘I was just talking about you.’ He turned and addressed another small, smoking man behind him. ‘Desi, here’s wee Paddy Meehan that I was telling ye about.’

  ‘Oh ho,’ said Desi. ‘You’ll be interested to meet me then: I know the real Paddy Meehan.’

  ‘I am the real Paddy Meehan,’ said Paddy quietly, moving towards the house, wanting to get inside and see Sean before the prayers started.

  ‘That’s right. I used to live in the high flats at the Gorbals and Paddy Meehan’s wife, Betty, she lived on my landing.’ He nodded adamantly as if she had forcefully expressed disbelief. ‘Aye, and I knew his pal, Griffiths.’

  ‘Who’s that?’ asked Matt.

  ‘Griffiths was the mad guy with the gun, the shooter.’

  ‘And was he a spy as well?’

  Desi blushed around the eyes, suddenly angry. ‘For Godsake, Meehan was never a spy. He was nothing but a bloody hood from the Gorbals.’

  Matt kept his lips tight and his voice low, looking around the crowd. ‘Here, mind your language. We’re at a rosary.’

  ‘Sorry.’ Desi looked at Paddy. ‘Sorry, dear. But he wasn’t a Soviet spy. He’s from the Gorbals.’

  ‘Spies don’t have to be toffs, do they?’ asked Paddy, trying to be respectful even though she was correcting him.

  ‘Aye, they need an education. They need to speak different languages.’

  ‘Anyway,’ Matt said, looking at her as he spoke,‘the Daily Record said they framed him for the Ross murder to discredit him, because he was a spy.’

  Desi blushed again and spluttered indignantly. ‘They were repeating what Meehan said and no-one believes him anyway.’ He raised his voice angrily. ‘What would a common thief have to tell the Soviets?’

  Paddy knew. ‘Well, he gave them the layout of most British prisons, didn’t he? That’s how they helped their spies escape, because he told them how.’ Matt looked interested. ‘So he was a spy?’

  Paddy shrugged again. ‘He might have sold secrets to the Soviets but I think the Ross investigation was just incompetent. I don’t think one had anything to do with the other.’

  Abandoning reasoned argument,
Desi raised his voice. ‘The man’s a known liar.’

  ‘Aye.’ Matt looked at Paddy blankly, wishing, she sensed, that he had never introduced her to his volatile friend.

  ‘Well, he’s back living in Glasgow, I hear.’ She nodded.

  ‘Living up in the Carlton. Drinks in the town.’ She nodded again.

  Calmer, Desi tried to reclaim his pace in the conversation. ‘How did ye end up named after him, well?’ He looked at Matt to deliver the punchline. ‘Do your parents hate ye?’

  Matt Sinclair tried to laugh but the phlegm in his lungs gurgled and made him cough. ‘Desi, man,’ he said solemnly when he had recovered,‘you’re awful funny.’

  ‘I was six years old when the other Paddy Meehan was arrested,’ Paddy said,‘and everyone calls my mum Trisha.’ Now reconciled, Matt and Desi nodded in unison.

  ‘So,’ said Desi,‘you got stuck with“Paddy”?’

  ‘Aye.’

  ‘How d’ye no call yourself“Pat”?’

  ‘I don’t like that name,’ she said quickly. Building on the success of a joke about the Irish homosexual Pat MaGroin, some of the older boys at school had nicknamed her Pat MaHind, a name she hated and feared for its unspecified sexual connotation and her uncontrollable blushing when they shouted it after her. ‘What about Packy?’

  ‘Hmm,’ she said, hoping they weren’t going to say anything about black people. ‘I think that word means something else now.’

  ‘That’s right,’ explained Matt knowledgeably. ‘A Paki means a Indian now.’

  Desi nodded, interested in this useful information.

  ‘It’s rude to call someone that,’ said Paddy.

  ‘Big Mo that runs the laundry,’ explained Matt,‘he’s a Paki.’

  ‘Not really,’ said Paddy, feeling uncomfortable. ‘I asked him and he’s from Bombay, so he’s Indian.’

  ‘That’s right.’ Matt nodded and looked at Desi to see if that had cleared things up any.

  ‘But Indians and Pakistanis’re not really the same thing …’ Paddy said, sounding unsure when she wasn’t. ‘Because didn’t the Indians and the Pakistanis have a big war? I think it’s like saying an Ulsterman is the same as a Republican.’

  The men nodded but she could tell that they had stopped listening.

  Desi cleared his throat. ‘Oh aye,’ he said, not grasping her angle at all. ‘Everything’s more complicated when darkies are involved, eh?’

  Paddy cringed. ‘I don’t think that’s very nice,’ she said. The men looked blank as she let herself be washed into the house on a wave of mourners. She felt their eyes on her back, judging her, thinking her a snooty wee cow.

  3

  A Tyranny of Eggs

  Paddy had spent her lunch hour wandering around the Sunday-shuttered town, nibbling boiled eggs wrapped in tinfoil, carefully avoiding newsagents with sweet counters. She hung her duffel coat on the hook by the door, carrying her yellow canvas bag over to the copyboy bench, sitting it underneath. She’d had the bag for two years and liked it. She had biroed the names of bands on it, not bands she necessarily liked to listen to but ones she wanted to be associated with: guy bands like Stiff Little Fingers, the Exploited and Squeeze.

  From their bench in the corner Paddy could see down the entire hundred-foot-long, open-plan news room and notice when anyone raised a hand or called them for an errand. She slid her bottom along the buttery oak, pulling up next to Dub. ‘Right?’

  ‘I hate weekend shifts.’ Dub glanced up from the music paper he was reading. ‘Quiet.’

  Paddy scanned the room for raised hands or open faces. No-one wanted anything. She found her thumbnail running along a gouge she had made in the wood. She liked to run her nail along the soft grain, imagining herself in the future as a grown-up journalist in a fancy suit and real shoes, on her way out to a hard story or an evening at the Press Club, brushing past and seeing the little indentations, remembering where she came from.

  Murray Farquarson, known as the Beast Master, shouted out from his office. ‘Meehan? Is she in?’ ‘She’s in,’ shouted Dub, nudging her to go.

  Paddy stood up and sighed, affecting reluctance like they all did when called to do any work. She muttered under her breath,‘For Godsake, I’m just bloody back,’ dragging her feet over to Farquarson’s door, secretly pleased that he had asked for her.

  Farquarson called for Paddy by name whenever he needed a discreet job done. He trusted her because she had no allegiances; none of the journalists had groomed her for an acolyte because they’d assumed she wouldn’t stay. They wouldn’t have known what to talk to her about even if they had wanted to recruit her: she didn’t like sport or know any of Hugh McDermid’s poetry. The journalists had a lot of odd ideas about women; she was always having to stay late and lift heavy boxes to show that she could. The only other women on the news room floor were Nancy Rilani and Kat Beesley, a genuine news reporter who had been to university and worked on a paper in England before coming home.

  Nancy was a heavy-breasted woman of Italian descent who wrote the agony column and most of the weekly woman’s page. She never spoke to Paddy or Heather Allen, the part-time student, wouldn’t even look at them, and gave the impression that she would trade any other woman to any man for peace and favours. Kat was proud. She always wore trousers, kept her hair very short and sat with her legs open.

  She stared at Paddy’s tits whenever she bothered to talk to her. Paddy didn’t quite know what the story was with her.

  She peered into the dark office and found Farquarson sitting at his desk, looking through cuttings about Brian Wilcox. He was a skinny, agitated man, all angles. He lived on a diet of sugar and tea and whisky. He didn’t look up when he heard her at the door.

  ‘JT’s in this office somewhere. Get him in here pronto. Best guess is the canteen.’

  ‘Right ye are, Boss.’

  Something big had happened in the Wilcox case or he wouldn’t be asking for the chief news reporter.

  ‘And I want clippings about missing kids dying in accidents, railway lines, wells, quarries, that stuff. See what Helen’s got.’ He pointed an accusing finger at her. ‘Say the clippings are for a freelancer and don’t tell anyone about this.’

  ‘OK.’

  Paddy walked briskly through the news room, out into the stairwell and up the two flights to the canteen.

  Gina and David Wilcox’s three-year-old son had been missing for almost four days. In the Daily News photo Baby Brian had a shock of white hair and a stiff, coaxed smile on his face. He had been sent out to play in the front garden at twelve o’clock and was alone for fourteen minutes while his mother spoke to the doctor on the phone about a personal matter. When Gina hung up and looked out of the front door her child was gone. The child’s parents were divorced, a rare occurrence in the West of Scotland. It was mentioned in most of the coverage, as if it wouldn’t be hard to misplace a tiny child in the decadent chaos of two separate houses. The story was all over the papers– the child was pretty and it was a welcome break from tales of galloping unemployment, the Yorkshire Ripper or Lady Diana Spencer’s simper.

  The self-service canteen on the top floor was bright, the long, wide window overlooking a dirt-floor car park across the road. It was just midday and the queue for hot food was already fifteen men long. They were print men in blue overalls with inky fingers, hollering casual conversations at one another, shouting because the presses they worked on all day were so loud. Paddy didn’t like going down there because they had pictures of naked women on the walls and the linotype operators stared at her tits. JT wasn’t in the queue. Through habit and affiliation the tidy rows of tables and chairs were segregated into blue-collar print workers’ and journalists’ areas. JT wasn’t sitting in either.

  She ran down three flights of stairs. Staff weren’t allowed to use the lifts, nor were they usually allowed to enter or leave the buildi
ng through the black marble reception area, but she was on urgent News business. The immaculately groomed Two Alisons who manned the front desk and switchboard stopped talking to watch her scuttle to the front door, pulling her cardigan around herself as she ducked out of the building. A queue of Daily News delivery vans were backed up in the street, rear doors rolled up showing bare metal floors strewn with sacking and tape. Paddy passed them, hurrying the four steps along the road to the door of the Press Bar.

  The pub was lunchtime busy. Men were shouting to one another with an air of forced levity, anxiously squeezing in as much drinking as they could. Paddy pushed past Terry Hewitt, blushing to think what he had called her, and found JT standing at the far end of the pub, wearing a blue shirt under a brown suede safari jacket. He was nursing a half of bitter. Paddy had watched him: she knew he didn’t much like to drink but he had to sometimes or the drunks on the paper would hate him even more. He was laughing joylessly at one of Dr Pete’s jokes, his eagerness to fit in setting him apart. He looked relieved when Paddy told him he had to come right away and put down his drink with indecent haste, not even attempting to finish it or to grab one last precious mouthful. Paddy saw Dr Pete watching the fresh young drink thoughtlessly abandoned on the table. He narrowed his eyes and shifted his gaze back to JT, his face shrivelling with disgust. Oblivious, JT followed Paddy outside.

  ‘What’s it about?’

  ‘I don’t know.’ Paddy didn’t want to mention the accidental death clippings in case anyone overheard. ‘Might be the Wilcox boy.’

  ‘Right,’ said JT, lowering his voice. ‘Don’t tell anyone.’ He dodged past her, sprinting into the lobby and up the stairs. Paddy chased close behind and got to Farquarson’s office just as JT shut the door. Through the slats on the Venetian blinds she could see Farquarson explaining something, looking angry and irritated at JT who was nodding excitedly, tapping the desk with his finger, suggesting a plan. The boy hadn’t been found dead; if he had they wouldn’t be excited, they’d be moving slower. Something else had happened.