by Denise Mina
It startled Paddy because she didn’t know what it was: the skin near his eyes and mouth folded over and a bizarre noise gargled up from his throat. McVie was laughing, but his face wasn’t used to it. ‘Can the police get it wrong?’ he repeated, making the noise again. ‘Your name’s Paddy Meehan, for fucksake.’
‘I know it happened then, but could it still happen now?’ McVie stopped doing the scary thing with his face and let it retract back to suicidal. ‘Most of them wouldn’t fit a kid up. Although …’ His eyes dropped to the side and he looked sceptical. ‘Most of them wouldn’t. If they were convinced they’re really guilty but it’s hard to prove, they might plant evidence. They see a lot of villains walk; you can kind of understand it.’
A night editor came over to the table with a coffee and a cigarette, settling into a seat near them.
McVie leaned into her. ‘I know Paddy Meehan, by the way. He’s an arsehole.’
Paddy shrugged awkwardly. ‘Well, that’s something coming from you. D’you know anything about a guy called Alfred Dempsie?’
‘Nope.’
‘He killed his son.’
‘Good for him. I heard the morning boys chased Heather Allen because of what she did to you. Don’t mistake that for popularity.’
‘I won’t.’
‘They’d hunt you for sport just as easy.’
‘Hunt me for sport? What are ye talking about? I’m going to report you to Father Richards for using creative language.’ McVie tried not to smile. He checked his watch. ‘Right, piss off, bint. I’ve got things to do before I go out.’ She stood up. ‘Well, thanks anyway, ya big swine.’
He watched her tug her pencil skirt down by the hem. ‘Get fatter every time I see ye.’
She couldn’t let him see she cared. ‘That’s right,’ she said, dying inside. ‘I’m getting fatter and you’re getting a day older in a job ye hate.’
IV
Paddy walked slowly down to Queen Street, aiming to get there after nine. It was a quiet Friday night in the black city; the heavy rain had lasted for most of the evening and even now the air felt damp and threatening. Outside a hotel on George’s Square she passed a crowd of women in cheap dresses and wedge shoes, alert and frightened as a herd of deer; nearby, their drunk men shouted at one another. She tried not to look at the women directly, and in her mind’s eye the women became a soup of fat arms in cap sleeves, of ringed fingers patting perms as sleek as swimming caps and raw heels persevering in razor-edged shoes.
Queen Street station was a cavernous Victorian shed with a fanned glass roof spanning five platforms. Only the pub and the Wimpy bar were open. Reading the railway timetable plastered to the wall, she saw that the trains left for Steps every half-hour and it would have taken the boys twelve minutes at most to get there. The ticket office was off to one side of the station and Paddy noticed that the barriers were not guarded at night like they were in the rush hour. It would have been easy for the boys to sneak onto the train without paying.
The ticket office was empty and the man serving at the ticket window was reading a newspaper.
‘Hello,’ she said. ‘Can ye tell me how much a half return is to Steps?’
The man frowned at her. ‘You’re not a half.’
‘I know. I don’t want to buy one, I just want to know how much it costs.’
He still looked sceptical. Paddy was bored with the Heather Allen lie so she told another one. ‘My nephew needs to go there to visit his auntie on his own this Monday coming and my sister has to give him the money for his fare.’ It sounded elaborate enough to be true.
The attendant watched her as he typed it into the ticket machine. It cost sixty pence, twice as much as the bus.
Back out on the concourse she read the boards and realized that the next train to Steps was due to pull out. She took out her Transcard but no-one asked to see it as she climbed onto the quiet train. The doors slid shut and the carriage jolted forward. There didn’t seem to be a conductor on board.
The train passed through a long, dark tunnel, emerging on the other side between two steep banks of earth, hewn away to make room for the railway lines. The banks were so steep that after a hundred years of perseverance the grass still hadn’t managed to grow on their jagged sides. The carriages were quiet and she could easily see small boys managing the whole journey without being spotted.
The first stop was Springburn station, eight minutes out of Queen Street. The platform was built in a deep valley with stairs up to the street. It was quiet for the moment but obviously well used: the platform was broad and had a chocolate machine and even a telephone kiosk on it. On the far side of the station, beyond the double railway tracks, a white picket fence marked off the surrounding land. It was dark behind the fence where thin trees and malnourished bushes struggled. The wilderness went on for so long that Paddy’s eye got lost in it. The train started up again, shaking her awake.
The journey on to Steps took the train along a short track before forking off away from the low-level Barnhill station. She could see it through the bushes on her left-hand side, a poor, lone platform with broken lights and a single bench next to stairs up to the road. It was around here that Thomas Dempsie’s tiny body had been left. She found the thought of him being left somewhere so dark almost more upsetting than his death.
She looked back at Barnhill station disappearing behind her. It was ridiculous. The boys wouldn’t have passed their home to take the baby somewhere else. Even if they had jumped on the wrong train they would have got off at Springburn and walked the half mile.
The train rumbled on to Steps, passing the Robroyston high flats, forty-storey paragons of architectural crime built on the top of barren hills with nothing around them to give them human scale. Beyond that it passed through dark, empty lands of bush and scrub bordering a marsh. In the cold moonlight Paddy could see fields and hedges, a strange landscape halfway between abandoned industrial site and countryside.
The approach to Steps was heralded by a strip of houses on a hill. They were big and had gardens she could see into when the train slowed. It didn’t seem like the sort of place that would draw wee boys from a ghetto, and it definitely didn’t look like a better place to hide a guilty secret than the industrial wilderness they’d come from.
Steps station platform was clean and neat, if a little exposed. On one side a huge wild field stretched off until it reached a school building; the other side faced the backs of houses. There was no ticket office or guard there to witness the boys’ arrival. Enamelled signs informed travellers that they would have to buy their tickets from the conductor on the train. No-one else got off the train. Paddy didn’t like to admit it but JT might have been right: the boys could have made it all the way there without being seen. It didn’t explain where they had hidden the baby for the eight hours before they got on the train though.
She loitered alone on the platform, looking down the long, straight tracks back to Springburn and onwards to Cumbernauld. The station exit was a gentle ramp up to the road. Paddy walked up it and let herself through the gate to the little humpback bridge over the tracks.
The break in the bushes across the empty road wouldn’t have been obvious without the small pile of flowers and cards and soft toys on the pavement in front of it. It was a dark lane, overhung with bushes and trees. Paddy glanced behind her, making sure she wasn’t being followed, and stepped over a bunch of withered carnations into the velvet dark.
The lane ran between the railway line and the far ends of long gardens belonging to big houses, evergreen bushes preserving their privacy. A craggy, leafless bush clung to a high wall of chicken wire on the railway side. The ground beneath her feet was uneven and frozen and she walked slowly, trying to find the faint tread line in the grass. It didn’t take long to reach the blue and white police tape blocking the path. Beyond it she could see the hole in the chicken-wire fencing, low down, j
ust high enough for small boys to get through. She ducked under the tape and climbed through, catching her tights on a loose wire and ripping a bullet-sized hole in the right knee.
She was standing in an area of disturbed grass. She crouched down on her haunches and ran her flat hand over it. The thin light from the distant train platform showed the pale silver undersides of the blades, uniformly flattened by the wind or a sheet, she thought, not broken by feet. Paddy felt as calm as she had in the alleyway with McVie, and reminded herself to keep an open mind about what had happened here. Anything was possible; the police weren’t always right. They’d questioned and eliminated the Yorkshire Ripper nine times before he was arrested.
She stood up, walking along the rail track for twenty feet, heading away from the station until the grass became upright and undisturbed. Dew from the blades clung to her tights, soaking into the wool, making the ankles sag.
It only caught her eye because it was a perfect square. Across the twin rail track was a geometrical patch of shadow beside a small bush. She recognized the signs from paddling pools left upended in her own family’s garden for seasons at a time: the little square of grass had been starved of wind and frost for a few days. It was where the tent had been placed, where Brian had been killed and found again. Beyond it, in a diagonal slash across the lip of the hill, a dirt path had recently been formed by a hundred journeys to and fro. It seemed suddenly terribly dark.
The darkness was a blanket over her mouth and ears, muffling the noise of distant traffic and the world beyond the tracks, thickening the air so that she couldn’t draw breath. A crisp packet fluttered against the fence, and to Paddy’s alert ears the cellophane crackle sounded like a stunted cry. She backed up to the fence, holding tight, letting the wire dig into her fingers while she blinked away Brian’s imagined final moments. A bright screaming train flew towards her, filling her ears, and Paddy closed her eyes to the grit and wind, glad of the heart-stopping intrusion.
The train passed and Paddy stood in the dank dark, looking down the railway line towards the bright station. It didn’t feel safe but she scampered over to the far bank, slipping slightly on an oily wooden sleeper, the momentary lack of balance sending a cold shiver up the back of her neck.
Next to the flattened square of grass the bush had branches cut from it: recent ones severed with a sharp knife, older ones twisted until they came off in a stringy mess of bark and sap. She remembered what Farquarson had said about sticks being put in the baby’s bottom. The sharp cuts suggested someone gathering evidence.
Paddy stepped beyond the flat grass where the tent had been and climbed up the frozen mud embankment, helping herself up by clinging onto stray roots and stones. She found herself in a large field, ploughed into furrows. An unlocked gate was only fifty yards away. She could hear the sound of cars speeding past on a road near by. A hundred tyre tracks from the police cars scarred the mud in front of her. She stood up straight.
The boys hadn’t stumbled on the baby after playing in a swing park for toddlers. They hadn’t managed to hide for eight hours or come here invisibly on an expensive train or tramp down an unfamiliar dark alley to a hole in the fence they didn’t know was there. Someone else had been here with them. All three of them had been driven to this spot by someone. It was obvious to her, and should have been obvious to anyone else who looked. But no-one was looking. As it stood, the Baby Brian murder was a good story, a clean story.
Paddy stood in the bitter field, her hair flattened against her head, listening to the brutal February wind and all the callous cars rushing home to warmth and kindness. The story suited everyone and wouldn’t be questioned until the evidence was overwhelming. It was Paddy fucking Meehan all over again. No matter how much evidence he had produced or how many people saw him on the night of Rachel Ross’s murder the police were determined it was him.
18
Killy Girls and Country Boys
1969
I
Meehan would spend the remaining twenty-five years of his life poring over the details of the night he didn’t kill Rachel Ross. He told the story so often that it changed meaning: the names of the girls became pleas for understanding; the timing, where the cars were parked, when the lights went on and off at the hotel, all became a hollow mantra to be chanted when a new journalist or lawyer took a passing interest in his case.
At the time, the night seemed like nothing but another disappointing recce, like a thousand other nights in the life of a professional criminal.
They had been sitting in the hotel car park for three hours, watching people arrive and leave the bar, slumping down when a man came past walking his dog, watching and waiting for the lights to go off so they could scan the next-door tax disc office. James Griffiths was slumped in his stiff car coat and kept coming back to the same thing. ‘I’ll steal one for ya,’ he said, his thick Rochdale accent putting the inflection at the end of the sentence, turning it into a question. ‘Happilee, happilee, happilee.’ He stubbed his Woodbine out in the ashtray. Until James helped himself to the turquoise Triumph 2000 from outside the Royal Stewart Hotel in Gretna, the four-year-old car’s ashtray had never been used. Now it was overflowing with snapped stubs and flaky ash.
Meehan sighed. ‘I’m not taking them on holiday to East Germany in a nicked motor, for Godsake. We wouldn’t get far. The Secret Service are watching me all the time.’
‘You won’t get done,’ said Griffiths casually. ‘I never get done. Been getting away with it for years.’
‘You never get done?’ Meehan stared at him.
‘Never,’ said Griffiths, only faintly uncomfortable at the blatant lie.
‘What were you doing in my cell on the Isle of Wight, then? Visiting?’
‘Yeah.’ Griffiths grinned, but Meehan didn’t reciprocate. The first time they met was on the Isle of Wight, when Griffiths was doing a three-year stretch for car theft. Griffiths was a halfwit sometimes. He did and said whatever came into his mind at the time; that’s why he got the strap so often inside. Paddy had seen him without his shirt on often enough: his back looked like Euston station.
Meehan needed the car to get the family to a holiday in East Germany. He didn’t really want a holiday. What he really wanted was to show his kids that he could speak German and Russian, that he was receiving a payment from a foreign government, that he wasn’t just another Glasgow thug. Before they got much older he was going to give them good memories of their father. He had spent the previous winter sitting next to his own father’s hospital bed while he was eaten away by cancer and during the long nights he couldn’t recall a single happy time with him. Not one. There wasn’t a moment spent together as a family that wouldn’t have been better had his father been out. Meehan wanted to be more than that to his kids and he couldn’t take them away in a stolen car. They’d be picked up before Carlisle, he was sure, stopped at the side of the motorway and sent home fatherless. He could already see their hurt and humiliated eyes looking up at him from the back seat of a panda car.
‘I dunno what you’re worried about,’ said Griffiths. ‘I’ve been picking up so many cars here I’ve been rolling them over a cliff into the water ’cause I got nowhere to sell ’em. And good ones too, Jags and that. Not rubbish. I’ll steal one for ya.’
He was apologizing, Meehan knew that. They’d spent a lot of time together over the years and he knew Griffiths’ shorthand for sorry. He was apologizing because the tax disc job he’d brought Meehan to scope in Stranraer wasn’t going to happen. As the hotel lights gradually went out and the patrons left in ones and twos, followed by the staff, it became clear that the spotlight on the roof of the tax building would stay on. Even if it went off, the hotel kept dogs, big bastards by the sound of them. So they sat at the dark edge of the car park, smoking and watching, Meehan going quiet to hide his dejection, Griffiths getting chatty to cover his embarrassment.
Between the tax office a
nd the hotel they could see Loch Ryan, and beyond the hills to the molten black sea. Big red ferry boats for Belfast and the Isle of Man bobbed on the gentle lift and sway of the water. A few lorries were already parked there, drivers sleeping in the cabs, waiting for the first crossing.
‘Fuck it,’ said Meehan, stubbing out his fag in the ashtray, ‘this is pointless. Let’s get back to Glasgow and get a breakfast at the meat market.’
The meat dealers’ café opened at four in the morning. Their fry-ups had rashers as thick as gammon steaks and they sold mugs of cheap whisky. Griffiths took a puff on his cigarette, shaking his head as he exhaled a string of smoke. They had shared a cell for two months and could read each other’s breathing. Griffiths was vexed. He shook his head at Paddy, smiling a little, and relented.
‘OK, OK.’ He turned the key in the engine, leaving the lights off as he reversed out of the dark corner. ‘Let’s get some brekkie.’
II
Fifty miles north of Stranraer in the small, wealthy suburb of Ayr, Rachel and Abraham Ross were in the bedroom of their bungalow, getting ready for bed. Rachel, in a sky-blue nightie and pink chenille dressing gown, sat on the side of her twin bed and watched her husband winding his watch. A single, convulsive cough shook her. She fought it off and waved a dismissive hand. ‘It’s nothing.’
‘Sure?’ said Abraham, putting his watch on the bedside table.
Rachel patted his bed. ‘I’m fine, I’m fine,’ she said. ‘Dr Eardly said it would come and go for a little while after the operation, didn’t he? I’m fine.’
She smiled reassuringly for her husband, showing a little of her bare pink gums. They had spent the past month lying in their respective beds, listening to the texture of Rachel’s bronchial cough. It had left them both exhausted. The cough was so violent that it had cracked one of her ribs and caused her to have an operation. Abraham had fallen asleep in his office in the Alhambra Bingo Hall yesterday and seen Rachel cough up a river into their bedroom. She had always been the strongest, five years older than him and barren too, but in both their minds the strongest.