Field of Blood

by Denise Mina

  At first she thought again that it must be some of the morning boys playing a prank that had gone too far, but they were never sober enough to drive, especially not late at night, and they wouldn’t have hurt her physically. She wondered for a moment if Paddy Meehan’s family were exacting their revenge, but that couldn’t be right either. She remembered the hand around her throat and realized, suddenly and clearly, that she didn’t know these men and they didn’t know her. They were going to kill her.

  Moving carefully, rubbing a relatively pain-free part of her chin repeatedly against her shoulder, she tried and failed to get the smelly towel off. She began to panic, rubbing frantically, regardless of the pain.

  She was struggling with the rope around her wrists and feet, getting nowhere, when the van pulled off the road, took a couple of sharp turns that slid her around the floor and then came to a creeping stop in a very dark place. The driver got out and a bright overhead light came on. They were outside, somewhere dark. She could hear a river and feet crunching around to the side of the van.

  Heather worked her hands up and down, her skin rubbing hard against the tight rope, trying to loosen the cord but embedding it instead in her raw skin. The van door opened, the hood was unhooked from her head and the man in the donkey jacket looked in at her. He was holding a short-handled shovel. Heather tried to smile.

  When Donkey Jacket saw her brutally swollen face, eyes like oranges, chin and hair smeared with blood and snot, he looked perplexed. ‘That’s not her.’

  From around the side of the van she heard another voice muttering, ‘Ye said ye’d follow her out and ye did.’

  An older face looked in at her, frightened, shaking his head. She couldn’t be sure, seeing him upside down, she couldn’t be altogether sure, but she thought his eyes were wet for her and sorry for what he had done. His sympathy made her think for a moment that they might let her go, and relief swept from her crown to her toes, a cold wash that unclenched her aching jaw and eased her throbbing shoulders.

  Donkey Jacket lifted the spade from his side, holding it with both hands near the shovel end. ‘And ye said she was dead,’ he said.

  The older man’s cracked voice gave his emotion away. ‘She’d stopped breathing. I thought she was.’

  Donkey Jacket nudged him playfully and raised the shovel to chest height. ‘See? You teach me about things.’ His voice was rich and calm. ‘And now I can teach you things.’

  He swung his arm freely, bringing the metal shovel down fast and crushing Heather’s skull against the van floor.

  20

  Ever So Lonely

  I

  Paddy’s weekend was as poor and friendless as she could remember. She spent the whole of Saturday skulking around the big library in town, keeping out of the house, reading old newspapers about the Dempsie case that told her nothing she didn’t already know.

  She hadn’t realized the degree of local animosity towards her until she passed Ina Harris, a vulgar woman she knew to be a friend of Mimi Ogilvy’s, on her way home from the library. Ina turned quite deliberately and spat at Paddy’s feet. She was hardly an arbiter of good manners herself: she often answered her door without her teeth in and was a famously light-fingered cleaner. She kept having to change her job all the time because the day and hour she started anywhere she’d look for the fiddle, steal what she could and had to leave before she got found out. She got a job cleaning operating theatres once and came home with a bag full of scalpels and lint. Everyone in Eastfield knew about her.

  When Paddy opened her drowsy eyes on the Sunday and saw the two cups of hot tea on her side table she thought for a moment it was a normal weekend. Con’s only chore around the house was to make the Sunday-morning cuppas and deliver them to the bedrooms, easing everyone up and getting them ready for ten o’clock mass. Paddy blinked, feeling especially excited about seeing Sean at chapel. It was only when she recalled why seeing him meant so much to her that she remembered it wasn’t a normal time.

  She sat up in bed, sipping her tea, thinking about all the disapproving Ina Harrises she would have to face today. Sean would be there and would ignore her. Her family wouldn’t speak to her and everyone in town was watching her and whispering about her crime. Mary Ann would stand loyally by her but she’d laugh an eloquent articulation of Paddy’s shame and fright.

  She listened as everyone in the house took their turn of the bathroom. Mary Ann was rinsing her teeth when Trish called up the stairs to tell them it was half nine, mind now, they’d need to set off in ten minutes. Mary Ann came back into the bedroom and made an astonished face to see Paddy still in bed. Paddy made the face back and Mary Ann giggled, gave her one last open-mouthed gawp, and left.

  Paddy lay in bed, still wearing her pyjamas, reading L’Etranger, a book Dub had lent her, because she knew the French title would upset her father. She heard the scuffle and whispers at the bottom of the stairs followed by Con’s tread. He stopped outside, knocked and opened the door, looking around the room expectantly. She wanted to sit up and challenge him, say something incendiary that would make him speak to her and have a fight for once in his pathetic life. But she didn’t. She sat in bed with her eyes fixed on the page, slowly slipping under the covers, protecting her father’s dignity at the expense of her own.

  Con snorted angrily twice and left, shutting the door to the room tight to show how annoyed he was. He tramped downstairs again, she heard the front door shut and, like bubbles bursting, the family were gone.

  A calm fell over the house. Paddy listened just to make sure no-one had been left behind. They were really gone. She was alone in the house for perhaps the first time in ten years. Even if no-one else was in the house, Trisha was usually in the kitchen or at least near it. Paddy threw back the covers and bolted downstairs to the phone.

  Mimi Fucking Ogilvy said ‘Hello’ in her best Sunday voice.

  ‘Is Sean there?’

  ‘Who may I say it is?’

  ‘Can I speak to Sean please?’

  Paddy could feel Mimi’s tiny mind grind out a thought before she hung up on her.

  Paddy waited in the hall, sitting briefly on the stairs, knowing that Sean would have been in the house getting ready for mass and would have heard the phone ring. He’d know it was her: no-one else he could possibly know would need to phone on a Sunday morning because they were all on the way to the chapel and would see each other anyway. He wasn’t going to call her back. She checked her watch. He would have left to get to mass now. He wasn’t calling back.

  Back upstairs she threw on some clothes and took off her engagement ring, leaving it sitting by her bed, knowing her mum would come in to make the bed while she was out and would see it there. She hoped it would worry her.

  She ate a quick breakfast of cereal. She could have made six boiled eggs but the grapefruit were all off and the chemical reaction didn’t work without them. Filling her canvas bag with biscuits, she set off for the town, hurrying to get the train past Rutherglen station before mass came out. She didn’t want to run into half the congregation. Sitting on the train, Paddy looked at her chubby hands dispassionately. She liked them better without the poor ring.

  In town she bought a ticket to an afternoon showing of Raging Bull, not because she wanted to see it but so that she could tell Sean she had already seen it if he asked her later. She didn’t want him thinking she would wait around for him all the time. She felt like a friendless idiot, handing her single ticket over to the usherette. Unprompted, Paddy told her that her friend who had been coming with her was prone to illness and wasn’t well enough to come and that’s why she was alone. The usherette was hung over and dressed like a bell hop in a washed-out red and grey uniform. She let Paddy finish her excuse and then silently pointed the way upstairs with her ticket skewer.

  Paddy sat near the back, calculating that fewer people would be able to see her there, and opened her bag of biscui
ts. One hour into the film she realized that she had never enjoyed a movie as much in her life. She wasn’t wondering what Sean thought about it or making jokes or checking that she got her share of the sweets, she was just enveloped by the music and the dark. She even forgot to eat.

  II

  She arrived back in Eastfield a full hour before anyone could reasonably expect their tea to be ready. It was too painful to go and sit in her bedroom before eating as well as after. The nets were thick in the living-room window and the settee was too low to see anyway, but she could tell from the blueness of the light that the telly was on. A head stood up from an armchair – one of the brothers – and went into the kitchen. She had another whole night of internal exile ahead of her.

  Sneaking past the front gate, she lifted the garage key from under a brick. If her dad saw the light on he’d think it was their neighbours, the Beatties, and stay well away. As she pulled the garage side door towards her a thin black carpet of mulch concertinaed at her feet.

  The air inside was cold, a damp cloud hanging over everything, eating into her fingertips and ear lobes, carrying the cold into every corner. Paddy kept her coat on and sat down in a slightly moist brown armchair. She finished the biscuits in her bag, eating them one after another as if it was a chore.

  The Beatties had managed to pack a wild amount of stuff into the Meehans’ garage. They had erected a precarious set of shelves from bricks and odd planks of wood against one wall and had stacked cardboard boxes full of bric-a-brac on them. Paddy stood up, picking her damp tights off the backs of her legs, and looked through the boxes, the soft cardboard coming apart in her hand when she tried to tug it.

  The Beatties went on foreign holidays and got to keep toys from when they were younger. The Meehan children were made to give theirs away to charities just when they stopped playing with them but before they lost all proprietorial sense over them. In one box they had stored a Union Jack biscuit tin from the Silver Jubilee and a cheaply framed picture of the Queen as a young woman, holding onto the back of a chair. Black speckled mould grew across her long pink skirt.

  Paddy sat in the cold armchair, looking around the room. If she had been a Beattie she could write an article about Thomas Dempsie and Baby Brian. She could say Brian disappeared on the anniversary of Thomas’s death, explain the Barnhill connection clearly and let readers draw their own conclusion. She could do it if she didn’t care what her family thought. They were punishing her already and she hadn’t done anything. She was suffering their wrath anyway, she might as well do the Judas deed. Heather Allen would do it, even if it were her family. She would grit her teeth and write the Dempsie article. But Heather Allen was a shit.

  Forgetting for the moment that she had taken Sean’s ring off, she touched her ring finger with her thumb and experienced a momentary horror when she found her finger bare. The impression of it was deep on her finger: the red mark had faded but the skin remained smoother where the band had been. She definitely liked her hand better without it.

  By the time she got into bed that night she noticed that she had changed her habit of twisting her engagement ring to stroking its silky absence fondly.

  21

  Sadly

  I

  Paddy sat on the bench in the news room, watching the editors filter back in slowly after the privilege of lunch, their tempers sweetened by a midday pint and a hot meal. The journalists, who had to make do with ten stolen minutes in the canteen or a sandwich at their desks, watched them insolently, feet up on desks, fags dangling from mouths, the antagonism between the two groups palpable. They hated each other because editors gave the orders and chewed up the journalists’ work while the journalists produced and bitched about editors’ cuts, even when their copy had been improved a hundredfold, perhaps especially then.

  A clump of editors were standing in the middle of the news room, sharing a final joke, when a flurry in the corridor caught everyone’s eye. William McGuigan, the paper’s chairman, as rarely seen in the news room as empathy or encouragement, made a dramatic double-doored entrance from the lifts. His large port-wine lips had deflated with age and lost their edges so that they reminded Paddy of overripe fruit. He was flanked by five men, two in police uniform and three in plain clothes. One of them, a whitehaired man in a pristine gaberdine jacket, stood authoritatively out in front of the others, eyeing the room, suspicious of everyone.

  The news room fell silent. The presence of so much authority made everyone feel as if they were about to be arrested and summarily put to the wall. Stuck behind the crowd, Dub climbed up on the bench and Paddy stepped up next to him.

  As the focal point of a crowd at silent attention, McGuigan looked around, savouring the moment. ‘Gentlemen, these are police officers.’ He flicked a hand at the uniformed officers and dropped his voice. ‘Something very sad has happened.’ He paused dramatically.

  The white-haired policeman stepped impatiently in front of him. ‘Listen to me,’ he shouted, his delivery loud and functional, a lorry to McGuigan’s sports car. ‘A body was found in the Clyde this morning. Sadly, we have good reason to believe it is that of Heather Allen.’

  Assuming a despairing suicide, a hundred guilty glances ricocheted around the room, many of them resting on Paddy, who was holding her breath. From the corner of her eye she saw Dub glare back at the accusers protectively.

  ‘We believe that the young lady was murdered,’ bellowed the officer, drawing all eyes back to him. ‘Her car was found outside Central station and we are asking for your help. If anyone has any information they think is relevant, please come to us. Do not wait for us to come to you.’

  Determined to carve a portion of the attention for himself, McGuigan stepped in front of the policeman. ‘I have assured the officers that you will co-operate, and let me say this: woe betide anyone who doesn’t.’ Reading his audience’s faces he realized that threats were not appropriate. He tried to soften them with a laugh, but it died on his lips.

  Several people crossed their arms. Someone muttered ‘fucking arse’. The white-haired officer stepped in front of McGuigan again. They seemed to be very slowly working their way across the room.

  ‘We have set up interview rooms downstairs. Rooms 211 and 212.’ The officer glanced at McGuigan for confirmation. ‘We’ll be taking some of you down there for interview.’ He took a tiny black notepad out of his pocket and opened it. ‘Can we have Patricia Meehan and Peter McIltchie first.’

  Paddy stepped down from the bench, finding her knees wobbly with shock, and worked her way out to the front of the room, meeting Dr Pete in front of the white-haired policeman. Around them the crowd of journalists and editors moved away, whispering about them and Heather’s terrible end.

  Two news men darted up for a few words with the police officer and caused McGuigan to raise his hands and address the room again. ‘Oh, yes, of course we will be reporting on this, but we’ll be doing it in co-operation with the police. We will, however, be withholding some information strategically, and all stories will go through the news editors to make sure that is done consistently.’ He smiled, stretching his baggy purple lips to their maximum, pleased to have had the last word. Everyone was listening to him but no one was letting it show.

  Paddy and Dr Pete waited while the white-haired officer gave urgent orders to one of his underlings about doors or watching doors or something. McGuigan, keen to get back on a cheery footing with the senior officer, said something to him about getting his own back over a game of golf. The man didn’t answer him.

  Paddy couldn’t take it in: Heather was dead. Someone had killed her. Dr Pete was sweating, his top lip and forehead damp, and he seemed to be tensing his shoulder in an odd way, as if he had fallen over on it. One of the younger policemen, a squat-faced man with a thick neck, nodded hello to him. Pete tipped his head back to acknowledge the greeting but flinched at the sudden movement, holding his shoulder, nodding briskly wh
en the man asked him if he was all right. He looked guilty of something terrible, and Paddy knew why. She wanted to run down to the Press Bar and get him a drink, but didn’t think the police would let her. He held his arm and shifted his weight, moving himself out of the group and nearer to Paddy.

  ‘Why do they want to talk to you?’ she said quietly. ‘I know why me, but why you?’

  ‘I’m an easy press.’ He sounded breathless. ‘I know one of the officers. Drank with his father.’

  ‘Plus you always know what’s going on.’ She sounded like an arse-lick because she was avoiding stating the obvious: that Pete was the bully-in-chief, the head of the pack that had hounded Heather from her job. The police would ask him if the news-room boys had gone any further than chasing her out of the office, if they had followed her home and killed her.

  ‘You.’ The white-haired officer turned back and pointed at Paddy without any preliminaries. ‘You go with him. McIltchie, if you don’t mind, you’re with me. How are you?’ ‘Aye. Going on.’ Pete dabbed at the sweat on his top lip. Pete and Paddy stayed close to each other as they were escorted out to the lifts they were never allowed to use. She guessed he was about three whiskies short of normal.

  ‘Not be long,’ said Paddy as the doors slid open in front of them.

  ‘Better not be. I’m melting.’

  Inside the lift the mirrored walls exaggerated the officers into a small, unfriendly brigade. Paddy was a full head shorter than everyone else. She was lost in a forest of torsos. One floor down the lift doors opened and they spilled out into editorial.