Field of Blood

by Denise Mina

  Voices approached her through one of the closed doors and she turned to see it open. A bald policeman was accompanying one of the women from Personnel, crying behind her thick-lensed glasses, her faraway eyes pinpricks of red regret. The officer patted her elbow and muttered empty words of comfort.

  ‘I don’t want tae—’ She broke off, kneading a cotton hankie into a flat plane and blowing her nose into it.

  The impatient officer pushed the crying woman by the upper arm out into the corridor, swinging her around the corner towards the lifts. The woman turned and crossed the doorway, still sniffling and covering her mouth with her handkerchief as she made her way towards the back stairs. He watched her double back and looked puzzled.

  ‘We’re not allowed to use the lifts,’ explained Paddy. He shook his head, looking at her for the first time. ‘Who are you?’

  ‘Paddy Meehan.’ She felt as if she’d done something wrong but couldn’t think what it might be. ‘You were asking for me upstairs? I just got in.’

  He didn’t look pleased to see her and glanced back at someone sitting at the table. It was Patterson, the squat faced bully from yesterday. Patterson looked a little flushed when he saw it was her.

  ‘Got any more brilliant ideas for us?’

  ‘I’ll go away if you want.’

  The bald officer stepped aside to let her in, glancing behind her into the corridor to make sure there wasn’t a queue forming.

  The policemen had clearly been there all morning: four big white tea mugs from the canteen were drained and drip stained, red and gold wrappers from caramel log biscuits were folded into interesting shapes on one side of the table, rolled up into tight little balls on the other.

  Patterson stood up as Paddy approached, pulling out a seat for her, managing to make her feel that she had let everyone down by not already being in the chair. The sheet of paper in front of his seat had diagrams on it drawn in biro, circles joined and overlapping with lines scored between them, retraced over and over. On a separate sheet, a long list of names was illegibly written in longhand, some with ticks, some with crosses next to them.

  ‘So ...’ Patterson slid into his seat and looked her up and down as if he’d heard something about her. He left the moment hanging in the air between them.

  ‘What did you want to see me for?’ she asked flatly, determined to be more wily than she was yesterday.

  ‘We want to ask you about the radio car and the night you and Heather were supposed to go out in it. What happened?’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Weren’t you both supposed to be going?’

  ‘She dropped out.’

  ‘Why?’

  Paddy thought about it for a moment. They were after McVie. ‘Dunno. She couldn’t be bothered. She didn’t think there was a story in it.’

  Patterson nodded and hummed, tapping his rough diagram with his pen. ‘Right?’ He rolled out his bottom lip and nodded softly, as if he was seriously considering the possibility. ‘See, I heard that Heather thought McVie had a thing about her.’

  Paddy tutted and shook her head. ‘D’you know how many men she thought had a thing about her? Every man in here, and she was mostly right. McVie’s harmless; he didn’t mean anything by it.’

  ‘Is he a letch?’

  Paddy laughed alone for a moment. ‘How long have you been in this building? They’re all letches. The print room’s wallpapered in pornography. Most of them can’t hold a conversation with a woman without staring at her chest. If letching was a concern you’d need to instigate a policy of internment for the entire paper.’

  The officers looked at her for a telling moment. Only someone from a Republican background would use a loaded word like internment. She knew it was still rare for a Catholic to work in a middle-class profession like the papers, or even the police. Paddy was a new generation and had never knowingly suffered anti-Catholic discrimination, but she still enjoyed the status of political underdog. She squared her shoulders and looked Patterson straight in the eye, raising an eyebrow, embarrassing him into continuing.

  ‘So you went out in the radio car,’ he said, four hundred years of bloodshed lying unacknowledged between them. And what happened?’

  She shrugged. ‘Nothing. We went on a couple of calls, a suicide and a gang fight in Govan. It was interesting.’

  ‘What day was it?’

  ‘Monday, last week.’

  He made a note of it in one of his interconnecting bubbles. ‘Now, think carefully: did Heather know anyone who lived in Townhead?’

  ‘Townhead? I don’t think so. She was posh.’

  ‘She never mentioned anyone to you? A friend, someone she might go up there to see?’ ‘No. Why?’

  ‘Any idea why she would go up there last Thursday evening?’

  It was the same night Paddy had been there after visiting Tracy Dempsie. She was glad she hadn’t bumped into Heather; she didn’t know what she would have said.

  ‘I don’t know why she was up there,’ she told Patterson. ‘It’s bound to be something to do with Baby Brian.’

  ‘“Bound to be”? You seem very sure about her motives.’

  He had that spark in his eye. He was going for her again, but this time she was ready.

  ‘What’s your problem with me?’ she said angrily. ‘Why’re you always picking on me?’

  Patterson looked a little bit startled. ‘I’m simply asking questions.’

  ‘And I’m simply answering them.’ She had frightened him and she was pleased.

  ‘Fine.’ Patterson stood up and pulled at the back of her chair. ‘That’s all. Get out.’

  She stood up. ‘You are a rude wee bastard.’

  ‘Out, or I’ll arrest you for breach.’

  Paddy looked at his bald colleague, who affirmed with an incline of his head that Patterson was mad enough to do it and she should go while she could.

  Patterson pointed at the door. ‘We’ll come for you again if we need you.’ He waved her out into the corridor and shut the door firmly in her face, giving it a little extra tug as if to stop her getting back in.

  She called the door a dickhead, but it gave her no relief.

  On the back stairs she picked up a new edition from the stack and locked herself in the toilets on editorial. For ten minutes she sat there staring blankly at the back of the door, sweating softly. Heather seemed very dead now. They could have met that night. Heather might even have been in Townhead at Thomas Dempsie’s house, she could have found the clippings herself, she was brighter than she seemed sometimes. Paddy lit a cigarette and inhaled deep into her lungs to wake herself up. The nicotine hit her system, firing up her nerves and making the back of her skull throb.

  She looked at the paper. The black-bordered photograph of Heather on the front page was a formal, posed picture. She was very pretty: she had a dainty little button nose and nice teeth, and her hair was as thick as possible without being coarse. Paddy remembered unravelling long, golden threads from her fingers outside the news room. It occurred to her that the editors must have been kicking themselves for using the proprietorial approach with Baby Brian when they could have used it almost justifiably with Heather. She had gone from being an outcast to the beloved daughter of the Daily News in less than a week.

  On the inside pages Heather’s mother spoke of her heartbreak, highlighting all that was best in Heather’s life: her academic ability, her kindness, her sense of humour and her three Duke of Edinburgh awards. She asked why anyone would want to snuff that out, as if the murderer had, Godlike, given due weight to every deed Heather had ever done, judged her and decided to kill her anyway. The mother was photographed outside the Allens’ enormous Georgian house looking exhausted and angry.

  On the opposite page a kidney victim (31) was trying to raise money for a dialysis machine by holding a sponsored tea party. The Evil
Baby Brian Boys were still being investigated. Their old school was pictured, a photo of the empty playground in an eerie light with sweetie wrappers and crisp packets floating around, the debris of a hundred packed lunches. It mentioned that the school was Roman Catholic twice in the text and once below the picture.

  Paddy looked at the picture of Heather again. They had been kicking around Townhead on the same evening. If Paddy had met her she might still be alive. Maybe they would have had a fight and made up and Heather would have invited her along to the Pancake Place to meet a contact. But they wouldn’t have made up and Heather would never have shared a contact or an advantage if she could help it.

  Paddy dropped the cigarette between her legs and into the toilet bowl, folded her paper neatly and went up to the clippings library.

  II

  Helen was off sick, they said, with a head cold, and Paddy was glad of it. The other librarians were difficult and rude but she knew they’d give her what she wanted. The woman serving her was Sandy, Helen’s right hand in the library. Sandy was secretly a very pleasant, helpful woman, but it was a side of her personality she only got to show when Helen wasn’t there to tut at it.

  Paddy told her that the police had requested any grey slips filled out by Heather Allen in the last week and a half. ‘Slips?’

  ‘Yeah, what clippings she requested in the last week or so. They want me to take them down to them.’ Sandy bit her lip. ‘God, isn’t it awful sad?’ ‘It’s her family I feel for,’ said Paddy.

  ‘I know, I know.’ She opened a drawer beneath the counter and pulled out a foolscap file marked ‘A’, searching through it with nimble fingers. ‘Nothing in the last week. But she’d a lot of stuff two weeks before that.’ She pulled out the sheets and flipped through them. ‘Yes, I remember those ones. All about Sheena Easton and Bellshill.’ She pulled them out of the file and sat them on the counter. ‘She was writing an article.’

  ‘But nothing in the last week?’

  ‘Nothing for two weeks.’

  ‘Oh, and Farquarson wants any clippings on an old case.’ Paddy tried to look nonchalant. ‘Thomas Dempsie. It’s an old murder. Some of them’ll be under Alfred Dempsie.’

  *

  The afternoon was busy and Paddy didn’t get the chance to read the clippings before she went home. She left them hidden in a drawer in the photographers’ office, underneath the picture editor’s portfolio, knowing they would be safe there.

  On the train home she leaned her head against the window and imagined Heather up in Townhead on the same night as her, asking questions and banging on doors. She might have met Kevin McConnell as well, but Paddy didn’t think so. He wouldn’t have wasted time flirting with Paddy if Heather had been there.

  The house was a husk. They had now been ignoring her for nearly a week, and Mary Ann couldn’t say when it would end. The silence had hardened from a sorrowful quiet to a bitter sneer. Marty smirked straight at her when they passed each other on the stairs; Trisha no longer served her careful dinners but dished up carelessly over-boiled potatoes and unsalted soup; and her father and brothers stayed out as much as possible.

  Things were getting worse, but Paddy had come to enjoy the solitude and silence of it. It left swathes of space in her head and across these great prairies she stumbled from Thomas Dempsie to the layout of Townhead and the railway in Steps where Baby Brian had been found. The elements were there, she was sure, but her unpractised mind couldn’t tease sense from them.

  She sat in her bedroom looking out of the window at the garden, watching the steam from the washing machine curl up the outside wall. She imagined Sean sitting near her, just out of the scope of her vision. In her mind she reached back and touched him, comforting herself. He kissed her neck and floated off to another part of the house, leaving her warm and happy. She was getting used to being alone.

  23

  Bringing It All Back Home

  1968

  I

  It was a quiet Tuesday before Christmas and the department store was half empty. Meehan wiped the top of the glass cabinet with a yellow cloth, paying attention to his hands so that he didn’t drift off. He could get the boxes out from under the counter and change the order around–that would keep him busy. He was thirty-three years old and only just learning the rudimentary skiving skills everyone else knew by their fifteenth birthday.

  It was a parole job, to keep the board happy. It choked him, taking orders from wee Jonny, a fairy who wore hairspray and had twenty years on the shop floor, but Meehan’s father was dying of cancer and he couldn’t get revoked just now. He had never been much to the old man but he was determined to be there for him now. The old man had never been much to him, right enough. He couldn’t remember his father ever making him happy, or giving him time; mostly he was a figure feared in the house for random violence. He dreaded to think how his own kids would remember him.

  Jonny minced up to the counter. ‘May I assist?’ ‘I am looking for a pen to send as a gift to my friend in Germany.’

  Meehan hadn’t heard that accent since Rolf handed him over to the British Consulate. He turned and blurted, ‘Sind sie Deutsch?’

  The woman looked up, surprised and delighted, and stepped immediately along the counter to him.

  ‘Are you East German?’ Meehan asked.

  ‘Yes, I am,’ she said in crisp English. ‘I am from Dresden.’ Meehan looked into her sea-green eyes as she spoke but his attention was on the periphery. She was tall and blonde, dressed in an elegant leopard-skin coat with leather trim and matching belt, pulled tight to show off her slender waist. Her nails were painted beige and she was holding a pair of beige kid gloves that matched her handbag. She drew the gloves softly through her free hand, over and again. She looked too good for Glasgow, too good for the Lewis’s fountain pen counter, and it made him suspicious.

  Meehan had come to expect them. After George Blake escaped and they discovered the two-way radio in his cell, the Secret Service had come back to him, drilling him for the information he’d freely given them in West Berlin after Rolf handed him over. They moved him into solitary for three months with meals through the door, his only human contact periodic visits from the Service, alternately angry and calm, coaxing and threatening. They were convinced he was holding out. He couldn’t tell them that he had no loyalties, not to them and not to the East where the guards didn’t shake hands and Rolf could pretend to like him for a year and a half. Meehan’s only loyalty was to his mates and his family, and he didn’t even like most of them that much. They released him on parole, but followed him all the time. He often found well-dressed men watching the front of their house in the Gorbals high flats. A stranger had been seen using a key to get in and out of his mother’s house on a day when everyone else was at work. The telephone clicked loudly after they picked it up. If Meehan made an arrangement by phone an immaculate loner with a copper’s haircut would be sitting in the pub or club or café when he arrived, always reading a paper but never turning the page.

  The woman was a beauty though. Not police. Definitely Secret Service.

  ‘And how do you come to be in Glasgow?’ he asked her.

  ‘My husband is English, in the diplomatic service, and we are posted here.’ Her gaze slipped from his to the glass topped counter, and she added quietly, ‘His work is very secret.’

  It was clumsy and unsophisticated, but she wasn’t embarrassed – like Rolf when Meehan realized he despised him, not a flicker of shame. They all thought he was an idiot. He wanted to show her he knew, to say that he knew who she was and what she was there for, but she was gorgeous and there was just the faintest chance of touching her.

  He pointed at the pen in front of her. ‘Would you like to see one of these?’

  ‘No, thank you, I am simply looking with curiosity. Why is it the case that you speak German?’

  Meehan shrugged. ‘I lived there for a wh
ile.’ He would have said it was in the East to give them more to talk about, but he didn’t know where Rolf and his friends had kept him. ‘In Frankfurt.’

  ‘And yet your accent sounds from the East.’ She raised her perfect eyebrows.

  Meehan tried not to smile: he hadn’t said enough for her to hear his accent.

  ‘I do not know many German speakers here.’She touched her white blonde hair gently, drawing his eye to the intricacies of the colouring. ‘I find myself quite lonely.’

  Jonny looked at Meehan, pursing his lips approvingly. He moved away to the far edge of the counter, leaving them alone. Meehan took out some pens from under the counter and let her look at them, lifting them and putting them down again, stroking the tortoiseshell casing on one, smiling at the extra-large ink well on another. Their fingers touched once as he handed over a Cross with a calligraphic nib, his fingertip brushing her inner wrist. Her hand was as soft and warm as butter and he would have given up the job just to touch it with his lips. He began to perspire.

  She was a gorgeous twenty-five-year-old blonde, put together like a Miss World. Meehan knew what he looked like: he was five foot eight, acne-scarred and out of shape. Done up he wasn’t much of a prize, but wearing a cheap uniform blazer and standing behind a counter he must look a mess.

  ‘Well, it was very nice to meet you,’ she said, proffering a hand. ‘Perhaps I may come in again and talk with you in German?’

  ‘Das ware schön,’ he said, and took her hand, intending to shake it firmly but professionally. She put her pretty hand in his, her fingertips curling as she pulled away, stroking the full length of his palm and making his mouth water. She turned on her perfect heels and clip-clopped away.

  Jonny was at his elbow in a moment. ‘Patrick, you’re a hit with the ladies. I’d never have guessed. Is she coming back in? What was that ye said to her?’

  ‘She said she’d come back in.’ Meehan caught his breath. ‘And I said that would be lovely.’