by Denise Mina
‘No,’ he said. ‘I wasn’t just boasting about the car. I meant, d’you want to come to Barnhill with me and have a look? I’m busy tomorrow, but we could go on Friday after work.’ She hesitated. Valentine’s Day fell on the Saturday and she would want to stay in on Friday waiting for Sean’s reconciliatory call.
‘I could do with the protection,’ he continued. ‘It’s a bit rough up there and I’m a lover not a fighter.’
It was the first time Paddy had ever heard a Glaswegian man admit openly that he couldn’t beat anyone in a fight at any time.
‘You’ll need protection. It’s a bit grim up there. Could you make it Saturday afternoon instead?’
‘Excelente,’ Terry said, toasting her with his mug. ‘If we work well together maybe we could do a couple of paragraphs about the hunger strikers’ march as well.’ The march was due to take place on Saturday and everyone in Glasgow knew there was going to be trouble. If they had been talking to each other Trisha would have forbidden her to go. ‘You could bring your Papish eyes and tell me what you see.’
‘How do you know I’m a Pape?’
‘Is Patricia Meehan your undercover name?’
‘No, my undercover name’s Patricia Elizabeth Mary Magdalene Meehan.’
He grinned. ‘Mary Magdalene?’
‘My confirmation name,’ she explained. ‘You get to choose a saint you like or want to emulate.’
‘You wanted to emulate a prostitute?’
She shook her head. ‘I didn’t know what she did for a living. She was the only woman with a job.’ They smiled at each other. ‘Saturday’s fine.’
‘During the day,’ she said, in case he thought she meant anything by it. ‘Great,’ he said.
She made up an elaborate lie: she would meet him, but she had urgent business in town on Saturday and could only meet him at the far end of King Street, at a bus stop which was far enough away from the paper to ensure they wouldn’t be seen together. Terry flashed his smile at the table as she made the arrangement, knowing why she was doing it. Even the suspicion of spending free time with a man from the paper would be tantamount to civil death.
Outside the café the lunchtime buses rattled past, full of mums with young kids and students from the poly. Paddy looked up the quiet road and back at the café. It was in a siding to a main road and it didn’t have a hanging sign. It was well hidden from passers-by. She only knew about it because of the time Caroline was in Rotten Row having Baby Con.
‘How did you find me up here?’ she asked.
‘You come here a lot, don’t you? I’ve seen you.’
The words hung between them, as shocking as an inadvertent kiss on the lips, and Terry seemed suddenly flustered.
He punched her arm. ‘See you later, then,’ he said, and spun around, heading down the hill like an angry speedwalker.
25
Dr Pete’s Condition
I
The sun forgot to rise on Thursday. Outside the news-room windows the city was stuck in perpetual twilight, the sky darkened by a bank of thick black cloud. Every light in the news room blazed bright. It was two in the afternoon but it felt like a busy midnight shift, as if some great catastrophe had occurred in the dead of night, causing them all to be called back in to draw up a fresh edition.
Paddy was looking for Dr Pete to ask him about Thomas Dempsie. She had been all over the building, buzzing about on errands, excelling herself by doing three canteen runs in fifteen minutes. Keck warned her to slow down. Pete was nowhere and the pack of early-shift workers were lawless without him, laughing at underlings and drinking at their desks in full view of Father Richards and the editors. It was bad form for them to make their indolence so blatant: it would make it harder for Richards to take their side when the inevitable fresh dispute came up.
She was loitering on the back stairs, reading a page proof about a house fire at a party in Deptford, when she ran into Dub.
‘If you’re still looking for Dr Pete, I was down for Kevin Hatcher’s medicine. He’s sitting in the Press Bar alone. Called in sick apparently.’
‘Called in sick but he’s sitting in the bar?’
‘Yup.’
‘That’s a bit cheeky, isn’t it?’
‘Oh, yeah.’
She found Keck hanging around the sports desk and asked if she could kick off early because she’d stayed late on Monday. He told her to go, pleased to get rid of her: she was working so hard she was showing himself and Dub in a bad light.
The Press Bar smelled like a hangover. The sound of McGrade cleaning up the glasses after lunch echoed mournfully around the empty room. Dr Pete was sitting alone at the usual morning-boys table near the back with a crisp whisky and two half pints of bitter lined up in front of him. A read newspaper sat on the seat next to him, thumbed into a messy pillow. On his table a paper mat tanned with beer had been torn into fibrous strips and rearranged into a rudimentary jigsaw. Paddy could tell by the depth of cigarette ends in his ashtray that he had been there for some time.
He saw Paddy coming towards the table and sat up, dropping his eyes to the jigsaw, expecting her to give him a message. You’re on a warning, maybe, or never darken the news-room door again.
Paddy stood at the side of the table, taking cover behind a chair. ‘Hello.’
Pete looked up and frowned, dropping his bushy eyebrows to shade his eyes. ‘What do you want?’ ‘Um, I wanted to ask you about something.’
‘Spit it out and then piss off.’
It was not going to be a Love Is … moment, she just knew it. ‘I wanted to ask you about the Thomas Dempsie murder case. I read some clippings of the articles you wrote.’
Pete looked up at her and something, possibly a warm thing, flashed at the back of his misery-scarred eyes. He turned the whisky glass in front of him with a slow hand and lifted it, throwing the whisky to the back of his throat and swallowing. He didn’t even give the customary little gasp afterwards; he might have been drinking tea. Running a grey tongue along the front of his teeth, he put down the glass.
‘Sit, then.’
Paddy did as she was told but kept her chair away from the dirty table, pulling the edges of her duffel coat around her lap. Still spinning the empty glass, Pete smiled to himself, his eyes surprisingly warm.
‘Hide your distaste, woman. You’ll have to sit at dirty tables with drunk old men if you want to work in papers.’
‘I’m scared.’
‘Why?’
She wasn’t sure how to say it. ‘You’re a bit brutal sometimes.’
‘Only with an audience.’ He looked at her for a moment and went back to spinning his glass. ‘I’m a show-off. My audience are suspicious of kindness.’
‘Yeah, that’s the trouble with working here. Everyone’s a cynic.’
His eyes softened. ‘We’re all heartbroken idealists. That’s what no-one gets about journalists: only true romantics get jaded. What do you want to know about Dempsie?’
She bent over her knees towards him. ‘Do you remember the case?’
Pete nodded slowly.
‘Baby Brian was taken on Thomas Dempsie’s anniversary. Whoever killed Thomas would be thinking about him then.’ She let it linger for a moment. ‘I know that,’ said Pete quietly.
It wasn’t the reaction she was expecting. ‘The boys were about the same age. Plus Thomas was found in Barnhill, half a mile from where the arrested boys live. It’s all tied in together.’
Pete sighed heavily and sat back in his chair. ‘Look,’ he said seriously, ‘I’m not sitting here with you three feet away and not even a drink in your hand. What will you have?’ ‘I don’t really drink.’
Pete looked sceptical. He raised a finger at McGrade, dropping the tip to point at Paddy. McGrade brought her over a half pint of sweet Heineken, a beer mat to sit it on and a stale cloth to wipe the t
able with. She had to shift her chair around the table to get away from the smell, coincidentally moving closer to Pete. He nodded approvingly and gestured to her drink. She took a sip and found it tasted nicer than she expected, like ginger beer but more refreshing. Pete looked at how much she had taken and nodded approvingly when he saw it was a quarter gone.
Paddy leaned across the table. ‘Doesn’t that seem strange to you that there are so many similarities between Baby Brian and Dempsie?’
He shrugged carelessly. ‘You see everything at least twice if you stay in this game long enough. It all comes around again. Same things again and again. It doesn’t mean they’re related to each other.’
‘It’s too much of a coincidence.’
Pete picked a string of stray tobacco from his lip. ‘Every year, usually just before Christmas, a woman in Glasgow is stabbed to death by her man.’
‘That’s not that unusual,’ said Paddy.
‘With a bit of broken window. They fight, a window gets broken and he stabs her with a bit of the glass. Every single year it happens in the same way. It doesn’t make sense that it happens then, but it does. Every year. It’s a cycle. It’s inevitable. You see patterns when you work for long enough. In the end, nothing’s new.’
‘I’d like to know what happened back then.’ Pete moved the empty whisky glass to the side, pulling the first beer glass to him. ‘Dempsie was a big story. The coverage was huge. The Moors murders were relatively fresh in people’s minds and the child was so young, sweet kid – good pictures, ye know?’
‘How come you got all the interviews with Tracy Dempsie? Were you assigned them?’
‘No, I doorstepped her. I found out the address and waited outside, in the rain, for three hours until she let me in.’ He raised an eyebrow. ‘I really cared in those days. That surprises you, doesn’t it?’
It didn’t, but Paddy nodded to be polite. ‘Was Alfred there when you interviewed her?’
‘Yeah, he was there. I saw him with his other kid, the older one.’
‘His stepson?’
‘Yeah. He didn’t like that boy, it was obvious, but he loved his son, the wee one. He was torn apart.’
‘Is there a chance he did it?’
‘Oh, Dempsie was innocent.’
Pete’s chin hardened a little. He lifted his glass of beer, raising his eyes as someone came in. She turned back to see Father Richards standing at the door, looking over at him, furious. Dr Pete stared back, daring Richards to come over and make him care, but Richards ordered a drink and sat down at the far end of the bar.
‘No-one really believed Dempsie’d done it but it had been four months and no conviction. They needed someone. He didn’t have an alibi and these things have a life of their own. The only person who half believed he was the killer was Tracy. She tried to sell her story after he was convicted but no-one would buy. That was then, of course. They’d buy it now.’
‘I heard the Yorkshire Ripper’s wife got ten grand.’
‘I heard twenty.’ He drank the half pint of beer in one tip of the glass, put the empty on the table and looked suddenly younger. He licked his lips, managing a playful eye roll. ‘Different days. Back then there were about three crime reporters working the city. We could go for a pint together and just decide to leave things alone if we wanted. It’s a different game now. It’s all circulation wars and young bucks. They’d cut the arse off their own mother for a byline. It was about finding the truth and checks and balances when I was starting out.’
‘Woodward and Bernstein and Ludovic Kennedy?’ He winked at her. ‘Exactly, wee hen. Exactly. We were a proud people back then. Not like now.’ He gestured around the room. ‘A troop of whores.’
Paddy smiled. She was enjoying herself, surprised that he was such good company. He had hardly even sworn at her and was going to the trouble of making her feel as if they were in the same business, instead of being a big brainy journalist and a daft wee copyboy.
‘The woman,’ said Paddy, ‘Tracy. What did you make of her?’
‘Ah, Tracy. Walking wounded, one of life’s casualties. She was loyal to Alfred until he was taken in for questioning and then she wanted to drop the dime on him. I don’t know what she was like before the baby died but when I met her she was all over the place, mad with grief. She’d have said anything the police wanted her to say, they only had to ask. She gave them an excuse to arrest him. Told them he wasn’t really home when he said he was, cut an hour out here and there.’
‘How do you know that? Did the police tell you?’
‘Aye, well, we were all on the case together. They became good friends, those coppers, we grew up together.’ He smiled at his drink. ‘It wasn’t a good thing, though: makes it harder to question a conviction if your pals won it. It takes an outsider to do that.’
‘Tracy can’t have been that soft. She left her previous man.’
‘I think Alfred Dempsie came and got her, which is different to leaving. Then we came and got Dempsie, and Dempsie killed himself.’ He raised his beer glass. ‘Large ones all round.’ He looked at Paddy’s glass and twitched the corners of his mouth down. ‘You’re not drinking. The news trade works on alcohol. You’d better learn if you’re as ambitious as you seem.’
She wasn’t halfway through her first drink yet but accepted another to please him and McGrade brought it over. She took a slurp and Pete checked the level in the glass again.
‘Not so good this time.’ She tried again.
‘Better,’ he said, lifting the fresh whisky nearer to his hand.
‘But if you all knew it was wrong, why was Dempsie in prison for five years before he killed himself? Why didn’t anyone question the conviction?’
‘Weight of evidence. Heavy-handed policing. They’d planted everything on him to get the conviction. You can overturn one bit of evidence, but not three or four. Then it hints at police corruption and the courts don’t want to get into that.’ He nodded at her. ‘See, there was only one bit of evidence planted in the Meehan case.’
‘I know.’
‘The paper from the Rosses’ safe found in Griffiths’ pocket after he was shot. You interested in Paddy Meehan?’ ‘A bit.’
‘I know him, by the way, if you want to meet him.’ It was a bit sudden; Paddy didn’t have her defences up. ‘Oh,’ she said, ‘no. No, not really.’
‘He’s a tricky bastard. Always annoyed. Not unreasonably, I suppose.’
‘I heard that.’
Pete bellowed in a rich baritone: ‘Are you going to talk to me?’
Startled, Paddy sat up before she realized that he was talking to someone behind her. Richards was walking towards them, his face thunderous.
‘You’re wasting your time, Richards. I don’t give a monkey’s any more.’
‘You phoned in sick,’ Richards sneered. ‘And then coming in here? What’s wrong with you?’
‘Liver cancer.’Pete drank down his beer and set the empty glass to the side. ‘I’ve got cancer.’
A horrible hush descended on the room. Paddy could see Richards processing the information, thinking it over, wondering whether Dr Pete would dare lie about something like that. ‘Balls.’
‘I got the word yesterday and this bar is where I want to be.’
Richards paused momentarily and then backed off, walking slowly back to his seat at the bar, checking Pete over his shoulder to see if he was joking. Everyone in the bar pretended they hadn’t heard him and turned the pages in their papers or placed their glasses back on tables, muffling the silence.
When they were left alone, Paddy thought she should say something. ‘That must have been a blow.’
‘It’s one way to get the word out, eh?’ Pete looked at his drink and nodded dreamily. ‘This bar,’ he said slowly, ‘I like this bar.’
McGrade scurried over with a fresh round of drinks from Richa
rds who stayed far away and nodded to them both. Paddy looked at her new half pint. She had three glasses in front of her and hadn’t finished the first one yet.
‘Those Baby Brian Boys,’ said Pete, trying to get back to the conversation they were having before the bomb, ‘the police’ll get a conviction. They’ll have to.’
‘Could they have planted evidence on the Brian Boys?’ Pete curled his lip. ‘I’d put money on the evidence being good. If you know how to watch for the pattern, planted evidence only comes out weeks later, when they’re getting frustrated. They don’t start off with a plant in a big case. They might put corroborating evidence down, though. It goes on more than you think.’
The bar was starting to fill up. Behind Pete a man passed on his way to the toilet, undoing his fly before reaching the door. She didn’t belong here and wanted to leave. She lifted her sleeve and carefully checked her watch as a preliminary move.
Pete spoke quietly. ‘Please don’t go.’
‘But I need—’
‘If you go, Richards’ll come over here. It’s been a long day and it’s hard work being pitied.’
So they sat together, a man facing the end of his life and a young girl struggling to kick-start hers. They drank together and then Paddy started smoking with him. Cigarettes and drink complemented each other perfectly, she discovered, like white bread and peanut butter. She drank an all-time personal best of four half pints.
They talked about anything that came to mind, their thoughts swimming sympathetically but barely connecting. Paddy told him about the Beatties’ stuff in the garage, about how she’d always hated it when she saw the Queen’s picture up in offices because of what she represented. She always saw her smiling and handing out OBEs to the soldiers who shot into the crowd on Bloody Sunday, but she’d looked at the Beatties’ portrait of her and thought she might actually be quite a nice woman, doing her best. She talked about her Auntie Ann who raised money for the IRA with raffle tickets and then went on antiabortion marches.