The Field of Blood (3 page)

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.”

“Okay.”

Paddy walked briskly through the newsroom, 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 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 printmen 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 building 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. Outside, a queue of Daily News delivery vans were backed up, 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 he 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 shriveling 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.

Farquarson spotted Paddy standing outside the door and snapped his fingers at her, telling her to go and get the clippings. She watched for another moment, yearning for a taste of the glory, not knowing that JT and Farquarson were discussing a development in the Baby Brian case that would tear her cozy life apart forever.

It was four-thirty and the last slice of sun was perched on the horizon, the failing yellow light oozing through the dirty windows on the upper deck. In the back three rows teenage boys kicked at one another while diffident girls smoked and smirked and pretended not to watch.

Paddy sat alone, surreptitiously eating from a plastic tub. The three cold boiled eggs had been sitting in her bag in the hot office all day, and the texture was alternately rubbery and clay dry. All she had to chase away the aftertaste was a sour quartered grapefruit. She’d have the black coffee when they got back from the chapel. The diet had been scientifically worked out in America: three boiled eggs, grapefruit, and black coffee three times a day would build up into a chemical reaction that actually burned off fat at a rate of six pounds a week, guaranteed. She projected forwards to her goal weight. In just one month she could tell Terry Hewitt to go and take a flying fuck to himself. She imagined herself with an unspecified but better haircut, standing in the Press Bar, dressed in that size ten green pencil skirt she had optimistically bought from Chelsea Girl.

“Actually, Terry, I’m not fat anymore.”

It wasn’t very witty. It had the essence of what she wanted to say but didn’t sound very real.

“D’you know, Terry, on balance, I’d say you’re fatter than me now.”

Better, but still not very good. If the journalists heard her say that, they’d know she cared about her weight and she’d never hear the end of it.

“Terry, you’ve got a face like two buckets banging together.”

That worked. Paddy smirked to herself. She’d wear the green miniskirt, pointy-toed winklepickers, and a tight black crewneck pullover. An unforgiving outfit. She’d need to be really slim to wear that. She only ever wore black pencil skirts with woolly tights and sweaters baggy enough to cover her lumps and bumps.

Paddy knew she was fat before Terry Hewitt commented on it— she wouldn’t have attempted the disgusting Mayo Clinic Diet otherwise— but it hurt that her weight was the only thing he had noticed about her. The Scottish Daily News was a fresh audience, and without seventy-odd relatives preceding her she felt she could be anyone. She didn’t want to be the clever fat girl again in this new incarnation.

Finishing the last piece of grapefruit, she put the soft plastic lid back on the tub, dropping it into her bag, and cautioned herself: there’d be a lot of food when they got back from the chapel, mounds of cheese sandwiches, hot salty sausage rolls, rough-cut gammon on soft plain bread spread with chips of hard butter. She’d better avoid physical proximity to them if she was to stick to her diet. Nor should she approach the iced rings or moist coconut snowballs or jammy biscuits or butterfly cakes or the arctic roll. She was salivating wildly as a talon hand clutched her shoulder.

“You’re wee Paddy Meehan, eh?” The voice sounded like a man’s but for a single strain in the timbre.

Paddy turned around to face a woman with a face like a dried chamois. “Oh, hello, Mrs. Breslin. Are ye going to Granny Annie’s laying-in?”

“Aye.”

Mrs. Breslin had worked with Paddy’s mother in the Rutherglen Cooperative when they were both first out of school. She had seven children of her own, five boys and two girls, all of whom were considered a little bit scary by the other young people of the area. The Breslin kids were rumored to be responsible for the fire that burned down the Salvation Army Hall’s shed.

Mrs. Breslin lit a cigarette from the stub of her last one. “God rest her soul, wee Granny Annie.”

“Aye,” said Paddy. “She was a lovely woman, right enough.”

They avoided each other’s eye. Granny Annie wasn’t lovely, but she was dead and it would be wrong to say otherwise. Mrs. Breslin nodded and said Aye, right enough, so she was, God rest her.

“I hear you’re a journalist now?”

“Not a journalist,” said Paddy, pleased at the mistake. “I run messages at the Daily News. I’m hoping to become a journalist, though, one day.”

“Well, lucky you. I’ve got four out of school now, and not one of them can get work. How did you get that? Did someone put in a word for ye?”

“No, I just phoned up and asked if they were taking on. I’d done articles for the school paper and that. I gave them some things I’d written.”

Mrs. Breslin sat forward, her smoke-stinking breath smothering Paddy as effectively as a cushion. “Are they taking on now? Could you put in a word for my Donal?”

Donal carried a knife and had been giving himself tattoos since he was twelve.

“They’re not taking on anymore.”

Mrs. Breslin narrowed her eyes and turned her head away a fraction. “Fine,” she said spitefully. “Help me up. We’re there.”

Mrs. Breslin was fatter than Paddy remembered. Her shoulders and face were deceptively slim, but her buttocks were fantastically large: the shoulders of her pale green raincoat were halfway down to the elbows to accommodate her shape. Paddy watched down the narrow stairwell as Mrs. Breslin slammed from side to side while the bus took a corner, and wondered if she herself would be that fat after seven children, or as oblivious to the truth of what her kids were like.

The bus stopped in the middle of the street, blocking the traffic. Paddy helped Mrs. Breslin down the steep step to the road, leading her across the still traffic, snaking through the smoking cars.

Every Catholic in the neighborhood was wearing black and converging outside Granny Annie’s tiny council house. They climbed out of cars, walked around corners, came down the Main Street. Smoke and icy breath rose like steam from cattle as the frosty black tarmac glittered silver around them.

Fifty yards up the side street Mrs. Breslin saw someone she was more annoyed at than Paddy and went over to spoil their day.

Looking out for Sean’s flattop, Paddy waved to cousins across the road and accidentally caught the distant eye of Mrs. McCarthy, an overemotional neighbor who cried with joy whenever she saw Paddy. Mrs. McCarthy had done an unrequested month-long novena before Paddy’s interview at the Daily News and subsequently felt she had a claim on her, having effectively snagged her the job. Mrs. McCarthy mouthed “Thank God,” and Paddy nodded stiffly, grateful for the hand reaching for hers. Sean Ogilvy, tall and dark with ninety-degree shoulders, dipped at the knee and gathered Paddy’s hand into his.

“Bloody hell. I met stinky Mrs. Breslin on the bus, and then Mrs. McCarthy saw me. I got caught by bloody Matt the Rat last night and had to have the whole Paddy Meehan conversation again.”

“You used to love talking about that Paddy Meehan case.”

“Well, I’m bored of it now.” She avoided his eye and looked around the crowd, seeing that a lot of her own extended family were there. “I’m sick of knowing everyone and everyone knowing me.”

“Why aren’t you interested in Paddy Meehan anymore? I thought you were going to try and interview him.”

“Ye grow out of things, though, ye know?” she said uncomfortably. “I don’t care about that anymore.”

“Please yourself.” He pulled off one of Paddy’s woolly red gloves, tucking it into her duffel coat pocket, and slid his hot hand around her bare skin, making the peace. “I thought you’d be interested to meet him, after knowing so much about the whole story and following it for so long.”

“He’s just a fat old man now.” She tutted and looked away. “He drinks in the town. All the wasters at work know him. I can’t be annoyed with it.”

“Well, well, well,” Sean said, squeezing her hand playfully. “Don’t get shirty with me about it.”

They smiled at the silly turn of phrase and stood pressing their shoulders together, looking at the crowd but thinking about each other. Paddy’s breath felt warmer when Sean was with her. She felt thinner and taller and funny suddenly because he loved her and they were promised to each other.

The undertakers were bringing the coffin out of the house. A respectful hush descended on the mourners. Those having conversations too urgent to abandon lowered their voices. The chief undertaker took his place at the head of the procession and the hearse began its glide down the quiet street, gathering the crowd in its wake. They formed in the natural order of family, then friends, followed by neighbors and pals from chapel, until a hundred and fifty people were behind the car. Sean’s mother and brothers were up front, but he held back, squeezing Paddy’s hand tight. She saw him blinking hard, and the tip of his nose darkened as he struggled for breath. At eighteen, Sean was as tall as a man and his voice was deep, but sometimes under all the bluster she saw the sweet boy she met at school, before his growth spurt made him six foot one, before working for Shug gave him those shoulders.

The hearse took a right, turning into the Main Street, and the line of mourners braced themselves, standing taller, pulling the small children into the center. The chat got louder, as if they were trying to swell the numbers. It was a tense time for a Catholic procession: Pastor Jack Glass was giving speeches all over the city about the whore of Rome, and the troubles over in Ireland were ferocious. A Republican woman MP had been shot in her home in front of her child, and prisoners in the Maze were starting a second hunger strike to demand political status. A demonstration in support of the men had been organized, and everyone knew there was going to be trouble. Whenever feelings ran high in the six counties, Glasgow teetered on the edge of the violence. As the nearest foreign city to Belfast, just over a hundred miles away across the Irish Sea, Glasgow was the traditional place of exile for Unionists who had lost their position but were too contentious to kill off. They drank in Dennistoun pubs and held raffles for the cause back home. Rogue Republicans got the better deal and were exiled to America.