The Field of Blood (44 page)

“I know.”

“I am entitled.”

“I know.”

Across the room, Dub scowled over at them from the bar.

“Is Dub gay, do you think?”

Terry watched her face curiously.

“You know, I really don’t think he is.”

Paddy looked up at the bar. Dub frowned at Terry again and took an angry draw on a cigarette. Beyond him, Pete was standing behind a wall of whisky drinkers, swaying slightly, his eyes shut. Dub glared over at them again. Paddy gave him a cheery little wave. He tipped his chin at her and flared his nostrils. Next to her, Terry cleared his throat loudly. It was getting a bit intense. Perplexed at what was going on, Paddy suddenly craved the calm of home. She patted her knees decisively.

“Well, I’m going to say good night to Pete.”

“’Kay.” Terry pressed his knee against hers and whispered, “Will I see you in tomorrow, wee Paddy Meehan?”

Embarrassed at the intimacy, Paddy smiled into her half-pint. “Mibbe’s aye,” she said, “and mibbe’s naw.” She stood up and walked away, wearing a soft smile to match Terry’s.

Halfway through the fog of men she bumped into McVie. Even he, the most mean-spirited man at the News, was drinking and enjoying the carnival atmosphere. He cornered her by the fag machine and tried to think of advice to give her, having enjoyed his moment in the chair when they were out in the calls car. He had not one morsel left and was rather drunk, so he gave her some slurred secondhand wisdom, passing it off as his own. Don’t take shit from anyone. Don’t buy things on hire purchase. Never back a horse called Lucky. Don’t go on holiday to Blackpool, it’s fucking horrible there.

By the time she got away from McVie, Pete was slumped in the corner, his eyes shut and his face slack. She had to fight her way through the whisky drinkers to get to him.

“Careful!” shouted one as she pushed past him, tipping his drink and making him spill a little whisky on the floor. He saw her going for Pete. “Don’t try to wake him up. He’s been in hospital, he needs his sleep.”

Paddy sat down next to Pete and slipped her fingers around his wrist. His pulse was still.

“He’s not asleep,” she said quietly.

“Yeah,” shouted one of the guys at the table. “He’s the king, man, he’s the fucking king. He’s had us in here since five o’clock.”

“He’s not asleep,” she whispered, taking Pete’s cold, lonely hand in hers and bringing it to her lips.

Paddy stood in the cold, pressing her hands into her pockets. Her warm, white sigh flowered and lingered in front of her.

Over the fence and through the window she could see the tops of their heads in the living room. Sean was sitting in one armchair, Con in the other, and they were watching the television news together. The light was on in Marty’s bedroom, and she could just discern the faint hum of a radio. Mary Ann would be having a bath. Trisha would be in the kitchen tending the food, warming plates ready for her return from work.

She told her feet to take her to the door, but she stayed, watching over the hedge, unwilling. Sean said something and Con nodded. Her parents didn’t know that they had split up. She wasn’t sure Sean had taken it in yet either, but it was nice that he was there. He wasn’t angry at her, anyway.

They’d go mad when they saw the bandage on her head, and now her eyes were raw from crying. She couldn’t tell them that her friend had died in a pub. She certainly couldn’t tell them about Garry Naismith.

She tried to think of a plausible lie that wouldn’t make her mum forbid her from going to work. She’d been mugged. No, that suggested danger in the town. There was a fight on the train— everyone took trains. A fight on the train, and she, cautious and careful, got up to get off and was hit on the head by a stray bottle. The train staff took her to hospital, but she was fine. The fighting men were arrested. One of them was fat. That sort of detail made it plausible. He had a Rangers football top on. They’d want to believe that.

The cold night nibbled at her face. Paddy saw a jagged frost forming on the leaves of the hedge. Custard-cream crumbs taking refuge in the seams of her pocket had worked their way under her fingernails. She felt Pete’s hands in hers again and promised herself that she’d never forget him or what he had done for her.

It was getting late. She dawdled reluctantly through the garden gate and stopped by the pile of bricks. She knelt down, her fingers feeling the mulchy ground for the key to the Beatties’ garage.

She’d have a smoke with the Queen and remember her friend Pete for a while before she went in.

AUTHOR’S NOTE

The Patrick “Paddy” Meehan portions of this novel are drawn from a real case. Paddy Meehan was a career safecracker who was found guilty of the high-profile murder of an elderly woman during a housebreaking. The case was a notorious miscarriage of justice in Scotland. Even after the real culprits had sold their story to a Sunday newspaper, it took a book by Ludovic Kennedy to prompt the reopening of the case and the royal pardon. The story told here is based largely on Meehan’s accounts in interviews and books and on those of his solicitor, Joseph Beltrami. Some facts have been conflated to make them read more clearly— for example, Griffiths hijacked a number of cars during his shooting spree. Only the emotional content is substantially fictionalized.

In the late eighties I interviewed Paddy Meehan. Neither of us wanted to be there. We were both trying to please my mum, Edith.

During a summer in the late eighties Edith was working as a manicurist in the Argyle Market, a ramshackle series of booths in a first-floor corridor off a main shopping thoroughfare in central Glasgow. At the same time, Paddy Meehan was selling his vanity-published book, Framed by MI5, at the bottom of the stairs that led up to the market. Edith’s nail booth was very classy: she wore a white uniform, had a desk and a sofa, and even had a working telephone installed. Meehan approached her and asked if he could receive important calls there because the Secret Service had bugged the public pay phone. Being a lady, she graciously agreed, but asked if he would return the favor by telling his story to her daughter. She would be interested, Edith said, because she was a law student. I actually wasn’t interested, I didn’t know anything about him or the case, and I had exams coming up, but my mum said I had to buy him a cup of tea.

The market canteen was deserted in the half hour before closing time. We were the only customers, and Meehan sat facing the door, watching over my shoulder. I was young and arrogant and in a hurry, and I only half listened to his story. He had told it so often that at times I think even he wasn’t listening, but he told it well and still got angry when he remembered prison and being mobbed in Ayr.

Afterwards I asked him to go over part of it again. He said he had been recruited into the communist underworld network by a shadowy figure named Hector who had first appeared when he worked in the shipyards. He bumped into him unexpectedly in London outside the embassy and now thought he was an agent provocateur from MI5, the UK Security Service. Although it appeared from his prison records that he had remained in Leicester Prison for a five-stretch, he actually escaped and ran away to the USSR. There he gave the Soviets information about prison layouts which they used to spring George Blake, a former officer for the Secret Intelligence Service (MI6) who had been caught spying for the Soviets. More incendiary than that, he claimed that he had warned MI5 about the method Blake used to escape. Either they failed to heed his warnings, he said, or they deliberately let Blake get away.

It sounded ridiculous to me. I told him I didn’t believe that MI5 would try to ensure his silence by framing him for a high-profile murder. He insisted, became agitated and flushed, and at one point almost tearful. I suddenly saw myself, an arrogant law student sitting in a dirty café correcting a red-faced old bloke about the narrative arc of his life.

Meehan insisted that his life made sense. He wasn’t prepared to accept that his life, like most eventful lives, was nothing but a series of comic mishaps and tragedies strung together in a meaningless pattern. Someone knew what was going on and had directed it all. In looking for a shadowy instigator, it seemed as though he was insisting that God existed.

We finished our tea and cigarettes and parted on a sour note. He blanked me for the rest of the summer. Every time I passed him at the foot of the stairs on my way up to visit my mum, he’d busy himself tidying the piles of books or look into the distance with narrowed eyes, pretending to spot an imaginary friend. I always said hello just to let him snub me.

As I’ve grown older I’ve come to realize that nothing silences an awkward truth more effectively than ridicule. His story was implausible enough to be true.

Meehan kept on telling his story. He told it to anyone he met.

He died of throat cancer in 1994.