Field of Blood

I

George McVie was not allowed to drive the calls car. He wasn’t even allowed to sit in the front seat next to Billy, because during one of their arguments he’d gone for the wheel and almost killed them both. Neither he nor Billy spoke to the other in the conventional sense. McVie grunted when he wanted to follow up a radio call; sometimes he shouted when he wanted Billy to call back to the office for a photographer; other than that they said nothing. They had been working nights together for five months and were ready to kill each other.

Billy, with his shoulder-length wet-look perm, was already in the car, tuning the radio and putting his fags on the dashboard, making sure he had change for the burger van. McVie, dressed in a crumpled raincoat and cheap acrylic pullover, stood by the car under a heavy gray sky.

“What d’you mean, she’s not coming?” He glowered across the roof of the car at Paddy with exhausted baggy eyes.

“She isn’t coming out in the calls car tonight, but I asked Farquarson and Father Richards, and they both said it would be fine if I come.”

She tried to smile, but he wasn’t buying it. He looked from her to the building, to the newsroom window and Farquarson’s office, as if expecting to see his boss there, standing at the window, laughing down at him while fucking Heather Allen himself.

“Farquarson said for me to come,” she repeated.

McVie looked at her again, just to be sure that Paddy was indeed as dumpy and not-Heather as he had originally thought. He tutted bitterly, leaning across the roof of the car to her. “Right, you, I’ve got a lot to do tonight. Don’t talk over the radio calls and stay in the car when we get anywhere. I’m not babysitting you all fucking night. Just fucking shut up and we’ll get on fine.”

Paddy stood back, exaggerating her astonishment. “Listen you to me. There is absolutely no call for that sort of rudeness. I’ve been perfectly polite to you, haven’t I?”

McVie glared at her.

“Haven’t I?” She was determined to make him say it. “Have I been polite to you?”

McVie shrugged grudgingly.

“You’re pig ignorant.” She opened the car door and got in.

She had never met Billy before, but he introduced himself, shaking her hand over his shoulder as he smiled at her in the rearview mirror, relishing the sound of someone else fighting with McVie.

They sat there for a moment while McVie fumed, slapping the roof of the car a couple of times. Each time Billy cheerfully waggled his eyebrows at Paddy in the mirror. Finally McVie yanked open the back door and climbed in next to Paddy, angrily pulling the tails of his mackintosh out from under his seat.

“What in the name of fuck does ‘pig ignorant’ mean?”

“You,” Paddy shouted back, sticking her finger in his face, “don’t know how to behave around people.”

Billy muttered amen to that and turned the key, starting the engine. The radio crackled into life, drowning out all hope of a continued dialogue, even a bawled one. They sat for a few minutes listening to long pauses and requests for police cars to go back to the station. Livid at being ganged up on, McVie kicked the back of the seat, and Billy pulled the car out into the street.

Paddy sat back and watched the dark city slip past the window, enjoying the rare sensation of being in a car. They passed by a rough pub in the Salt Market. Two drunk men were wrestling outside, one in a gray leather bomber jacket squeezing the throat of a man in a crombie overcoat, holding him tight in the crook of his elbow, his opponent frantically reaching back, grabbing air, feeling for his attacker’s face. Both men were too old for a dignified street fight, their bellies and stiff legs restricting their movements, turning it into a jerky, adamant dance. Behind them three other men leaned against the pub’s outside wall, watching the fight, detached, as if it were an audition. If Paddy had been standing at a bus stop the sight would have scared the life out of her, but she felt secure in the smart car and able to observe it, imagining herself as a journalist. She had dreamed of this since she was at school, ever since Paddy Meehan got his royal pardon because of the work of a campaigning journalist.

II

It was the first of their nightly rounds. Billy stopped the car in a broad street on the north side lined by industrial warehouses, and McVie got out, slamming the door behind him. His hand was on the door to the police station before he realized that Paddy was at his back.

“Bint, stay in the car.”

“Farquarson told me to go with you, so that’s what I’m doing.”

McVie sighed, shutting his eyes and pausing dramatically, as if being pleasant to Paddy was the hardest call of his life. He reached up and pulled open one of the double doors, leaving it to close in her face.

Inside she found herself in a waiting room with dirty plastic chairs arranged around the walls, some slightly soot-stained where a visitor had used a cigarette lighter on the underside and back. Cheerful posters on the walls carried warnings about pickpockets and burglaries and gas leaks. Two tired young men were slumped disconsolately on the chairs, waiting and waiting and waiting.

Seated behind a high desk was a middle-aged policeman, his pink skin blistered with acne. He dabbed at his neck with a tissue, touching a weeping spot just below his ear, while he wrote in a large black book tilted towards him on the desk.

“God,” Paddy said to McVie when she caught up with him at the desk, “you’re an awful curmudgeon.”

“Who’s a curmudgeon?” The duty officer looked up from his ledger.

“Him,” said Paddy, thumbing at McVie. “He’s a torn-faced misery.”

The officer smiled pleasantly and dabbed again, flinching slightly as the tissue touched open skin.

“What’s going on?” McVie nodded at the big black book on the high desk.

“Nothing. A couple of suicides. One a schoolgirl found in her school uniform in the Clyde. She’d failed her mock O Grades. The other…” He looked down the ledger, guiding his eye with his finger. “A guy hanged himself at Townhead.”

Paddy expected McVie to go for the suicidal schoolgirl. It was the obvious choice: an emotive and tragic story with spin-off articles about the pressure of exams, a grieving family who would almost certainly give a quote about how it was someone else’s fault, and a good excuse to print a picture of a girl in school uniform. McVie flipped open his pad. “Whereabouts in Townhead?”

The desk sergeant was surprised too and had to find the entry in the ledger with his finger again. “Kennedy Street, just an hour ago. Street suicide, hung himself off a lamppost.”

“What’s the name?”

The officer looked at the ledger again. “Eddie McIntyre, but he doesn’t live there. He did it outside a girlfriend’s house.” He ran his finger along the entry. “Her name’s Patsy Taylor.”

McVie wrote down the names and addresses. “Right, Donny, give me it straight. Are they here?”

The officer flinched, checking behind McVie, reassuring himself that the waiting men couldn’t hear. “I’m not answering on the record.” He hardly moved his lips. “What we don’t want is a repeat of last night.”

McVie nodded. “They going to charge them?”

Donny shrugged and nodded at the same time, dabbing the clear yellow liquid pooling on his neck.

“What’s the charge?”

Donny kept his lips tight. “Murder.”

McVie leaned into him. “What are the families like?”

“Hmm, aye, well, one- okay. Other one- Wild West,” he said, as if the sin of breaching a professional confidence could be tempered by using broken language.

McVie stepped back from the desk and smiled warmly at the sergeant. “Donny, you’re a pal.” He turned, heading for the car and forgetting to hate Paddy for the moment. “Let’s go.”

Paddy had her suspicions but waited until they were sitting in the backseat again. “Who is in there?”

McVie looked out of the window. “Never mind.”

She caught Billy’s eye in the mirror.

“The Baby Brian Boys,” Billy said, starting the engine.

It made them sound like a sinister jazz band. She knew immediately that the name would stick forever.

The street was dark, filled with deep, sharp shadows. As they pulled away Paddy looked up at the tiny cell windows, imagining a child up there in a cell alone with no one to stand up for him. It would have been a terrifying prospect for an adult.

She tried to make it sound casual. “Are they looking for the men behind it?”

“No.” McVie seemed sure. “If they were looking for a grown-up, they’d be charging them with conspiracy to commit murder, not murder.”

“How’s that different?”

“It means they weren’t the brains behind it, they’re not as culpable. In sentencing terms it’s a difference of about ten years.”

Paddy looked out the window and thought of Paddy Meehan being mobbed outside Ayr High Court. Someone had run out of the crowd and kicked him so hard on the shin that they drew blood. She wondered if the person who did that had felt ashamed when they heard that he was innocent.

They passed the brightly lit bus station. Billy was driving along a broad back road to Townhead, around the back of the bus station, skirting the shut and empty town.

“Why’re we going to this story, anyway?” Paddy asked. “The schoolgirl was a better story.”

Neither of them answered her.

Billy crossed at the lights and pulled into the housing scheme. Townhead was on a subtle hill between the city center and the motorway. They were good houses, built with quality materials on a small scale after the city planners had learned the lessons of the slum clearances. Its housing stock ran from individual houses with tiny gardens to low blocks of flats to four giant high-rises. The surrounding area was carefully landscaped into steep little green hills with trees on them, giving a false perspective, like a grand estate on a minigolf scale. Respectful residents looked after the area jealously: houses could go empty for weeks without having the windows smashed.

Billy stopped outside the entrance to Patsy Taylor’s block of flats. The stairs were open to the elements. Each flat had a front room window that curled around the corner of the building, a veranda at the side, and a porthole window next to the front door.

“D’you want to see what this shitty city’s about?” asked McVie vindictively. “Then come with me.”

The walls of the open-mouthed entrance were a green and cream, but the steps were cold gray concrete. The flat they were looking for was one flight up, the door flanked by tripod plant-pot holders holding withered somethings. A fake mother-of-pearl nameplate was fastened to the door frame. McVie looked disappointed.

“Well, at least it’s not Sawney Bean again,” he muttered, referring to a famous Scottish cannibal who had lived in a cave, eaten travelers from England, and interbred with all fifty of his daughters. Bean was fictional, a clumsy piece of anti-Scottish propaganda from the eighteenth century that backfired: the Scots loved Sawney from the moment he was launched onto the international bogeyman scene, taking him to their hearts and private kinky nightmares, extrapolating from his wild and lawless life to develop a national personality.

McVie took a deep breath and knocked on the door, an authoritative, firm three times. A stocky balding man with a ring of cropped white hair opened the door. He was sucking a freshly emptied pipe and wearing an itchy woollen dressing gown over his day clothes.

“What can I do for you, my friend?”

“Good evening, Mr. Taylor. My name is George McVie and I’m the chief reporter for the Scottish Daily News. I understand there has been an incident here this evening. I wonder if I could have ten minutes of your time to ask you about it?”

Paddy was astonished at McVie’s skill and grace. Mr. Taylor was charmed too, and flattered that the Daily News would send out its chief reporter for his story, a fact that McVie had anticipated when he told the lie.

Mr. Taylor invited them into his formal front room and packed his pipe from a yellowing rubber pouch while his silent wife made tea and grandly offered around custard cream biscuits. The electric fire wasn’t on, but the red light spun slowly under a dusty coal mountain range, regular as a siren.

Mr. Taylor had taken the large armchair for himself and put McVie next to him on the settee. Paddy was relegated to the far end by the door, farthest away from the core of the conversation. Listening over the ticking of the clock, Paddy thought she heard someone down the hall sobbing low and regular, like a boiler ticking down to cool.

Under McVie’s surprisingly gentle prompting Mr. Taylor told how his wife was washing the dishes at the back of eight when she heard a commotion in the street. They both looked out the window and saw a body hanging from the streetlight opposite their house. Mrs. Taylor called the police and ambulance services from the neighbor’s telephone, but the man was dead. They found a letter pinned to his chest, addressed to Patsy, Mr. Taylor’s daughter. When the police came to the door Patsy admitted that she had received another letter at work that morning. The hanging boy was Eddie, a lad from her work who was angry because she didn’t want to go out with him. Mr. Taylor kept his eyes on his cup of tea as he explained the background, and Paddy felt strongly that he was lying.

“Could I see the letter, please?” she asked suddenly. “To check the spelling of Eddie’s name. I’ll get into terrible trouble with the lawyers if we spell it wrong.”

Both men had forgotten she was there. They sat up and looked at her in surprise.

“That’s your bit of the job, is it?” said Mr. Taylor.

Paddy nodded and pulled a notebook out of her bag. It was pristine, a navy-blue hardboard cover with a matching elastic band around the middle. She’d only stolen it from the stationery cupboard that afternoon.

Mr. Taylor hesitated for a moment. “There’s a lot of language in it.”

“That doesn’t bother me.” Paddy smiled bravely. “I’ve heard it all in this job. I just ignore it.”

He reached under his cushion to pull out a pale yellow envelope, handing it to Paddy. “You’re surely not a journalist?”

She glanced at McVie. If he was the chief news reporter, she could be a journalist. “Aye,” she said, “I am.”

McVie drew his attention away, asking him to repeat the story again because it was vital that they get the times right.

Paddy slid the folded sheet out of the envelope and opened it. She moved her pencil across her pad as if she were copying out the name while she read the letter quickly. The sheet of paper was from a small girl’s writing set, a little sister’s maybe. It had a faint picture of a black horse on the face of it, galloping through a misty field. It was obvious that Eddie and Patsy had been more than passing acquaintances. He referred to previous outings, and to her father calling him a bigot. But Eddie was an angry man. He told Patsy she was a bitch and he’d kill himself if she didn’t meet him tonight. Paddy folded the letter carefully and slipped it between the pages of her notebook, putting the empty envelope on the table in full view.

McVie noticed and stood up, gesturing to Paddy to get up too. “Thank you for your time. It’s very much appreciated.”

Mr. Taylor glanced at the envelope, and Paddy knew immediately that he saw it was empty. He knew he had made a stupid mistake. He lurched forwards in front of McVie, grabbing the notebook with one hand and Paddy’s wrist with the other, trying to yank them apart.

“Mr. Taylor, let go of her at once,” said McVie, as indignant as the Pope in a go-go bar. “She’s just a girl.”

“Ye devils!” Mr. Taylor pulled the notebook away from her and found the letter inside. “Dirty, lying devils. Out!”

He chased them into the hall, pushing them out the front door and slamming it behind them. McVie looked at Paddy, panting and exhilarated.

“It was the father who split them up, then?”

She nodded.

“Thought so.” He nearly smiled but caught himself. “You didn’t fuck that up too much at all, bint.”

“Thank you,” said Paddy, accepting the compliment in the spirit in which it was intended. “You ignorant shit.”

As they left the mouth of the close and headed down the path, Billy reversed slowly back, letting the car roll to the end of the path. Paddy didn’t want to get back into the car with Billy and all the animosity and unpleasantness.

“It’s a pretty poor thing to do.” She slowed her step to a stroll. “Kill yourself to upset someone.”

“Aye, well.” McVie slowed down alongside her. “That won’t make the page. We won’t publish an article saying ‘Moody wee bastard kills himself.’ It’s the details that tell the real story. The truth is a slippery bastard, that’s what you learn in this game. That, and never trust the management.” He looked up at the streetlight where Eddie had hanged himself, carefully considering whether he had any more important information to pass on to the next generation. “And that people are arseholes.”

McVie’s mood had mellowed, even to the extent of talking to Billy. “Well,” he said as he got back into the car, “there actually was a story in it.”

Billy shrugged. “D’you want to go anyway?”

“Aye, why not.”

“Go where?” asked Paddy.

Neither of them answered her.

Billy didn’t get faster than five miles an hour, crawling along slowly for a couple of streets. At the heart of the housing project they cruised past a dark swing park with mini-chutes and barred baby swings glistening with frost. Billy took a sharp corner a little too fast and drove along for a hundred yards before parking.

It took Paddy a minute to work out where they were. Following McVie’s gaze she looked up the gentle incline of the road and recognized the green ribbon fencing before anything else.

There was no one outside the Wilcoxes’ house, but the lights were on in the living room. The only thing that picked it out from the other houses on the modest terrace were the yellow ribbons tied randomly to the railings, the dirty bows soggy from exposure to the elements. One of them was a big perky bow from a bouquet of flowers and remained obscenely cheerful, hanging at an angle near the gate.

“Gina Wilcox’s house,” said Paddy.

Billy smiled in the mirror. “We’re here looking for a story to save his career.” He glanced at McVie. “He wants to get off night shift, but he’s annoyed too many people. Careers’ll be made over those boys. Could be bigger than the Ripper.”

“Aye, you’d know,” said McVie. “You’re a fucking taxi driver. Right, bint, you want to be a reporter. What do you see in there?”

Paddy looked at him half amused, expecting him to laugh at the paper-thin ruse, but McVie didn’t laugh back. He genuinely expected her to tell him everything she could glean from the scene without questioning his right to use it. Flustered, she looked back at the house.

“Um… I dunno.” Maybe there was some unspoken rule about giving up information and no one had told her about it. Paddy could see into the empty living room. The curtains in the window were unlined, the ornaments small and cheap. “Nothing much.”

The settee and armchair were brown and old, antimacassars pinned over balding arms and backs. It was an elderly person’s suite, perhaps donated to a poor new house by a kind relative or bought secondhand. At the center of the wall above the gas-fire mantel was a wooden clock in the shape of Africa with two red dots on the lower coastline. Someone in the Wilcox family had emigrated to South Africa. A lot of working-class families went, drawn by tales of ex-bus drivers with swimming pools, of plumbers with private airplanes.

“I can’t see anything at all. Are the two boys from around here?”

“No, Barnhill,” said McVie.

Paddy knew the area. She had been to a funeral there once. “That’s a couple of miles north. So they came here, got the baby, went to Steps, left him there, and went all the way home alone? What ages are they?”

“Ten? Eleven?”

Paddy shook her head. “Why were they here in the first place if they live in Barnhill? Do they know someone here?”

McVie shook his head. “No. The police think they came to use the swing park after seeing it from the road, maybe from a bus into town; came to have a go, saw Baby Brian, and… well, you know. Pop.”

They had passed the swing park and Paddy noticed that it was for babies and under-fives. The chutes had a gradient as gentle as the horizon. There was even a sandpit and rubber matting around the ridey horses for tiny tots to take tumbles on. Paddy looked around. Across the road, over a grass verge and broad dual carriageway, was the high back wall of the bus station. The swing park wasn’t even visible from the road: it was tucked in tight into the center of the estate. She was sure those boys had been brought here by someone who knew the area. An adult had brought them here.

“Well,” Paddy said, sitting back. “Can’t see anything.”

Billy pulled the car from the curb and Paddy watched the housing scheme pull past the window. Little drops of not-quite rain started to smear the windscreen. She hid her mouth under her hand, trying not to smile. She could read the scheme. She could see patterns that McVie and Billy were blind to.

III

They were on the Jamaica Street bridge when they heard it over the radio. A christening in Govan had turned into a gang fight- one dead so far. McVie kicked the back of the seat and Billy swung the car around, cutting in front of a bus on the other side of the road and getting honked for his cheek. The snow came on heavily. Flakes as big as rose petals tumbled gracefully out of an ink-black sky. Pedestrians evaporated off the streets and traffic slowed to a cautious crawl. In the ten minutes it took for them to get to the address, the snow grew thick, sticking to soot-blackened walls in patches.

The gangs had dispersed by the time they arrived in Govan. The tall street was bare of cars, a deep valley between two long red tenement rows, the crisp sheet of snow covering the ground punctuated by regular warm pools of orange from the streetlights. A few stray policemen were still standing in the tumbling snow, teasing out names and addresses from shivering witnesses desperate to get back into their houses and out of the weather, wishing they hadn’t bothered to come for a look at the dead boy.

Billy pulled the car over to the pavement. Invited, Paddy followed McVie out of the car. Big soft snowflakes stuck to her hair and face and lay on her shoulders and chest, dampening her duffel coat. She looked down at the pavement and saw fresh scarlet speckles melting into the snow on the curb.

McVie walked over to one of the policemen. “Alistair, what’s happening?”

The policeman pointed around the corner and explained that an eighteen-year-old boy had been chased into an innocent family’s house by five members of an opposing gang. The boy had tried to escape by jumping out of the window, but his foot got caught and tipped him upside down. He landed on his head, dying instantly.

As the policeman spoke, Paddy stood five feet away looking at the deep dots of blood melting through the white snow to the black pavement beneath, tracing the path of the body to the ambulance tire tracks in the road.

“C’mon.” McVie flicked his finger and Paddy followed him to the alley running between two blocks of flats.

The snow had barely reached the ground in the dark, narrow lane. It was lit by overspill from the kitchen windows above. McVie stalled in front of her, inadvertently sucking in a disgusted gasp through his teeth. Looking around his legs, Paddy saw a jammy, lumpy mess arranged in a halo around a central point of contact. A clump of long brown hairs was soaking up the blood. He must have had very dry hair, she thought. She stared at it, unmoved, surprised at her cold reaction. She felt nothing, just hot excitement at being there, bearing witness to events that would have happened anyway.

McVie looked up at an open kitchen window on the third floor, tracing the boy’s trajectory from the window to the ground. The window was still sitting wide, and inside a hub of people were gathered. A uniformed policeman squinted down at them and, seeing McVie, waved happily. McVie was busy scribbling something in his pad, so Paddy waved back in his stead.

She found herself standing in the cold, dark alley next to a stranger’s blood. Her feet were going numb and she was hungry. She looked down at the blood of a dead man her own age. This was exactly what she wanted to do for the rest of her life. Exactly.

McVie flipped his notepad shut and nodded her towards the car. “Right, then. That’s tonight finished. We’ll drop you home.”

“I’m not going home. The shift’s not finished yet.”

“Look, that snow’s gonnae shit down and we’ll get stranded.” He pushed her out of the alley, but she knew he meant it nicely. “Everyone stays home when the weather’s like this. They don’t even fight with each other. The calls will all be stranded motorists. We’ll go back to the office and get the rest of the night’s stories over the phone.”

Paddy didn’t know whether to believe him or not. She chapped on Billy’s window, and when he wound it down she asked if they would be going back to the office. Billy looked up at the sky. “Yeah,” he said. “We’ll end up stuck in snow otherwise.”

Snow muffled the noise of the night city. The few people they passed in the street were making their way out of the weather, stepping carefully, as if tiptoeing through oil. Billy concentrated hard on the road, while McVie and Paddy listened to the radio calls getting fewer and farther between. The city was putting itself to bed. They passed through the Gorbals and the blazing lights of the damp Hutchie E housing scheme, past the edge of Glasgow Green and Shawfield Stadium dog track, and on through Rutherglen. By the time they arrived at Eastfield the snowdrifts were half a foot deep.

The snow had cleaned up the Eastfield Star beautifully. All the roofs on the cottages matched, and the unmanaged gardens looked tidy. With a blanket of snow the overall design of the scheme was clear and coherent. Even the broken cars and tattered fencing looked clean and pretty. Lights blazed bright and warm from every home. Flocks of wily pigeons gathered on the snow-free roofs of uninsulated houses. Paddy felt proud to come from such a solid working-class background. She wished McVie had some friends at work he could tell about it. Maybe word would get around and people would respect her for it. Maybe Billy would tell someone.

She got out and leaned back through the door, telling Billy and McVie to come back to her house if they got stuck: they would be more than welcome to spend the night there, please don’t hesitate.

“Fuck off,” said McVie, pulling her door shut. “We’re not coming back to your scabby wee house.”

She watched the car roll away until it was swallowed by a white curtain. It was only when her back was turned and her face was hidden in her duffel hood that she burst into a smile. She was a journalist. She had to run around the block twice to burn the buzz off before she went home.