Field of Blood

THIRTEEN . GROCERY VAUGHAN

Every light in the Wilcox house was on and all the curtains sat open, spilling light out into the dark street. Paddy stood on the opposite pavement, her breath crystallizing into speech bubbles, wondering why she had come. She wasn’t a journalist, she didn’t have a legitimate reason for being there. She was just a stupid fat girl who was afraid to go home and face her mother.

The house was a gray rectangle with a big window on the ground floor and a brown front door. In front sat a little rug of muddy garden, tufts of grass left in the corners where Brian’s shoes hadn’t worn it away. Surrounding the garden was a fence of three metal ribbons, painted green and chipped. Wee Brian could just have climbed through the bars and wandered off to the busy motorway access road nearby. Anyone might have picked him up.

Paddy had been to the swing park, and it confirmed everything she thought she’d noticed a couple of nights ago. It was tucked well into the middle of the housing scheme, and Callum couldn’t have found it accidentally. Even if he had he wouldn’t have wanted to play there: it was a kiddie swing park with few attractions for older boys.

She thought of home, and a ball of acid flowered in her stomach. She sagged against the streetlight. If she’d had any money she would have gone to the pictures for the night.

Across the road she saw a flicker in the window. Gina Wilcox was standing in the corner of her living room. She was looking at her hands, and Paddy saw that she was holding a cloth, kneading it. She looked like an ordinary slim young woman cleaning her house, but even from a hundred yards across the road Paddy could see that the woman’s eyes were as red as a summer sunset.

Gina stood still, pulling at the cloth for a moment. Her hair was brown and dank, and as she reached up and flattened her hair Paddy saw why. She must have been working cleaning products into it all day, cleaning, cleaning, trying to wipe away the knowledge that her baby wasn’t coming back.

An old-fashioned navy blue grocery van with purple and white writing on the side traveled slowly down the hill behind her. It passed by, pulling up at the curb a hundred yards away. The hand-painted declaration on the side of the van announced that it was a mobile grocer’s owned and operated by Henry Naismith, Esquire. The door on the back of the van was covered in colorful stickers from fruit importers and biscuit companies. Stuck over the top, wind scorched and peeling in one corner, was a band sticker declaring FRIEND OF BILLY GRAHAM.

In the quiet of the evening she could hear the gentle ratchet sound of the hand brake being pulled tight and then a tinny music-box rendition of the first three bars of “Dixie” sounded from a little horn on the roof. Someone was moving around inside the van, jostling it, and a light inside flickered uncertainly. The door opened and Paddy could see a man unfolding a step to the street. Inside, the light found its note and brightened as the man stood up. He was slim with sharp sideburns and a graying Elvis-style mini-quiff. Approaching customers chased him back up the steps. Inside the van he pulled down a wooden shelf to form a counter between himself and the outside world.

An orderly queue gathered around the steps, a crowd of five women and a man. The women nodded to one another and passed pleasantries, ignoring the man, who pretended to count the change in his hand. Paddy knew that van steps were a woman’s arena as much as a pub was a man’s. Friendships were made in the queue, gossip exchanged, and reciprocal child care organized.

She stayed well back and waited as they bought bread and glass bottles of fizzy juice; some asked for soap powder; others just after the wooden penny sweet tray the man proffered like a Tiffany’s display. She waited until the crowd thinned before approaching.

The van smelled of soap and sweets. The man serving wore a grubby white grocer’s coat with yellow action streaks around the pockets. Across his neck was a red slash scar from a long time ago, the soft skin puckered around the shiny stripe.

He smiled expectantly at her. “What can I do ye for?”

“Packet of Refreshers, please.”

He reached over to his right, so sure of his stock that he didn’t need to look at the shelves, and put the glittery packet of fizzy sweets on the counter.

“Okay, li’le lady. Anything else catch your eye? A loaf? A bottle of ginger?” He pointed to the glass rows of fizzy drink and winked at her.

She grinned at his fake American accent. “Listen, can I ask ye this: those boys who were arrested for…” She didn’t know how to phrase it. “For hurting Baby Brian. Did they know anyone on this scheme?”

He pulled her change from his money belt and narrowed his lips. “Those filthy wee buggers. I say give them to the women’s prison, they’d know what to do with them.”

It didn’t sound like a very good plan to Paddy. She frowned, and he saw it.

“No,” he corrected himself, “you’re right, you’re right. We need to forgive.”

“Aye, right enough,” she said awkwardly, moving the conversation on. “Anyway, were they visiting someone here?”

“I heard they were at the swing park.”

“Yeah, that’s what I heard. I was just wondering, because it’s kind of out of the way. Could they have been visiting someone?”

The van man shrugged. “I dunno. If they’d been at a house someone would know about it. Everyone here sees everything. Why are you asking?”

“Dunno.” She picked the change up off the counter. “Just wondering about it. Seems funny, know what I mean?”

He looked suspicious. “You don’t live here, do you? What are you doing here?”

“I’m a journalist at the Daily News,” she said proudly, and immediately remembered Farquarson’s warning. “My name’s Heather Allen.”

“Right?” He looked her up and down. “A journalist, is it? I tell ye what, could it be the ice-cream van? Maybe they were passing and heard the van coming. It stops outside the wee boy’s garden.”

“Really?” She was glad he hadn’t pressed her about her career.

He shooed her out onto the pavement and lifted his fold-down counter, following her down the step to show her. “There.” He was peering past Gina Wilcox’s house. “See the wee lane?”

Paddy couldn’t see it at first. She had to strain her eyes through the soupy dark to see the triple railings along the far side of Gina’s garden. There was a lane down the side of it.

“That lane leads straight to the main road. The ice-cream van stops just there.” He indicated the curb across the road from Gina’s house. “Stops there at the back of twelve every day and then at half four again.” He looked at her. “That’s when the wee man went missing, eh?”

Paddy nodded. “Aye, back of twelve, right enough. Don’t know if those boys’d have money for a van, though.”

“Aye, well, Hughie keeps a penny tray for the poorer weans.” She wondered how he knew so much about it, and he saw the questioning look. “We fell out about it,” he explained. “The penny tray was my idea in the first place. His rounds are earlier than mine, so he takes all the custom. He’s a snipey bastard.”

She pointed at his quiff. “Were you a Teddy boy, then?”

“I am a Teddy boy,” he said indignantly. “Ye don’t stop being what ye are because it’s out of fashion.”

She looked at his feet and only then noticed his drainpipe trousers and crepe soles. “God, you’re very loyal to your style.”

“And why not? Tell me this: Who’s as good as Elvis now? Who can sing like Carl Perkins these days? None of them.”

Paddy smiled at his abrupt energy. “So, I suppose.”

“What’s your favorite Frankie Vaughan song?”

She shrugged. “Don’t know any.”

He was disappointed. It had been a test question, she could tell. “Ye don’t know any Frankie Vaughan? Not know ‘Mr. Moonlight’? Young folk today, I don’t know. Do you know what he did for this city?”

“Aye, I know, that I know.” The crooner Frankie Vaughan had been so appalled at the levels of violence when he played Glasgow in the fifties that he met the gang leaders and appealed to them to hand in their weapons. He became a totem for peace but was mostly now remembered by those who had caused the trouble in the first place.

“You young ones, yees don’t know music at all. I bet you’re one of they punkers.”

Paddy laughed. “Punk was a hundred years ago.”

“Drug music, that’s what it is. Frankie should come back here and set them right.” He did a little tap dance move, raising a hand, extending a foot, and they laughed together in the soft dark. Paddy wished she didn’t ever have to go home.

The van man waved her off and closed up his back door, driving off up the street and leaving her alone.

She wandered up the road, chewing through the frothy Refreshers, and looked into the alley. Beyond the houses and the small back gardens she could see the yellow lights of the main road and the bus stop from Barnhill. The boys could easily have got off there and wandered through to the van. She hadn’t read the scheme properly at all. She was wasting her time.