Field of Blood

I

The features writer was struggling to whip up a credible moral panic piece about Joe Dolce’s novelty single signaling the final demise of the English language when the phone rang, giving him an excuse to turn away from the page.

“Nope,” he said, running his eye over the sheet in the typewriter. “Heather Allen doesn’t work here anymore.”

The man on the phone seemed surprised. He had met her yesterday, he said, in Townhead, and she told him she worked at the Daily News.

“Yeah, well, she’s left now, pal.”

“Would you have another number I can reach her on?” His voice was gruff but his accent careful and affected.

“Nope.”

The man sighed into the phone, sending a ruffle of wind into the journalist’s ear. “It’s just… it’s really important.”

The features writer’s attention span was broken anyway, and the guy sounded genuinely desperate. “Well, I know she works at the polytechnic newspaper. Ye could phone them.”

“Thank you,” said the man. “That’s brilliant.”

II

He phoned the polytechnic several times, always refusing to leave a message, always asking just for Heather Allen, when would she be in, is she still not there? I’ll ring back, he said. It’s her I want.

It was late afternoon before Heather came into the Poly Times office. She was in a furious mood. She hadn’t told anyone about her dismissal from the News. Even her parents didn’t know. A latent sense of decency had stopped her from telling them about the syndicated piece. She’d known at the time that she would feel rotten for doing it, had weighed up the pros and cons, and decided that in the long term the benefits would outweigh the guilt. But she’d been wrong. She hated herself for betraying Paddy, and she’d lost her job. She felt enough of a shit without having to deal with her father’s disapproval.

The Poly Times was a two-bit operation. Their office was a small room on the first floor of the students union block, furnished with a single table, three chairs, and a phone. Two walls of shelving held four years of back copies and all the financial records and minutes of all the committee meetings there had ever been. Lots of people applied to work on the paper, but they only printed twice a year and there just wasn’t that much to do. They managed to freeze out most of the interested parties by being cliquey, intimidating, and unfriendly, which left them with a core staff of about six. One of Heather’s duties as the editor was trawling through the unsolicited articles students submitted to see if any of them were printable.

Despite posters up all over campus declaring the upcoming deadline, there weren’t very many submissions in the red wire basket. The office wasn’t empty, though: a couple of committee members, both greasy headbangers, both supernaturally ugly, were standing by the telex machine trying unsuccessfully to send something off. Heather ignored them, hoping they’d feel uncomfortable and leave.

She claimed the entire worktable by putting her bag on one side and the red wire basket on the other, using one chair to drape her coat on and another to sit in. One of the metal boys called over to her that a guy had been phoning for her all morning.

“Someone from the Daily News?” she said hopefully.

The boy shrugged. “He didn’t say where he was from.”

On reflection, Heather realized that the call couldn’t have been from the News. If they had wanted her back, someone would have phoned her at home last night. Anyway, they wouldn’t reverse the decision. No one went against the union. She settled back into her black mood and began pulling submissions out of envelopes and folders, piling them up.

She was halfway through reading a second-year’s travelogue about interrailing around Italy when the phone rang.

“Heather Allen?”

“Yeah.”

“I met you last night, do you remember?”

She didn’t. “I meet a lot of people.”

“I know I can trust you.” The caller paused, wanting a reaction.

“Really?” She was still only half listening, balancing the receiver on her shoulder and flicking through the submissions, looking to see if there were any other travel pieces in case she needed to choose between the two.

“Do you want to know about Baby Brian?”

Heather dropped the travelogue and took the receiver in her hand. He must have heard she was the source of the syndicated piece. She covered her mouth with one hand to stop the sound carrying to the headbangers in the corner.

“Can you tell me something about that?”

“Not on the phone. Can you meet me?”

“You name the place and I’ll be there.”

The man explained that he was very nervous, and made her promise to come alone to the Pancake Place at one a.m. He asked her not to tell anyone where they were meeting and said she shouldn’t even write it down, in case she was followed without knowing it.

Heather tore the scribbled address off the corner of the foolscap sheet and dropped it in the bin. “I’ll see you tonight,” she said, and waited for him to confirm before she hung up.

The boys were watching her without looking; she could feel them. She left her things on the table and went out to the lobby to buy a gritty coffee from the machine. She dropped the coins in and looked out the window, over the rooftops of low buildings towards the city chambers, smiling to herself as the machine spluttered and whirred her coffee into the plastic cup. She would skip the Daily News and take her story straight to a national paper. With a good story about Baby Brian and the syndicated piece about the family on her CV she would be able to walk into any job she wanted after graduation. She could go straight to London.

III

Paddy hung around the newsroom and canteen, killing time until McVie came in. The night shift gradually filtered into the newsroom, replacing the manic fussiness of the day. The skeleton staff took up their positions at their desks, setting up for the night, laying out their magazines and books for reading, one guy on the features desk tuning in a small tranny to a Radio Four program about the silent age of cinema.

McVie saw her when he came in to check the board for messages. He nodded an acknowledgment but looked annoyed when she came over to speak to him.

“Not again,” he said. “I got in enough fucking trouble last time. That wee bastard phoned in and complained about us. I didn’t know you weren’t a journalist.”

“I’m a copyboy.”

“Well, just stay away from me,” he said.

“I just want to ask you something about Baby Brian.”

“Yeah.” He pointed at her nose accusingly. “And that’s another fucking thing. You’re related to that bastarding child and you never told me.”

Paddy raised a finger and did it back. “I didn’t know it then, did I, ye big arse.”

The use of a bad word seemed to placate McVie somehow, as though he suddenly, completely understood the degree of her vehemence.

“Okay,” he said. “Have you got anything ye can tell me about it?”

“Nut. I don’t know anything about him.”

“How can you not know anything about him? He’s a relative.”

“Are you close to your family?” It was a lucky guess. “D’you know what, though?” she added. “That guy JT, he tried to question me about it, and he wasn’t a patch on your technique.”

McVie nodded. “Yeah, but he’d swap his balls for a story. Gives him the edge. I heard he once went to collect the picture of a rape and murder victim from her mother. On his way out the door he told her that her daughter had been asking for it.” He nodded in sympathy with the shock on Paddy’s face. “That way the woman wouldn’t talk to anyone else from the press. Made it an exclusive. He’s an arsehole. What do you want anyway?”

“I wanted to ask you something about Baby Brian. What time did the boys catch the train to Steps?”

“They said it was between nine and half ten at night. Why?”

“Where were they from lunchtime until then?” She lowered her voice. “And JT said no one saw them on the train. I don’t think wee guys with nothing would catch a commuter train to Steps.”

McVie looked unconvinced. “They found their tickets on them.”

“But Barnhill’s full of waste ground and abandoned factories, and these are poor kids. Why would they spend money on a train? Could the police get it that wrong?”

It startled Paddy because she didn’t know what it was: the skin near his eyes and mouth folded over and a bizarre noise gargled up from his throat. McVie was laughing, but his face wasn’t used to it. “Can the police get it wrong?” he repeated, making the noise again. “Your name’s Paddy Meehan, for fucksake.”

“I know it happened then, but could it still happen now?”

McVie stopped doing the scary thing with his face and let it retract back to suicidal. “Most of them wouldn’t fit a kid up. Although…” His eyes dropped to the side and he looked skeptical. “Most of them wouldn’t. If they were convinced they’re really guilty but it’s hard to prove, they might plant evidence. They see a lot of villains walk; you can kind of understand it.”

A night editor came over to the table with a coffee and a cigarette, settling into a seat near them.

McVie leaned into her. “I know Paddy Meehan, by the way. He’s an arsehole.”

Paddy shrugged awkwardly. “Well, that’s something, coming from you. D’you know anything about a guy called Alfred Dempsie?”

“Nope.”

“He killed his son.”

“Good for him. I heard the morning boys chased Heather Allen because of what she did to you. Don’t mistake that for popularity.”

“I won’t.”

“They’d hunt you for sport just as easy.”

“Hunt me for sport? What are ye talking about? I’m going to report you to Father Richards for using creative language.”

McVie was trying not to smile, she could see it. He checked his watch. “Right, piss off, bint. I’ve got things to do before I go out.”

She stood up. “Well, thanks anyway, ya big swine.”

He watched her tug her pencil skirt down by the hem. “Get fatter every time I see ye.”

She couldn’t let him see she cared. “That’s right,” she said, dying inside. “I get fatter, and you get a day older in a job ye hate.”

IV

Paddy walked slowly down to Queen Street, aiming to get there after nine. It was a quiet Friday night in the black city; the heavy rain had lasted for most of the evening, and even now the air felt damp and threatening. Outside a hotel on George’s Square she passed a crowd of women in cheap dresses and wedge shoes, alert and frightened as a herd of deer; nearby, their drunk men shouted at one another. She tried not to look at them directly, and in her mind’s eye the women became a soup of fat arms in cap sleeves, of ringed fingers patting perms as sleek as swimming caps, and raw heels persevering in razor-edged shoes.

Queen Street station was a cavernous Victorian shed with a fanned glass roof spanning five platforms. Only the pub and the Wimpy bar remained open. Reading the railway timetable plastered to the wall, she saw that the trains left for Steps every half hour and it would have taken the boys seventeen minutes at most to get there. The ticket office was off to one side of the station, and Paddy noticed that the barriers were not guarded at night like they were in the rush hour. It would have been easy for the boys to sneak onto the train without paying.

The ticket office was empty and the man serving at the ticket window was reading a newspaper.

“Hello,” she said. “Can ye tell me how much a half return is to Steps?”

The man frowned at her. “You’re not a half.”

“I know. I don’t want to buy one, I just want to know how much it costs.”

He still looked skeptical. Paddy was bored with the Heather Allen lie, so she told another one. “My nephew needs to go there to visit his auntie on his own this Monday coming, and my sister has to give him the money for his fare.” It sounded elaborate enough to be true.

The attendant watched her as he typed it into the ticket machine. It cost sixty pence, twice as much as the bus.

Back out on the concourse she read the boards and realized that the next train to Steps was due to pull out. She took out her Transcard, but no one asked to see it as she climbed onto the quiet train. The train doors slid shut and the carriage jolted forward. There didn’t seem to be a conductor on board.

The train passed through a long, dark tunnel, emerging on the other side between two steep banks of earth, hewn away to make room for the railway lines. The jagged banks were so steep that after a hundred years of perseverance the grass still hadn’t managed to grow on them. The carriages were quiet, and she could easily see small boys managing the whole journey without being spotted.

The first stop was Springburn station, eight minutes out of Queen Street. The platform was built in a deep valley with stairs up to the street. It was quiet for the moment but obviously well used: the platform was broad and had a chocolate machine and even a telephone kiosk on it. On the far side of the station, beyond the double railway tracks, a white picket fence marked off the surrounding land. It was dark behind the fence, in the wild wastes where thin trees and malnourished bushes struggled. The wilderness went on for so long that Paddy’s eye got lost in it. The train started up again, shaking her awake.

The journey on to Steps took the train along a short track before forking off away from the low-level Barnhill station. She could see it through the bushes on her left-hand side, a poor, lone platform with broken lights and a single bench next to stairs up to the road. It was around here that Thomas Dempsie’s tiny body had been left. She found the thought of him being left somewhere so dark almost more upsetting than his death.

She looked back at Barnhill station, disappearing behind her. It was ridiculous. The boys wouldn’t have passed their home to take the baby somewhere else. Even if they had jumped on the wrong train they would have got off at Springburn and walked the few hundred yards.

The train rumbled on to Steps, passing the Robroyston high flats, forty-story paragons of architectural crime built on the top of barren hills with nothing around them to give them human scale. Beyond that it passed through dark, empty lands of bush and scrub bordering a marsh for five whole minutes. In the cold moonlight Paddy could see fields and hedges, a strange landscape halfway between abandoned industrial site and countryside.

The approach to Steps was heralded by a strip of houses on a hill. They were big and had gardens she could see into when the train slowed. It didn’t seem like the sort of place that would draw wee boys from a ghetto, and it definitely didn’t look like a better place to hide a guilty secret than the industrial wilderness they’d come from.

The Steps station platform was clean and neat, if a little exposed. On one side a huge wild field stretched off until it reached a school building; the other side faced the backs of houses. There was no ticket office or guard there to witness the boys’ arrival. Enameled signs informed travelers that they would have to buy their tickets from the conductor on the train. No one else got off the train. Paddy didn’t like to admit it, but JT might have been right: the boys could have made it all the way there without being seen. But that didn’t explain how they had hidden the baby for the eight hours before they got on the train.

She loitered alone on the platform, looking down the long, straight tracks back to Springburn and onwards to Cumbernauld. The station exit was a gentle ramp up to the road. Paddy walked up it and let herself through the gate to the little humpback bridge over the tracks.

The break in the bushes across the empty road wouldn’t have been obvious without the small pile of flowers and cards and soft toys on the pavement in front of it. It was a dark lane, overhung with bushes and trees. Paddy glanced behind her, making sure she wasn’t being followed, and stepped over a bunch of withered carnations into the velvet dark.

The lane ran between the railway line and the far ends of long gardens belonging to big houses, evergreen bushes preserving their privacy. A craggy, leafless bush clung to a high wall of chicken wire on the railway side. The ground beneath her feet was uneven and frozen, and she walked slowly, trying to find the faint tread line in the grass.

It didn’t take long to reach the blue-and-white police tape blocking the path. Beyond it she could see the hole in the chicken-wire fencing, low down, just high enough for small boys to get through. She ducked under the tape and climbed through, catching her tights on a loose wire and ripping a bullet-sized hole in the right knee.

She was standing in an area of disturbed grass. She crouched down on her haunches and ran her flat hand over it. The thin light from the distant train platform showed the pale silver undersides of the blades, uniformly flattened by the wind or a sheet, she thought, not broken by feet. Paddy felt as calm as she had in the alleyway with McVie, and reminded herself to keep an open mind about what had happened here. Anything was possible; the police weren’t always right. They’d questioned and eliminated the Yorkshire Ripper nine times before he was arrested.

She stood up, walking along the rail track for twenty feet, heading away from the station until the grass became upright and undisturbed. No big feet had been milling around here gathering evidence. Dew from the blades clung to her tights, soaking into the wool, making the ankles sag.

It only caught her eye because it was a perfect square. Across the twin rail track was a geometrical patch of shadow beside a small bush. She recognized the signs from paddling pools left upended in her own family’s garden for seasons at a time: the little square of grass had been starved of wind and frost for a few days. It was where the tent had been placed, where Brian had been killed and found again. Beyond it, in a diagonal slash across the lip of the hill, a dirt path had recently been formed by a hundred journeys to and fro.

The darkness was a blanket over her mouth and ears, muffling the noise of distant traffic and the world beyond the tracks, thickening the air so that she couldn’t draw breath. A crisp packet fluttered against the fence, and to Paddy’s alert ears the cellophane crackle sounded like a stunted cry. She backed up to the fence, holding tight, letting the wire dig into her fingers while she blinked away Brian’s imagined final moments. A bright screaming train flew towards her, filling her ears, and Paddy closed her eyes to the grit and wind, glad of the heart-stopping intrusion.

The train passed and Paddy stood in the dank dark, looking down the railway line towards the bright station. It didn’t feel safe, but she scampered over to the far bank, slipping slightly on an oily wooden tie, the momentary lack of balance sending a shiver of nerves up the back of her neck.

Next to the flattened square of grass, the bush had branches cut from it: recent ones severed with a sharp knife, older ones twisted until the branches came off in a stringy mess of bark and sap. She remembered what Farquarson had said about sticks being put in the baby’s bottom. The sharp cuts suggested someone gathering evidence.

Paddy stepped beyond the flat grass where the tent had been and climbed up the frozen mud embankment, helping herself up by clinging onto stray roots and stones. She found herself in a large field, plowed into furrows. The unlocked gate was only fifty yards away. She could hear the sound of cars speeding past on a road nearby. A hundred tire tracks from the police cars scarred the mud in front of her. She stood up straight.

The boys hadn’t stumbled on the baby after playing in a swing park for toddlers. They hadn’t managed to hide for eight hours or come here invisibly on an expensive train or trampled down an unfamiliar dark alley to a hole in the fence they didn’t know was there. Someone else had been here with them. All three of them had been driven to this spot by someone. It was obvious to her, and should have been obvious to anyone else who looked. But no one was looking. As it stood, the Baby Brian murder was a good story, a clean story about other people, far away.

Paddy stood in the bitter field, her hair flattened against her head, listening to the brutal February wind and all the callous cars rushing home to warmth and kindness. The story suited everyone and wouldn’t be questioned until the evidence was overwhelming. It was Paddy fucking Meehan all over again. No matter how much evidence he had produced or how many people saw him on the night of Rachel Ross’s murder, the police were determined it was him.