Field of Blood

I

Heather gathered the keys for her mother’s car from the hall table and tiptoed out of the house. Heavy rain masked the noise of the closing door and Heather’s feet crunching over the moat of gravel around the house. She swung her bag into the passenger seat, shut the door carefully, and started the red Golf GTI, leaving the lights off until she had cleared the drive.

The country roads were quiet all the way into town and stayed quiet as she approached the city center. It was just past midnight on a Friday night, but the rain had chased everyone off the streets. Every third car was a cab. Even the buses had stopped. Going at full speed, the windscreen wipers only managed to pull back the curtain of rain periodically, and sheets of water rippled down hills.

Waiting at a traffic light, Heather rummaged in her handbag on the seat next to her, feeling for her cigarettes. The lights changed before she could take one out of the packet, and she found herself on the green side of every light into town. It wasn’t until she reached Cowcaddens that she managed to put one in her mouth and press the lighter on the dashboard. She inhaled, and the smoke made her lungs feel dirty and clogged. On the way out it did the same to her teeth. It felt good.

The Pancake Place was straight across the road from a shuttered and padlocked side entrance to Central station. A big van was parked right in front of the doors, so she parked a few spaces back and checked her makeup in the rearview mirror. Her lipstick was coming off in the middle where she had sucked her cigarette. She took the No. 17 Frosty Pink from her handbag and one last puff before touching up her lips. She opened the door, stepped out into the wet street, dropping the half-smoked cigarette to hiss to death into the wet, and ran into the café.

The Pancake Place menu was a testament to the versatility of the humble pancake: it was offered with everything, from a dollop of cheap jam to a pair of eggs and black pudding. Open until four a.m., the café had become a haven for late-night shift workers, students on their way home from the dancing, and tired street prostitutes giving their feet a rest. The overwhelming impression of the decor was dark brown. Plastic timbers had been grafted into a suspended ceiling and fake oak partitions built between the tables. To add a touch of olde worlde authenticity, laminated menus were propped up in darkwood stands.

It was quiet, and Heather immediately spotted the man sitting at the back table reading a copy of yesterday’s Scottish Daily News, just as he had promised. He was younger than she had expected from his voice and looked too rough for the paper he was reading. He was dressed like a construction worker, in a heavy jacket and a black woollen hat pulled down over his ears.

“Hello,” she said, trying to look unexcited and professional.

He seemed puzzled. He looked her up and down, taking in her expensive red overcoat and thick lipstick, and went back to reading his paper.

“You called me?” she said.

He looked up at her again, annoyed this time. “Do I know you?”

It was a different voice from the one on the phone, and Heather looked behind her to see if there was another man in a donkey jacket reading the Daily News. There wasn’t. She checked her watch. It was one in the morning. She was right on time.

“I think…” She looked at the empty seat across from him. “May I?”

“May you what?”

“May I sit down?”

He folded his paper shut and cleared his throat. “Gonnae leave me alone?”

“Didn’t you phone me and ask me to come here?”

“I never phoned ye.”

“But someone phoned me.”

“Well,” he said, opening his paper again, “it wasn’t me that phoned ye.” He glanced at her and saw how disappointed she was. “I’m very sorry.”

“I was to look for a man in a donkey jacket reading the Daily News.”

“I think someone’s playing a joke on ye. Sorry.”

Heather suddenly understood. It was one of those bastards at the Daily News, one of the morning-shift boys having a laugh at her expense. They’d be watching her. They’d be in here or across the road, laughing at her.

“Okay,” she said, her voice cracking on the second syllable as the disappointment choked her. “Thank you.”

She backed off, glancing around the café, making sure there wasn’t someone else in the room who met the description. Two tarty women in high heels and evening wear were huddled together near the back; a stoned mod girl was sitting with two boys in leather jackets, each red-eyed and slow moving; an old, old man hunched in an overcoat with tobacco-stained arthritic fingers. No one looked back at her.

She stood inside the door looking out at the shitting rain, blinking hard and trying not to cry. She lifted a paper napkin from under the cutlery on the nearest table and wiped the itchy lipstick off. There would be no London. She would never get a job up here either, because the union had taken against her and those bastards never forgot a grudge.

They were inside, she guessed; someone in the café was watching her. She fumbled a cigarette from her packet and lit it, taking a deep, bitter drag. She felt fat tears welling up, uncontrollable, because she was tired and it was late at night and she’d set such hopes on coming here.

She opened the door and stepped out into the rain, pulling the car keys from her pocket, only vaguely aware of the figure following her out. The street was empty of parked cars, but somehow the big van had backed up nearer to the Golf, so that she would have to reverse first to get out. Cursing it, herself, and every spiteful shit who worked at the Daily News, she turned sideways to slip between the van and the bonnet of the little red GTI.

The van door flew open, hitting her in the face, breaking her nose with a dull thunk. A large, rough hand fell over her face, covering it entirely, smearing what was left of her Frosty Pink lipstick over her chin. She heard him behind her, the man from the café. She heard him speak to the grabbing man, heard him object. Thinking him her savior, she tried to turn to him, but the hands in front of her grabbed her neck, lifting her by her throat into the back of the van.

Donkey Jacket hardly spoke above a whisper. “Wrong fucking bird, ya mug ye.”

II

When Heather came to she knew she was in the van and felt it moving fast, along a motorway or a good flat road. She was lying on her side, on a flat surface, with a towel that smelled of sour milk hooked over her head. She was missing a shoe, and her hands were tied together with rope behind her back. Through the waves of shock and nausea she realized that her face was very swollen; the pain seemed to radiate out from the bridge of her nose, engulfing her eyes and cheeks and ears, almost meeting round the back of her head again. Her nose was blocked with blood. She tried to blow it clean, but it hurt too much. She could hear the faint sound of a radio coming from the front of the cab, a sound of voices, and poor, dead John Lennon’s “Imagine” came on.

At first she thought again that it must be some of the morning boys playing a prank that had gone too far, but they were never sober enough to drive, especially not late at night, and they wouldn’t have hurt her physically. She wondered for a moment if Paddy Meehan’s family were exacting their revenge, but that couldn’t be right either. She remembered the hand around her throat and realized, suddenly and clearly, that she didn’t know these men and they didn’t know her. They were going to kill her.

Moving carefully, rubbing a relatively pain-free part of her chin repeatedly against her shoulder, she tried and failed to get the smelly towel off. She began to panic, rubbing frantically, regardless of the pain. When the driver hurried or slowed she drifted a little over to the side.

She was struggling with the rope around her wrists and feet, getting nowhere, when the van pulled off the road, took a couple of sharp turns that slid her around the floor, and then came to a creeping stop in a very dark place. The driver got out and a bright overhead light came on. They were outside, somewhere dark. She could hear a river and feet crunching around to the side of the van.

Heather worked her hands up and down, her skin rubbing hard against the tight rope, trying to loosen the cord but embedding it instead in her raw skin. The van door opened, the hood was unhooked from her head, and the man in the donkey jacket looked in at her. He was holding a short-handled shovel. Heather tried to smile.

When Donkey Jacket saw her brutally swollen face, eyes like oranges, chin and hair smeared with blood and snot, he looked perplexed. “That’s not her.”

From around the side of the van she heard another voice muttering, “Ye said ye’d follow her out and ye did.”

An older face looked in at her, frightened, shaking his head. She couldn’t be sure, seeing him upside down, she couldn’t be altogether sure, but she thought his eyes were wet for her and sorry for what he had done. His sympathy made her think for a moment that they might let her go, and relief swept from her crown to her toes, a cold wash that unclenched her aching jaw and eased her throbbing shoulders.

Donkey Jacket lifted the spade from his side, holding it with both hands near the shovel end. “And ye said she was dead,” he said.

The older man’s cracked voice gave his emotion away. “She’d stopped breathing. I thought she was.”

Donkey Jacket nudged him playfully and raised the shovel to chest height. “See? You teach me about things.” His voice was rich and calm. “And now I can teach you things.”

He swung his arm freely, bringing the metal shovel down fast and crushing Heather’s skull against the van floor.