Field of Blood

I

It was a quiet Tuesday before Christmas and the department store was half empty. Meehan wiped the top of the glass cabinet with a yellow cloth, paying attention to his hands so that he didn’t drift off. He could get the boxes out from under the counter and change the order around- that would keep him busy. He was thirty-three years old and only just learning the rudimentary goldbricking skills everyone else knew by their fifteenth birthday.

It was a parole job, to keep the board happy. It choked him, taking orders from wee Jonny, a fairy who wore hair spray and had twenty years on the shop floor, but Meehan’s father was dying of cancer and he couldn’t get revoked just now. He had never been much to the old man, but he was determined to be there for him now. The old man had never been much to him, right enough. He couldn’t remember his father ever making him happy, or giving him time; mostly he was a figure feared in the house for random violence. He dreaded to think how his own kids would remember him.

Jonny minced up to the counter. “May I assist?”

“I am thinking of sending a pen as a gift to my friend in Germany.”

Meehan hadn’t heard that accent since Rolf handed him over to the British consulate. He turned and blurted, “Sind sie Deutsch?”

The woman looked up, surprised and delighted, and stepped immediately along the counter to him.

“Are you East German?” Meehan asked.

“Yes, I am,” she said in crisp English. “I am from Dresden.”

Meehan looked into her sea-green eyes as she spoke, but his attention was on the periphery. She was tall and blond, dressed in an elegant leopard skin coat with leather trim and matching belt, pulled tight to show off her slender waist. Her nails were painted beige, and she was holding a pair of beige kid gloves that matched her handbag. She drew the gloves softly through her free hand, over and again. She looked too good for Glasgow, too good for the Lewis’s fountain pen counter, and it made him suspicious.

Meehan had come to expect them. After George Blake escaped and they discovered the two-way radio in his cell, the Secret Service had come back to him, drilling him for the information he’d freely given them in West Berlin after Rolf handed him over. They moved him into solitary for three months with meals through the door, his only human contact periodic visits from the Service, alternately angry and calm, coaxing and threatening. They were convinced he was holding out. He couldn’t tell them that he had no loyalties, not to them and not to the East, where the guards didn’t shake hands and Rolf could pretend to like him for a year and a half. Meehan’s only loyalty was to his mates and his family, and he didn’t even like most of them that much.

They released him on parole but followed him all the time. He often found well-dressed men watching the front of their house in the Gorbals high flats. A stranger had been seen using a key to get in and out of his mother’s house on a day when everyone else was at work. The telephone clicked loudly after they picked it up. If Meehan made an arrangement by phone, an immaculate loner with a copper’s haircut would be sitting in the pub or club or café when he arrived, always reading a paper but never turning the page.

The woman was a beauty, though. Not police. Definitely Secret Service.

“And how do you come to be in Glasgow?” he asked her.

“My husband is English, in the diplomatic service, and we are posted here.” Her gaze slipped from his to the glass-topped counter, and she added quietly, “His work is very secret.”

It was clumsy and unsophisticated, but she wasn’t embarrassed- like Rolf when Meehan realized he despised him, not a flicker of shame. They all thought he was an idiot. He wanted to show her he knew, to say that he knew who she was and what she was there for, but she was gorgeous and there was just the faintest chance of touching her.

He pointed at the pen in front of her. “Would you like to see one of these?”

“No, thank you, I am simply looking with curiosity. Why is it the case that you speak German?”

Meehan shrugged. “I lived there for a while.” He would have said it was in the East to give them more to talk about, but he didn’t know where Rolf and his friends had kept him. “In Frankfurt.”

“And yet your accent sounds from the East.” She raised her perfect eyebrows.

Meehan tried not to smile: he hadn’t said enough for her to hear his accent.

“I do not know many German speakers here.” She touched her white blond hair gently, drawing his eye to the intricacies of the coloring. “I find myself quite lonely.”

Jonny looked at Meehan, pursing his lips approvingly. He moved away to the far edge of the counter, leaving them alone. Meehan took out some pens from under the counter and let her look at them, lifting them and putting them down again, stroking the tortoiseshell casing on one, smiling at the extra-large inkwell on another. Their fingers touched once as he handed over a Cross with a calligraphic nib, his fingertip brushing her inner wrist. Her hand was as soft and warm as butter, and he would have given up the job just to touch it with his lips. He began to perspire.

She was a gorgeous twenty-five-year-old blonde, put together like a Miss World. Meehan knew what he looked like: he was five foot eight, acne-scarred, and out of shape. Done up he wasn’t much of a prize, but wearing a cheap uniform blazer and standing behind a counter, he must look a mess.

“Well, it was very nice to meet you,” she said, proffering a hand. “Perhaps I may come in again and talk with you in German?”

“Das wäre schön,” he said, and took her hand, intending to shake it firmly but professionally. She put her pretty hand in his, her fingertips curling as she pulled away, stroking the full length of his palm and making his mouth water. She turned on her perfect heels and clip-clopped away.

Jonny was at his elbow in a moment. “Patrick, you’re a hit with the ladies. I’d never have guessed. Is she coming back in? What was that ye said to her?”

“She said she’d come back in.” Meehan caught his breath. “And I said that would be lovely.”

“That coat must have cost what we earn in a month,” said Jonny, catching a final glimpse of her heading for the stairs to the exit. “From Paris, by the look of it.”

II

Meehan left the job two months later without ever telling Jonny his suspicions about her. The beautiful German appeared to him just once more, in the pub where he was meeting James Griffiths before their recce jaunt to Stranraer- the night he’d never be able to forget.

He and Griffiths had arranged to meet on the phone, and Griffiths had blurted out the name of the pub. He wasn’t the brightest and he couldn’t remember the code. Paddy was just pleased that he hadn’t said “tax decal robbery” and “Stranraer” on the phone as well.

The woman was alone when he came in. She was drinking a small lemonade and standing at the bar. She chatted with Meehan, expressing surprise at their meeting again, having no trouble remembering where she had seen him before. Meehan didn’t handle it well. He knew she was there because of Griffiths’s mistake and was wary and afraid. He was a little rude to her. She was wearing the coat again but this time had higher shoes on, beige court shoes, and a pale blue scarf at her throat. When she left, the entire pub turned and watched, staring at the door as it shut and bounced open again, giving them one more flash of her perfect ankle.

Later, after Rachel Ross died, during his seven long years in solitary confinement, Meehan remembered the woman and the way she slipped her hand through his, the way her hips moved inside her coat, the touch of her lipstick-sticky lips against each other. He had never seen such a beautiful woman outside the movies. He wondered whether she might have been his in another life. If he’d had an education, been born three miles to the west or south of the Gorbals, maybe he could have been charming and rich, a sophisticated linguist, a poet or painter, good enough for a woman like her.

He made up a history for her: She was a spy, yes, but she had been forced into it after escaping from the East. The British had threatened to hand her back over if she didn’t work for them. She had a husband, a handsome man with a job in science, but he had died young and left her alone. Meehan liked to think that although good-looking, the dead husband might have been a short man with bad skin, that Meehan might remind her of him in some way. She became a golden light in the dark years ahead. It was the one good thing about the aftermath of the East and Stranraer and the subsequent years of hell: being caught in the middle of it all meant that he had met her.

III

Seven years later Meehan was on exercise, walking around a concrete yard in a burst of black rain. Water smashed off the concrete, bouncing up his trouser legs, making his bare legs wet. He walked in a slow circle, his collar pulled up, while the guards watched him from the shelter of the doorway. He only got out once a fortnight. Apart from two months somewhere in the middle, he had always been kept in a solitary cell because he refused to work.

He wished he could draw. He’d do a picture of the yard and put it up on his wall and imagine himself out here whenever he wanted. He’d draw the Tapp Inn in the Gorbals, where all his cronies drank. Meehan had laughed louder and longer in the Tapp Inn than anywhere else. He’d draw it from outside, the colored glass windows and high white walls, and leave the door open so he could see the bar and fat Hannah Sweeny cleaning the glasses.

Over the years he had spent most of his time in Peterhead Prison on the gray, wind-lashed Aberdeen coast, and he had been in his present cell for eight months, but wherever they kept him the cells all looked the same. The walls were painted with thick paint, a gloss so that it could be washed clean whatever happened, even if a man had his throat cut and sprayed blood everywhere.

The thick paint meant that prisoners could scratch messages into the wall with the softest of implements: a sharpened spoon or a nail from a bed, sometimes even with a bit of flint found in the exercise yard. Paddy had read every single word on these walls. He had made up stories for the messages to pass the time. J. McC. TWO YEARS + FIVE DAYS was a street fighter from Edinburgh who robbed a post office. SHITEBALLS was a ned, a nonearning thug who beat his wife to death with a shoe. The stories had become so familiar that Paddy had fallen out with some of them. He was sure LICK MY CUNT had been written by a nonce, and the Rangers graffiti wound him up so he had stuck some of his pictures over them. The messages from one poof to another annoyed him. He felt implicated by their sexiness and tender words, so he stuck pictures over them too. The things he hung on his wall formed a senseless pattern, some up high, some down low- full stops to imaginary arguments.

Prisoners weren’t usually allowed to put up pictures in solitary, but they let Meehan do it because he had been in for so long. He had seven things on his wall, one for every year he had served for Rachel Ross. He felt it was an important statement that he hadn’t chosen to put up scuddy pictures of birds like guys who were waiting out their time. Instead, he had chosen to pin up important letters about his case, including a Crown Office letter stating that his application to sue the police for perjury had been received. He wasn’t allowed to bring the case but was proud that he had tried; it was an obscure part of Scots law, and he had discovered it himself. The Sunday Times special investigation into his case was pinned to the wall as well, and nearby a Scottish Daily News front page: a confession to the murder of Rachel Ross by Ian Waddell. Waddell wouldn’t name the second man, the only person in the world who could corroborate his story and release Paddy Meehan.

The only color picture on the wall was the red-and-black script on the cover of the book Ludovic Kennedy had written about his conviction. Next to it a one-page point-by-point dismissal of the case, from the disputed traces of Rachel Ross’s blood on Meehan’s trousers to the paper scraps from Abraham’s safe being found in Griffiths’s pocket.

He was trying hard to keep his mind. He counted things over and over: the bars, the squares of the mesh covering the window, the bangs on the pipes as they heated up in the morning and cooled at night. He had tried to count every cut in the wall, every line scratch, but the distinctions became too technical, and he couldn’t decide between continuous lines that changed direction and individual incisions. He talked to himself in a normal voice, without shame or embarrassment, quite unworried about who would hear him. He said the same things over and over. Bastards. Arseholes. Not me, pal, it wasn’t me. Das wäre schön. Das wäre schön, Lieben. Mein Lieben.

She sauntered through his cell a hundred times a night, asking for pens and finding herself lonely, moving her snaky hips like a dancer. Sometimes she danced for him, tiny steps, raising a foot and then another, the belt on her leopard-skin coat swinging to and fro. A Mediterranean summer gleam shone around her. She rarely looked at him, keeping her grassy-green eyes on her feet as she danced and staring straight ahead when she walked. He didn’t just see her when he wanted a tug either. He saw her when he felt low; when he saw himself in his filthy surroundings and read the messages from the men who had been in here before him; when he suspected that he was just like them, no better, no mistake. Then she would come and bring the light and speak to him in broken German. When his appeals were turned down and the home secretary decided against reopening the case, then she would come to him. Sometimes she would sit on his horsehair bed and hold his hand. Her skin was soft, like air. Other times he didn’t see her but just knew she was out of his line of vision. He reached back to touch her sometimes, and she might touch his neck with her manicured fingertips before floating away, leaving him warm and happy.

He had to ration her company to keep it special. During the worst times he tried to keep her out of his thoughts altogether, afraid she would become tainted by the association.

Coming back from exercise, Meehan walked through the open door into his cell and stood dripping onto the floor, keeping his back to the door so the screw couldn’t see him smiling. He loved the rain.