Field of Blood

I

Paddy Meehan heard the mob from half a mile away, chanting in a low, slow bray, getting faster and faster, until he began to sweat with panic, adding to the stench of piss and worry inside the police van. It was nine thirty on a weekday morning, but three hundred people had found the time to gather outside the court to see the bastard charged with old Rachel Ross’s murder.

He kept thinking that the van was in the middle of them, that the noise was as loud as it could get, but then another second would pass, the van would move another few feet, and the crowd outside would get louder. When they finally rolled to a stop the sound was deafening. The two uniformed policemen glanced at each other nervously, one holding the door handle, the other holding Meehan’s arm. They turned to the plainclothes CID men sitting near the back of the van, looking to them for the signal to go.

“Right, boys,” one of them shouted at the uniforms. “You two stay in front, we’ll follow up and watch his back. On three. One, two…” The blanket went over Meehan’s head, and in the darkness his face convulsed with terror. “Three.”

The rear doors to the van flew open and the two officers on either side pulled Meehan into the road. He could see the pavement below him, the glint from the coppers’ shiny shoes, and the first step up to the court. Stumbling in darkness, he heard men’s voices and women screaming, children shouting that he should hang, that he was a bastard, a murderer. The CID men grabbed the back of his jacket, reckless of skin, shoving and pushing, hurrying him up the stairs. The policemen were frightened. Tightening their lock on his elbows, they lifted him off his feet. In the sudden darkness beneath the gray blanket, he heard the fast slap of feet running on road and encouraging cries from far away. The policemen jerked sideways as a brown shoe scraped his shin. The assailant was pulled off, and the policemen dragged Meehan up the final steps and bundled him through the doors.

Every time Meehan had ever been in court before, he had waited patiently in the holding cells, but not this time. When they pulled the blanket off him he found himself in a witness room annexed to the court. He couldn’t let them see how shaken he was, so Meehan grabbed the nearest CID man by the lapels and screamed out all the terror and panic. “Do your fucking job! Do your fucking job!” They pulled him off, wrestling the grasp of his fingers from the fabric. He was wild-eyed and panting. “Find Griffiths. Check my fucking alibi. I gave you his address. What’s wrong with you?”

Meehan fell back into a chair and looked down. His trouser leg was soaked with blood from the brown shoe.

This was all wrong. He was a safecracker, a professional for Godsake, a peterman. He learned his trade with Gentle Johnny Ramensky; he had references. He wouldn’t get involved in a tie-up. And anyway, he had a solid alibi. He was in Stranraer with James Griffiths on the night of Rachel Ross’s murder, and they’d been seen. They had picked up two Kilmarnock girls and driven them home. All they had to do was talk to Griffiths or the girls and he would be free.

II

At the same time that Paddy Meehan’s van set out for Ayr High Court, five officers of the Glasgow Criminal Investigation Department were pulling up in a Ford Anglia outside the address Meehan had given them for his alibi, James Griffiths.

Holyrood Crescent was a graceful curve of town houses facing onto private central gardens. Griffiths had a couple of outstanding warrants for car theft, but the officers weren’t interested in them. They wanted to know if he would corroborate Meehan’s story about the night of Rachel Ross’s death.

It was midmorning on a gorgeous summer’s day, and the generous trees in the central gardens of Holyrood Crescent were lush and full, rippling in the warm wind. The house had been built as a single dwelling, chopped up into apartments for let to commercial travelers and decent families who were down on their luck but wanted to keep a good address. Detectives had done a reconnaissance of the property earlier that morning. They questioned the caretaker about Griffiths’s habits. He would just be getting up now, the man said, and he promised to leave the front door to the house unlocked.

Now the officers were led by their superior up the three flights, following the red stair carpet worn threadbare in the middle. Griffiths’s room was on the attic floor, in the old servants’ quarters, where the stairs were narrow and listing.

It was a small landing with a single four-paneled door. The first officer to reach the top of the stairs banged on it sharply, shouting, “James Griffiths, open up. It’s the CID.”

A chair scratched against the floor inside. They glanced at one another.

“Come on, Griffiths, open up or we’ll open up for you.”

A floorboard squeaked. Griffiths was messing about in there, taunting five officers. The detective inspector pointed to a detective constable and then at the door, motioning for the other officers to back down the steps and give him room. When everyone had finished noisily rearranging themselves around the tiny hall, the DC shouted at the door, “Step back, Griffiths, we’re coming in.”

He ran at the door, shoulder first, aiming for the lock but hitting and breaking one of the panels, pushing it in so that it flapped open into the bright room, then snapped shut. They saw him for less than a second, and not one of them believed it. Griffiths was sitting on a wooden chair facing the door, a blank expression in his hooded eyes. He wore bandoliers of bullets across his chest, and resting in his lap was a single-barreled shotgun. The DC had had his head bowed against possible splinters from the wood and had seen nothing. He backed up and ran at it again. This time the door panel cracked and snapped off, dropping inside the door.

Framed in the splintered opening, James Griffith rose from the chair, lifting the nose of his shotgun. The first blast hit the DC in the shoulder, spinning him round, the meat and blood of his arm splattering over the landing walls. The second shot hit the ceiling, a plaster-and-horsehair cloud exploding in the air. Policemen tumbled over one another to get down the first narrow flight. They reassembled on the floor below and carried the DC down the rickety stairs in an ungainly blood-smeared scramble as Griffiths fired random shots out of windows and at walls.

Downstairs they ran out into the street and found a passerby lying in the road, shocked and speechless, bleeding from the leg. The DI shouted into the radio that Griffiths had at least one gun, someone thought they saw a rifle as well, send someone with a gun right now, get the army, anyone, because the bugger was firing into the street. They could still hear shooting in the house.

Griffiths fired a last shot from his rifle into the hallway before running out the back door. In the walled garden wooden bedsteads were propped up with veneer peeling off them; broken chairs and a settee were piled up on rotting linoleum. The door to the lane was blocked by a tallboy. Climbing on top of it, Griffiths dropped the shotgun and the rifle over the crumbling brick wall and hoisted himself over, dropping down the far side. He picked up his guns and ran down the back lane.

He felt higher than he ever had in his life, like stealing cars times ten. He was a lifelong criminal and knew the score. The police wouldn’t let him live after this. He wouldn’t have to face the consequences. It would be like before, when he robbed or got chased, but he wouldn’t ever go to jail again.

Ecstatic that this was his final day he ran faster, stumbling on the uneven ground, acutely sensitive to the wind pushing his hair off his face, the warm, damp breeze on his skin. His shirt flapped loose around his body, feet landed on damp turf, and his own, lonely heart thumped hard in his chest. The high walls dropped away and he was in a bright residential street. The sudden sun frightened him, so he raised his rifle and fired three times. He could see figures running, melting into the brightness, and then, as if the fact of other people had been a mistake, he was alone again.

He breathed, felt the sun prickle at the sweat on his brow, heard his breath suck in, push out. His hand was sweating on the steel of the gun barrel. Streets away a car stopped too quickly. He wanted to be alone, but when he was alone he got confused. He needed an audience to be brave in front of. He was too excited to drive, too heated up. He needed a drink.

It was a small pub with an unassuming exterior, painted black, with red trim on the high windows. Inside, two old men sat at separate tables. One was reading a paper, keeping up the pretense that a quarter gill of whisky at half ten in the morning was a casual enjoyment. The other old man stared straight ahead, dead-eyed, dreading the last of his glass.

The day gleamed through the windows, but the sunlight didn’t temper the gloom. The pub was peaceful, a contemplative pocket of calm reflection. Behind the bar was the charge hand, a well-built ex-boxer named Connelly, who was looking down his flattened nose at the glass he was drying when Griffiths kicked the swing door open into the stale and dusty room. Connelly looked up, smiling at Griffiths’s bandoliers, thinking he was in fancy dress.

“I’ll kill the first man that moves,” shouted Griffiths. The two old men froze, the newspaper reader holding his glass still to his mouth. “I’ve shot four policemen this morning.”

Griffiths stood up on the foot rail and grabbed a chubby bottle of brandy from behind the bar, uncorking it and drinking from the neck. It tasted peppery and exciting. Griffiths saw himself standing there, taking what he wanted, and felt like giggling. Instead he swung his shotgun vertical, fired into the ceiling, and a burst of plaster hit the floor. The man with the newspaper twitched forward to put his glass down and Griffiths spun around and fired the rifle. The dead man slumped forward, a ribbon of red fluttering from his neck to the black floor.

“You bastard,” whispered Connelly, dropping the dishtowel to the floor. “You complete bloody bastard.” He reached for the brandy bottle and yanked it away from Griffiths’s greedy little mouth, dropping it so it bounced and rolled to the wall, glug-glugging its contents to the floor. “Look at him.” He pointed at the old man facedown on the table, the flow from the hole in his neck pulsing in time to the noise from the brandy bottle. “Look at Wullie. Look what you’ve done to that wee man, you bastard.”

Unable to contain his anger anymore, Connelly ran out from behind the bar, and Griffiths could see that he didn’t care how many guns he had.

“Out! Get out of my fucking pub!” Connelly took hold of Griffiths’s shirt and pulled him towards the door. Griffiths scrambled for purchase, holding his rifle and shotgun tight to his body. Connelly let go and Griffiths backed out hurriedly through the door, instantly swallowed by the white summer light. Connelly shouted after him, “And fucking stay out, an” all!”

He just had time to take a deep breath and convince himself not to chase the guy into the street when three shots ripped through the open door, one of them tearing the sleeve off his shirt. Connelly contracted, bending his knees and stiffening his thick neck, and sprang through the wall of light, screaming to the full capacity of both his lungs.

“Arsehole!”

But Griffiths had run off, lifting the two unwieldy guns up high to shoulder height as he legged it around the corner. He was out of sight, but Connelly knew exactly where he had gone: everyone in the street was frozen still, staring at the first right corner. Cars had stopped in the middle of the street so that drivers could stare.

Around the corner, a long-distance lorry driver who had parked to consult a map of Glasgow heard a series of bangs. He looked up to see what appeared to be a small, hatless Mexican bandit running towards him, followed by an angry muscleman a hundred yards behind. The cab door opened next to him and a shotgun barrel was pointed at his face.

The man fell out of the lorry and Griffiths swung himself up into the cab, started the engine, and sped off, leaving Connelly standing by the side of the road, so angry that he kicked a wall and broke three small bones in his toes.

Griffiths managed two miles. His last ever turn was into the center of a Springburn cul-de-sac. He stopped the engine and pulled on the hand brake. A packet of Woodbine cigarettes was sitting under a yellowed newspaper on the dashboard. He sat back in the seat and lit one with a match, watching the entrance to the cul-de-sac in the nearside mirror. He couldn’t back out; he was convinced that the police were right behind him. He waited, smoking his cigarette and watching. They didn’t come.

Sure that they were waiting around the corner, he slowly opened the driver’s-side door and dropped the yellow newspaper onto the ground, expecting a police bullet to hit it. Nothing happened. The paper fell into the road with a soft thud. The summer wind flicked through the crispy pages. Griffiths reasoned that he must be in a blind spot. He stepped out tentatively, holding his guns across his chest. His footing slipped as he stepped down from the high cab and he landed heavily on his heel, feeling slightly foolish for the very last time.

Resting his guns on his hips, he stepped away from the cab. He pointed the guns at a streetlight, at an already broken tenement window, at the entrance to the road. He was scaring the locals, the coppers, making the law wait for him for once, standing like the cowboys did in the movies.

There was no one there. The unarmed police had kept too much of a distance and had lost him. The street Griffiths was in was derelict; the tenements were damp and rat infested. James Griffiths’s last living moments in the soft summer air were pissed away, like his life, posing for an audience that wasn’t watching.

Over and beyond the surrounding tenements he could hear children laughing and screaming, enjoying the summer holidays. A magpie flew over his head, a beautiful flash of turquoise on its broad, black wing, and Griffiths suddenly felt profoundly sad to be leaving. It had been a poor excuse for a life. A surge of self-pity prompted him to run, and he bolted for the farthest tenement, running through the close mouth and up the stairs. It was a rotten building: patches of plaster the size of a child were missing from the burgundy walls, the windows on the landings were all smashed. He ran all the way up to the top floor and kicked open a door.

It was an abandoned room and kitchen; dirty gray net curtains flapped at the broken window. The walls were lumpy and stained brown by galloping damp. Through the window he could see a swing park, sliced in half by the shadow cast by the building. This is where it was going to end, in a dirty flat with a bad smell and a broken window. He stood and caught his breath, tears itching at his eyes. They might not shoot him. They might talk to him and convince him to give himself up and send him back to pokey for-ever. Or else he might escape and be forced to go somewhere else and start all over again. Waiting, always waiting, for it to go wrong again.

Griffiths pulled up a stool next to the window and, raising his telescopic rifle, started to shoot at the children in the light.

The last thing James Griffiths saw was a gun barrel sliding through the letter box towards him and a tiny puff of smoke and flame. As the bullet flew towards him, his brain sent out a signal to smile. The impulse didn’t have time to reach the muscles of his face before the bullet pierced his heart.

III

Meehan was in the van, being driven back to his remand cell in Barlinnie Prison. His shin had stopped bleeding but it still throbbed, drawing his mind back to the mob outside the court. He thought of James Griffiths fondly, hoping he wouldn’t be too annoyed that he had given the police his home address, that he would understand how desperate he had felt. Griffiths hated the police; he wouldn’t like them knowing where he stayed, but it was just a rented gaff. He could move. Meehan would offer him the deposit for a new place.

The detective chief inspector waited until the van was on the main road to Glasgow and an officer was on either side of Meehan, ready to grab him if he went nuts. He told him that Griffiths was dead, that he had committed suicide after a long shootout with many dead. When they searched Griffiths’s dead body they found paper in his car coat pocket that matched a sample taken from Abraham Ross’s safe.

The officers on either side of Meehan watched for a reaction, ready to jump up and give him a doing if he lashed out. Meehan had to be told three times that his friend was dead. Completely. Not sick, not winged. Dead. He sat back, pressing his head against the wall of the van. The plant of the paper from the safe would convict him, Meehan knew it. It was the Secret Service. They were setting him up because of Russia.

He waited until they got back to Barlinnie and he was put in a holding cell, one of a row of cupboard rooms at the drop-off yard with their names chalked onto the door. Naked and ready for the search, Meehan turned his back to the Judas window and sobbed with panic.

IV

That same sunny morning lingered in Rutherglen while small girls and boys gathered excitedly in the courtyard of St. Columbkill’s RC Chapel. The class had been given lessons on confession for weeks beforehand. Despite having the theological basis explained to them over and over, in detail and by analogy, only the already very damaged children could properly grasp the concept of sin. All the confession meant to young Paddy Meehan was washing her soul so that she could make her first communion and wear a big white dress with flowers embroidered on the hem and a blue velvet cape. Paddy got her photo taken in Mary Ann’s cape when it had been her turn. Even the three Protestant Beattie girls next door got their photo taken in the cape and veil, though they asked the Meehans not to show their mum, because she was in the Orange Lodge and marched against Popery in the summer when the weather was nice.

The boys from her class knelt in front of her in the warm, dusky chapel. They giggled and nudged one another in the pew, growing increasingly bold until spindly Miss Stenhouse walked silently out of the dark side chapel and glared at them, picking one out for a silent finger-point. The boys slid apart in the pew, only seven and still biddable with a look.

The confessional was dark and fusty, like the inside of a cupboard. Behind the trellis window she could see the brand-new parish priest, an old man with hair up his nose whom no one was allowed to laugh at because he was a priest. He was staring at his knees. He waited for a moment before prompting her to begin.

Paddy said her lines, repeating them singsong-style, hearing the rest of the class chant along with her in her head.

“Forgive me, father, for I have sinned. This is my first confession and I have committed the sin of being disrespectful to my mother and father. I stole sweets from my sister and I lied about it and my brother Martin got the blame-”

“And did you own up then?”

Paddy looked up.

“When your brother was blamed for your theft, did you own up then?”

Paddy hadn’t been told about the priest speaking. It was throwing her off. “No.”

He exhaled a whistle through his hairy nose and shook his head. “Well, that’s very bad. You must try to be honest.”

Paddy thought she was honest, but a priest was saying she wasn’t, and priests knew everything. She was afraid to tell him more.

“Are you sorry for what you did?”

“Yes, Father.” Martin always blamed her when he did things. He always did.

“And what other sins have you committed?”

Paddy took a deep breath. She’d peed up a close once and hit a dog on the nose for snarling. She couldn’t tell him those things, they were even worse than blaming Martin. She took a breath and abandoned herself to the terrible sin of not making a good confession. “I can’t think of any others.”

He nodded heavily. “Very well.” He muttered absolution, gave her a penance of five Hail Marys and two Our Fathers, and dismissed her.

Kneeling in the front row of the chapel, Paddy looked at the child next to her. The girl was counting off three fingers as her lips moved through the prayers. Paddy owed God seven fingers. It seemed to her infinitely, grotesquely unjust. Ostentatiously holding up three fingers, Paddy looked around at the moving lips and closed eyes of the other children and smiled sweetly to herself as she began to mutter quickly: One potato, two potato, three potato, four…

After the confession, just before tea, Paddy stood in the front room of their house, swaying to a song on the wireless. Her two brothers were fighting on the settee, while Rory, their ginger dog, tried to join in, his hard pinkie sticking out under his tummy.

The news came on the wireless, and the very first story made them all listen. The north of Glasgow had come to a standstill when a man went around shooting at people. The boys stopped wrestling and listened. Rory’s pinkie retracted. The man had killed two policemen and injured four passersby. The police had shot him dead, and Paddy Meehan had been charged with murder.

The boys sat up and looked at their little sister, mouths dropping open, eyes wide with wonder.

Outside St. Columbkill’s girls were showing off their white dresses, the boys just pleased to be together and outside. Paddy knew she would die. Her mother had dressed her carefully in Mary Ann’s white dress. She had white gloves, made of a material so fine that the seams on the fingers were visible from the outside. On her feet she wore lace-trimmed ankle socks and white sandals that she would grow into. Her soul was too dirty for communion: some splinter of her was a murderer.

She once saw her father, Con, pick up a frying pan of smoking oil and run a tap into it. The water exploded, carrying particles of scalding oil through the air. Con still had red speckles on his neck. This is how it would be when she took communion in her mouth, Paddy knew it: cold water into hot oil.

Mass was conducted by her hairy-nosed confessor. He spoke throughout in the priestly four-step, a punctuation-free method of delivery that bleached all interest and meaning from his words:

And now we see

That God so loved

The world that he

Gave his only begotten

Son for our sins

Suddenly Miss Stenhouse was in the aisle, conducting the children with her fingers, bringing a boy and a girl out of each side to walk up to the altar rail and kneel down. Paddy followed the finger, clip-clopping up to the rail in her white sandals, and knelt on the velvet cushion.

Father Brogan approached, flanked by the altar boys. She was glad he would be there. She hoped he’d get scars on his neck. An altar boy held a silver plate under her chin.

“Body of Christ.”

She amen’d, shut her eyes tight, squeezing a panicked tear from her left eye, and opened her mouth to receive the Holy Eucharist. It melted quickly in her hot mouth. The priest moved off but Paddy stayed on her knees, eyes shut. Miss Stenhouse had to tap her on the shoulder to get her to move.

She crossed herself and went back to kneel in her pew. She grinned at the girl next to her. They giggled high and fast for no particular reason, pushing a prayer book back and forth along the seat while the priest gave the adults communion.

Outside, Paddy had her photo taken many times. Mary Ann got a shot of her cape and then their mother took them to the Cross Café for a double nugget ice cream.

And Jesus didn’t do anything. Paddy watched for him at school and at mass. She waited for their dog to die or her parents to fall ill. She waited for weeks.

It was after tea on a particularly bad-tempered day. Paddy and her sisters were hanging listlessly around their living room, climbing over furniture, being mean to one another because they were trapped indoors, frustrated by heavy rain. Their mother was busy in the kitchen and the radiogram was tuned to a local station, turned up loud to drown out the noise of the bickering children. It was the first item on the Scottish news. Paddy Meehan had been convicted of murdering Rachel Ross. He had been sent to live in a prison for the rest of his life.

Mary Ann looked at Paddy. “What have you done?”

Caroline nodded. “You killed a lady.”

Paddy tipped her head back and screamed at the ceiling.

When Con Meehan arrived home after work, he sat down in the big chair and pulled his sobbing youngest daughter onto his knee, holding the newspaper open and making sure she was nice and comfy so he could read to her. He read the description of the court, the who-said-what, the technical things she couldn’t possibly understand, rolling through it in a boring voice to calm her. Mr. Paddy Meehan had given a speech in the court, he said. He had stood up and talked to them after they found him guilty. “I am innocent of this crime, and so is Jim Griffiths. You have made a terrible mistake,” he had said.

Paddy sniffed and wiped her nose dry with the back of her hand. “Is it right, Daddy? Did they make a mistake?”

Con shrugged. “Might be, Sunshine. We all make mistakes. And Mr. Meehan is a Catholic as well.”

“Are the people who put him in prison Orange men?”

“They might be.”

She thought about it for a moment. “But he didn’t do anything wrong.”

Con paused. “The prisons are full of innocent men. Mr. Meehan’ll have to stay there until they admit it.”

Paddy considered it briefly and began to scream again.

“Oof, for petesake.” Con stood up, letting her slide messily off his knee to the floor. “Trisha,” he shouted, climbing over her and heading for the kitchen. “Trisha, come and do something with her.”

While he was out of the room Mary Ann snuck over to Paddy, who was screaming on the floor. She stroked her hair clumsily. “Don’t cry, Baddy,” she said guiltily, using Paddy’s baby name. “Don’t, Baddy-baby, don’t cry.”

But Paddy couldn’t stop crying. She cried so much that she threw up her macaroni and cheese.

V

The ongoing drama of Meehan’s imprisonment unfolded slowly as Paddy grew up. She read and reread every article and interview, watched the Panorama documentary twice, and visited the sites of the case: the high courts in Edinburgh and Ayr and the bungalow in Blackburn Place where Rachel Ross was murdered. She read Chapman Pincher’s account of Meehan’s trip to East Germany and planned to travel behind the Iron Curtain herself one day to see if she could find corroborating evidence that he had ever been there. The British government said he was a fantasist and had been in an English prison the whole time.

Paddy didn’t stop believing in Jesus, but she didn’t trust him. Unable to conceive of a world without a central story, she substituted Meehan’s, forming it in her mind, replaying his passion and sentence, tracing the buildup to his conviction, trying to shoehorn sense into the mess of his life. Meehan became a noble hero to her, maligned and defamed in a thousand different ways. She drew huge life lessons from the myth and emulated qualities she projected onto him: stoic loyalty, righteousness, dignity, and perseverance. He was released because of the work of a campaigning journalist, so she became a journalist. She gave talks about the case at school and changed her status from pleasant fat girl to intellectual heavyweight.

It was always the myth that fascinated her, never the real Meehan. The real Meehan was morally awkward, compromised by a life of petty burglary, a sour temper, and a bad complexion. Now he was back living in Glasgow, hanging around bars in the city center, spilling his story to anyone who would listen. Several journalists had offered to introduce her, but she didn’t want to meet him. She had to face the uncomfortable truth that Meehan wasn’t a nice man and he wasn’t trying to help anyone but himself.