Field of Blood

I

The Drygate flats looked like lost American tourists. Painted and peeling Miami pink, they were topped with jaunty little Frank Lloyd Wright hats and banded with balconies. The designer had overlooked the setting: a brutally windy Glaswegian hillside facing the Great Eastern Hotel, a soot-blackened doss-house for lost men.

Thomas Dempsie’s mother had been transferred by the council shortly after her husband was convicted of murdering Thomas. It was less than half a mile away from the old house, just down the hill from Townhead. Paddy guessed that she would have been moved by the council for her own safety. The News had published her new address when Alfred killed himself in prison.

Paddy waited for five minutes in the lobby, watching the red digital display above the steel doors tell her that the lift was moving exclusively between floors four and seven, before accepting that she would have to walk. She didn’t like running or hills or walking up stairs. She didn’t like the feeling of pockets of fat jigging on her stomach or hips. She didn’t believe thin people ever got sweaty or out of breath and felt she was drawing attention to her size when she did.

Everything in the urine-stained stairwell that could be broken was broken: rubber had been torn off the handrail, leaving a filthy black substance that stuck to the skin; tiles on the floor had been lifted, leaving bald, tacky splats of adhesive. Several landings were littered with glue-filled plastic bags, the discarded tins often lying nearby, some still giving off a detectable tang. Paddy had to stop a couple of times to get her breath on the way to the eighth floor, and each time she stopped she could hear people’s lives clattering and murmuring through the walls around her, smell the evening meals being prepared and the moldy rubbish blocking chutes. She reached the eighth floor and paused in front of the gray fire door, taking another breath and reminding herself why she was there and what she wanted to ask about. She had a job to do, she was a reporter. Thrilled by the game, she pulled the open door and stepped out onto the windy balcony.

The row of front doors were painted a uniform pillar-box red. Between each was a living room window for the neighbors to peer into and a smaller, mottled bathroom window. As she stood waiting in front of 8F for an answer to her knock, Paddy noted that the net curtains in both were gray and tired. An empty bottle lay on the blurred bathroom sill, next to a pool of what looked like dried toothpaste. She felt her lip curl in disgust but checked herself. She shouldn’t be small-minded about how other people lived, it was none of her business. She stared hard at the door and could see that the wind on the landing had brought hairs and dust and grit to it when the paint was still wet, giving it a textured microbe-safari finish. The door opened cautiously and a strange woman looked out at her.

“Oh.” Paddy let out a little startled exclamation, surprised by the woman’s odd appearance. “Hello?”

Tracy Dempsie had gone to great lengths to disguise any natural advantage she had ever had. Her hair was dyed aubergine and pulled up in a tight ponytail that dragged her face back into an unflattering mask. Her black mascara and eyeliner were thick and migrating under her eyes. Her pupils were so dilated that the blue iris was little more than a halo. Tracy blinked slowly, cutting out the scary world for a delicious moment, knowing that all the sharp edges would be waiting for her if the prescriptions ever ran out.

“Hello, Mrs. Dempsie? I’m Heather Allen,” said Paddy, half hoping it would all go sour and Tracy would phone the paper and complain about her, compounding her dismissal. “I’m a journalist with the Daily News.”

Reluctantly, Tracy opened the door, and the wind shoved Paddy into the hall. The decor was as garish as Mrs. Dempsie herself. The swirling carpet looked like an abstract representation of an argument between red and yellow. The walls were covered in jagged yellow plaster. Tracy shuffled back, walking off to the living room. Paddy paused in the hall and then guessed that she had been invited to follow.

A black-and-white portable television was on in the corner, showing a nature program about otters, their little silvery pelts slipping in and out of water. Around the set, lost in the same loud carpet as the hall, were cigarette packets and dirty plates. A saucer at the side of the settee had a bit of toast and three dog ends stubbed out on it. Two wire clotheshorses were arranged around the burning fire with sheets draped over them, sending wave after wave of wet heat into the living room.

Tracy saw her looking at it. “That’s the high flats. No lines for washing. Ye can’t leave a washing out on a line ’cause someone’ll nick it.”

“You used to have a house, didn’t ye?”

“Aye, Townhead. Up the hill, know?” Tracy lifted her hand slowly and lowered it again, indicating over there, where the badness was. “Council moved us here after Alfred got the jail. Then your mob published this address.” She frowned bitterly, looking at Paddy as if it had been her decision.

“They have to do that, by law,” said Paddy, “to identify ye. In case people think it’s someone else of the same name.”

“Well, everyone knew where we’d got moved to. We lost the Kennedy Street house for nothing, know?”

They were standing facing each other, Paddy still wearing her duffel coat and scarf, her underclothes damp after the exertion of the stairs. Tracy blinked again, oblivious to her guest’s discomfort, and her eyes fell on the television.

“We got moved?” said Paddy. “Who’s ‘we’?”

“Me and the wean.”

“I didn’t know ye had other kids.”

“I had a boy before. I was married before I met Alfred. I can’t manage much, so he’s with his dad now.” Tracy nodded heavily. “Ye can sit down if ye like.”

They looked at the settee together. Tracy had left some damp clothes sitting on one end of it, and they were smelling faintly sour.

“Thanks.”

Paddy took off her coat and sat it on her knee, taking care to stay away from the source of the smell. Tracy sat next to her, her knee lazily pressing into Paddy’s thigh. She didn’t seem to notice. She kept her eyes on the telly and lifted a silver packet of Lambert and Butler off the coffee table.

“Smoke?”

Paddy could see exactly where she sucked her fags: her two front teeth had a dirty little sunrise impressed on them.

“No thanks,” said Paddy, taking the empty notepad out of her bag and leaning back so Tracy couldn’t see the paper. She flicked elaborately through to the middle, as if the pages were choked with vital information from other cases.

Tracy took a cigarette out of the packet with a slack hand, lit it with a match, and took three consecutive draws, tilting her head back to expand her lungs.

“So, ye said on the phone ye wanted to see me about Thomas?”

“That’s right.” Paddy positioned her pen. “Because of the Baby Brian case-”

“Tragic.”

“It was.”

“Those wee bastards should be hanged.” Tracy touched her mouth in self-reproach. “’Scuse me, but I blame the mothers. Where were they? Who lets their boy do that to another woman’s wean?”

“Well, because of it we’re doing a series about past stories, and your son Thomas was one of the names that came up. Would you be all right talking about it?”

Tracy shut her eyes tight, squeezing the lids together. “It’s not easy, know? Because first I loss my baby and then I loss my man. Alfred was innocent.” Tracy shifted uncomfortably in her chair. “He always said that. He was at the pitch-and-toss that night. That’s how he didn’t have an alibi.”

The pitch-and-toss were illegal gambling schools, impromptu affairs run by gangsters in pubs and sheds and open-air waste grounds all over the city. Men could bet away their family’s weekly wage on the turn of a few coins.

“Surely someone would come forward?”

“No one remembered him at the pitch-and-toss. Gamblers don’t notice ye if ye don’t have a big stake.” Her eyes deadened. “He wasn’t a man you’d remember, Alfred.”

The misery was vivid in Tracy’s eyes, and suddenly Paddy didn’t feel like a junior scoop, she felt like a fat girl cheering herself up by quizzing a bereaved woman about her private business.

Tracy nursed her fag, letting it dawdle on her lips. “You wouldn’t notice him. He was a good dad, though, a really good dad. Loved his weans, handed his money in, know?” Her eyes were brimming, threatening to flood her face with mascara.

Paddy dropped her notebook into her lap. “I feel terrible coming here bringing this all up for you again.”

“Never mind.” Tracy flicked her cigarette ash into a dirty saucer on the floor. “I don’t mind. It’s always with me anyway. Every day.”

Paddy looked at the television. A voice-over was explaining breeding cycles while two otters swam around each other.

“If Alfred didn’t kill your son, who do you think did?”

Tracy squashed her fag out in the saucer. “D’you know what happened to Thomas?”

“No.”

“They strangled him and left him on the railway to get run over. He was in bits when I got him back.” Her chin contracted into a circle of white and red dimples and her bottom lip began to twitch. To stop herself crying she picked up her packet again, flicking open the lid and pulling out another fag, lifting her box of matches. “No man could do that to his own wean.” The head flew off the match as she struck it and landed on the carpet, melting a little crater in the man-made fabric. Tracy stamped on it with her foot, screwing the flame into the ground. “Bloody things. Made in Poland, for petesake. As if we cannae make matches here.”

“I didn’t know that about Thomas. The old papers never said that.”

“They’re shutting all the works and we’re buying this rubbish from the bloody Poles. Half this landing has been laid off. And why would Alfred leave Thomas in Barnhill? He was never up that way. He didn’t even know anyone there.”

Paddy’s face felt suddenly cold. Barnhill was where Callum Ogilvy lived.

“Whereabouts in Barnhill?”

“The tracks. Before the station.” Tracy stared at the television. “He was there all night before he was found. First morning train went over him.”

“I didn’t know, I’m sorry,” mumbled Paddy. Thomas’s death was all too real now, and she wished she hadn’t come here. She wished something nice had happened to Tracy. “Did you not marry again?”

“No. Been married twice, that was enough. I was pregnant at fifteen, married at sixteen. He was just a boy himself. Never there. In and out of Barlinnie. A wild man.” She churned out a grin. “Always go for the bad ones, don’t ye?”

Paddy didn’t, but she nodded to be agreeable.

“He got a big shock when Thomas was killed, cleaned up his act. Tried to be a father to his own boy. Had him to stay when the neighbors were attacking the house up the road. He stays with him still.”

Paddy nodded encouragingly. “At least he tries.”

“Oh, he tries. He does that,” Tracy conceded, dropping her voice to a whisper.

“Brian was taken on the same day as Thomas. Did you notice?”

“Of course I did. Eight-year anniversary.” Tracy took a draw on her cigarette and watched the otters slither over each other, sedating herself with the television. “Stays with ye, the death of a child. Never seems by, like it’s always happened this morning.”

II

As Paddy stepped out onto the windy veranda she saw a swath of green light on the balcony floor, thinning between the shutting lift doors. Driven by her dread of the grim stairs, she ran for it, catching the doors with just an inch to go, frantically pressing the button on the wall.

There were two boys in the lift, both about thirteen, guarding either side of the doorway. Paddy stepped in and heard the door shut behind her before she had the wit to change her mind. With a dawning sense of danger, she turned around.

They were poor boys, she could see that, both wearing cheap parkas with flattened orange linings and thin fur edging on their hoods, both in school trousers that were too short for them, with tide marks where hems had been let down.

The lights through the tiny lift window showed them passing the seventh floor, a big industrial stamped number on the far wall flicking past and registering on Paddy’s eye. After glancing at each other, the boys turned to look at her.

One of them had his hood up, covering all but his nose and mouth. The other’s hair was cut so short that telltale patches of ringworm were visible on his scalp. Each of them flicked his eyes at the other again, signaling something sneaky and malign.

The most expensive thing she owned in the world was her monthly travel Transcard in her bag. Paddy pulled her bag strap over her head and held on to the base of it in case the boys tried to grab it.

They passed the fifth floor, the lift gathering momentum, the cable above their heads creaking.

The boys looked at each other again, smirking, putting their hands behind their backs and pushing themselves off the wall as if getting ready to pounce. It occurred to Paddy suddenly that one of the boys might be Tracy Dempsie’s other son. Either of them looked poor enough.

“I know your mum,” said Paddy, looking at the wall.

A little disconcerted, the boys glanced at each other again. “Eh?”

She looked at the ringwormed boy, who had spoken. “Is your mum called Tracy?”

He shook his head.

“Mine’s is dead,” said the hood, with such relish she doubted it was true.

Paddy put her hand in her pocket, feeling past the bits of tissue to her house keys, slipping them through her fingers to make a face-ripping fist. She tried speaking again, thinking that any local connection would protect her a little. “Do you know Tracy Dempsie on eight?”

The boys laughed. “She’s a fucking ugly hooker,” said the hood.

Paddy felt suddenly protective of Tracy, as if being insulted by small boys was compounding all the insults life had dealt her. “Hooker? Where’d ye get that word? Off the telly?”

The lift bounced to a stop on the ground floor. The boys stood still, staring at her feet as the doors slid open. The hood tipped his head back, his mouth falling open, eager to see what she would do.

Paddy held on to her bag with one hand and kept the other in her pocket. She worked hard not to turn her shoulder or give way to them, just to walk straight through the middle. She lifted her foot but faltered before taking the first step, prompting a giggle from one of the boys. As she stepped out into the foyer a cold sweat formed over the back of her neck. They could have cut her or raped her or mugged her and there would have been nothing she could do to defend herself. She was out of her depth.

She scuttled out of the lobby and the building, hurrying out of the shadow of the block and across a patch of grass, passing a garden party of old alkie men standing around a burning brazier, too late or too drunk for the Great Eastern Hotel’s seven o’clock check-in time.

III

Distracted by the memory of Tracy’s hollow eyes, Paddy walked up the steep hill to the blackened cathedral and cut around the back of the Townhead scheme to the old Dempsie house. She was walking fast, hurrying away from the fright of the boys and the unfamiliar air of regret in Tracy’s house.

She felt sure she had stumbled on something significant. Someone had killed Thomas Dempsie and left him in Barnhill. If the same person had killed Baby Brian on Thomas’s anniversary, they couldn’t leave him in Barnhill; they would have to leave him somewhere else if they didn’t want to draw attention to the similarities. That might be the reason they took him to Steps, to cover up the fact that it was a repeat murder. But it wasn’t a repeat: Callum Ogilvy and his friend had killed Baby Brian. They had his blood on them and their footprints were found there, and they were toddlers themselves when Thomas died. That could be good for her, though: if Farquarson thought Thomas Dempsie’s case was highly relevant, a better journalist would get to take it over. For her to get to write it up it needed to seem only quite interesting. Still, she shouldn’t even be considering it. Her mum would put her out of the house if her name appeared on any article that mentioned Baby Brian.

A plyboard wall ran along one side of Kennedy Street, blocking entry to one of the many bomb sites still pockmarking the city from the Second World War. On the other side, a snake of houses followed the spur of land around. They were mirror images of Gina Wilcox’s house, from the concrete steps leading up to the narrow door to the three-banded green fence. A nearby household had taken offense at the Irish Republican implications of the fence color and had repainted theirs a royal blue. Apart from one house using its small garden to store bald tires, the neighborhood was well tended, the front rooms cozy and peaceful when seen from the cold street.

Around the shoulder of the crescent she saw a middle-aged man in a navy overcoat walking down the road towards her, his hands jammed into his pockets. Paddy walked towards him and saw him flinch warily, hurrying to get past her.

“Excuse me?”

The man sped up.

“Can I speak to you, sir?”

He stopped and turned, looking her over. “Are you the police?”

“No,” she said. “Why would you think that?”

“Ye said ‘sir.’ You’re not the police?” he repeated, seeming annoyed that she had misrepresented herself.

“No. I’m Heather Allen, Daily News. I’m here about Thomas Dempsie?”

“Oh, aye, the wee fella that was murdered?”

“Yeah. Do you know which house was his?”

“There.” He pointed to the house with the tires in the garden. “The family moved away after. The mother lives in the high flats down at Drygate. It was his dad that killed him, ye know.”

Paddy nodded. “So they say.”

“Then he hanged himself in Barlinnie.”

“Aye, I heard that too.”

Together they looked at the house. Beyond the tires and the muddy grass, limp white curtains formed an arch in the window.

The man nodded. “Ye don’t know what goes on indoors, sure ye don’t. At least he was sorry enough to kill himself.”

“Aye. Didn’t they think he was taken from the garden?”

“At the start they did. He just went missing, but of course then it turns out that the daddy had him all along.”

“I see.”

The man shifted his weight uncertainly. “Is that it? Can I go?”

“Oh.” Paddy realized suddenly that the man, ages with her father, had been waiting to be dismissed. “Thank you, that’s all I wanted to know.”

He nodded, backing off before turning and carrying on his way. She watched him go, amazed at the power gleaned from introducing herself as a journalist.

Kennedy Street should have had an open vista over the new motorway to Edinburgh, but the view was blocked by a makeshift barrier. Bits of plyboard had been pulled off, and Paddy crossed over to look through it. The ground was muddy and uneven. A stubborn ground-floor tenement wall stood alone with melancholy cherry wallpaper around the impression of a fireplace.

She had never met anyone like Tracy Dempsie before. Everyone she knew who had suffered terrible tragedy in their lives offered it up to Jesus. She thought of Mrs. Lafferty, a woman in their parish whose only child had been run over and killed, whose husband had died agonizingly of lung cancer, and who had herself developed Parkinson’s, so that she had to have communion brought to her seat during mass. But Mrs. Lafferty was all high kicks and yahoo. She flirted with the young priests and sold raffle tickets. The possibility that suffering could defeat people disturbed Paddy. The only other person she had ever heard of like Tracy was old Paddy Meehan. The unfortunate were supposed to rise above adversity. They should become fat, bitter men in cheap coats boring people in dirty East End pubs.

It took her a moment to register the sound. Coming around the corner towards her was a hurried, scuffed run. For no real reason she thought of the boys in the lift and felt a stab of fright in her stomach, thinking she’d be pushed through the hole in the wall. Without looking to the source, she scurried across the road towards the nearest working streetlight and calmed herself. There was nothing to be afraid of. Tracy had creeped her out, that was all.

She slowed her pace to a walk and turned to see the person behind. He smiled at her with disarming warmth. He was tall, taller than Sean, with thick brown hair and a creamy complexion. He stood thirty feet away, hands in his pockets.

“Sorry, did I frighten you? I was running because I saw ye and I thought you were my pal.”

Paddy smiled back. “No.”

“It’s a girl I’m trying to meet. By accident.” He nodded and looked sheepishly back up the street. “You live here?”

“No,” she said, thinking he was sweet. “I’m working.”

“What d’ye work at?”

“Journalist. For the Daily News.”

“Ye a journalist?”

“Aye.”

Impressed, he looked her up and down, his eyes lingering on her monkey boots and gelled hair. “Don’t they pay ye?”

“Listen, these are Gloria Vanderbilt monkey boots.”

He smiled at that and looked at her with renewed interest. He held his hand out. “Kevin McConnell,” he said, leaning forward to take her hand.

It could be a Catholic name, she wasn’t sure.

“Heather Allen.”

His hand enveloped hers, the skin powder soft. As he stepped forwards the light caught a gold stud in his ear. Paddy had only ever seen male pop stars with earrings, and Glasgow was not a city that calmly accepted blurred gender boundaries: she’d once heard of a guy being beaten up for using an umbrella. Looking at him with renewed admiration, she noticed that his eyes were small and neat and his lips were glistening.

“You need to be careful coming up here, visiting people in a scheme ye don’t know.”

“I was only here for a minute.” She started strolling slowly down the road, hoping he’d follow.

“A minute’s long enough,” he said, falling into step. “There’s gangs up here, ye have to be careful.”

“Are you in a gang?”

“Nut. Are you writing about the gangs? Is that what you’re doing up here?”

He veered towards her slightly, keeping the space between them narrow, as if he could feel the frisson between them too. “I’ll see ye out safely, then.”

She kept him talking, asking if he was working (he wasn’t), where he went dancing (he didn’t), and what sort of music he liked. The Floyd, Joe Jackson, and the Exploited sometimes, but only sometimes. Ye have to be in the right mood, eh? Paddy knew what he meant: she never happened to be in the right mood for the Exploited.

By the time they reached Cathedral Street she was reluctant to leave his company. He was a big, handsome man, like Sean, but not annoyed at her or talking about his family or angry about her job. He walked her down to the bus station, waving her off across the dual carriageway, giving her a coy look and saying that maybe he’d see her again.

As Paddy walked down through the town to the train station it occurred to her that maybe the world was full of men she might choose; that maybe Sean was just one of the nice men instead of the one nice man.

Reluctant to go home to her family, she took her time wandering down through the town. The closer she got to the station the smaller she felt. She wasn’t Heather Allen. She wasn’t a journalist at all. She was just a fat lassie playing a stupid game because she was too afraid to go home.

IV

Trisha was alone in the house when Paddy got in, and the atmosphere was worse. She dished up a bowl of broth and a plate of mince with peas and spuds and left Paddy alone to eat it, going off to sit in the living room to watch the news. Paddy could see her through the serving hatch, sitting in the armchair, her neat brown hair shot through with wild gray. She was pretending to listen to a news report about the Maze Prison hunger strikers, as if the world outside Rutherglen Main Street didn’t terrify her.

Paddy would have gone to the movies, but she didn’t have any money. She considered using her Transcard and taking the two-hour circular route around the city on the 89 just to worry Trisha but knew it would be a petty revenge. And the bus might be cold.

She finished eating and got up, putting her plates in the sink, meaning to wash them later as a penance, but her mother got out of the chair and silently came into the kitchen, slipping between Paddy and the sink, running the hot water and beginning to wash the plates and cutlery briskly. Paddy skulked away into the living room.

She couldn’t be bothered watching the news. She twisted the channel dial to ITV and sat down before the picture had resolved itself. It was a quiz show. A saccharine host was asking a portly woman from Southampton questions about her tiny bespectacled husband, trapped in a soundproof booth and smiling like a baby sitting in warm shit.

Sean would be eating his tea right now. His mum would be smiling and chatting away to him, telling him the news of the day and who had died in the parish and whose grandchild had said a clever thing. Paddy could phone and tell him she missed him. She could try to say sorry again.

She waited until her mum had walked through the living room and climbed the stairs to the toilet, then nipped out and dialed Sean’s number.

Mimi Ogilvy could hardly speak when she asked for him.

“Please, Mrs. Ogilvy, I’ve got something important to tell him.”

She hadn’t finished the sentence before Mimi hung up.

V

Mary Ann came up to bed earlier than she normally would and silently went about her business, going to the bathroom with her wash bag and coming back dressed for bed, sorting out her clothes for the morning and putting her dirty underwear in the laundry bag at the side of the wardrobe, all the time letting off incontinent little laughs as she pottered around the room.

She turned off the light by the door, but instead of getting into bed she climbed over her own bed and sat on Paddy’s, pulling out a pack of cards from behind her back and a packet of cheese-and-onion crisps. She tugged Paddy out of bed and over to the window, made her sit down, and pulled the curtain over their heads. Lit by moonlight, Mary Ann opened the packet of crisps for them to share and dealt them a rummy hand of seven cards each. Down at the bottom of the garden the lone tree waved softly in the breeze, silver moonlight glinting off the few leaves.

They played for almost an hour, laughing silently when the crisps made a crunchy noise in their mouths, keeping score in Paddy’s notepad. Mary Ann mimed out the additions every time they moved on to a new hand, scratching her head and making a puzzled face, writing down ridiculously wrong numbers in her favor. Paddy let her go through her play each time, enjoying it more and more. They kept the real score on the back page.

They stayed there long after their eyes had begun to sting with sleep, playing together, their faces next to the windowpane, damp and cold, their overheated feet in the bedroom, smothering comradely giggles. The silent games would become a ritual, a nightly statement of loyalty that bound them to each other for decades ahead.