Field of Blood

I

The sun forgot to rise on Thursday. Outside the newsroom windows the city was stuck in perpetual twilight, the sky darkened by a bank of thick black cloud. Every light in the newsroom blazed bright. It was two in the afternoon, but it felt like a busy midnight shift, as if some great catastrophe had occurred in the dead of night, causing them all to be called back in to draw up a fresh edition.

Paddy was looking for Dr. Pete to ask him about Thomas Dempsie. She had been all over the building, buzzing about on errands, excelling herself by doing three canteen runs in fifteen minutes. Keck had warned her to slow down. Pete was nowhere, and the pack of early-shift workers were lawless without him, laughing at underlings and drinking at their desks in full view of Father Richards and the editors. It was bad form for them to make their indolence so blatant: it would make it harder for Richards to take their side when the inevitable fresh dispute came up.

She was loitering on the back stairs, reading a page proof about a house fire at a party in Deptford, when she ran into Dub.

“If you’re still looking for Dr. Pete, I was down for Kevin Hatcher’s medicine. He’s sitting in the Press Bar alone. Called in sick, apparently.”

“Called in sick but he’s sitting in the bar?”

“Yup.”

“That’s a bit cheeky, isn’t it?”

“Oh, yeah.”

She found Keck hanging around the sports desk and asked if she could kick off early because she’d stayed late on Monday. He told her to go, pleased to get rid of her: she was working so hard she was showing himself and Dub in a bad light.

The Press Bar smelled like a hangover. The sound of McGrade cleaning up the glasses after lunch echoed mournfully around the empty room. Dr. Pete was sitting alone at the usual morning-boys table near the back with a crisp whisky and two half-pints of bitter lined up in front of him. A read newspaper sat on the seat next to him, thumbed into a messy pillow. On his table a paper mat tanned with beer had been torn into fibrous strips and rearranged into a rudimentary jigsaw. Paddy could tell by the depth of cigarette ends in his ashtray that he had been there for some time.

He saw Paddy coming towards the table and sat up, dropping his eyes to the jigsaw, expecting her to give him a message. You’re on a warning, maybe, or Never darken the newsroom door again.

Paddy stood at the side of the table, taking cover behind a chair. “Hello.”

Pete looked up and frowned, dropping his bushy eyebrows to shade his eyes. “What do you want?”

“Um, I wanted to ask you about something.”

“Spit it out and then piss off.”

It was not going to be a Love Is… moment, she just knew it. “I wanted to ask you about the Thomas Dempsie murder case. I read some clippings of the articles you wrote about it.”

Pete looked up at her, and something, possibly a warm thing, flashed at the back of his misery-scarred eyes. He turned the whisky glass in front of him with a slow hand and lifted it, throwing the whisky to the back of his throat and swallowing. He didn’t even give the customary little gasp afterwards; he might have been drinking tea. Running a gray tongue along the front of his teeth, he put down the glass.

“Sit, then.”

Paddy did as she was told but kept her chair away from the dirty table, pulling the edges of her duffel coat around her lap. Still spinning the empty glass, Pete smiled to himself, his eyes surprisingly warm.

“Hide your distaste, woman. You’ll have to sit at dirty tables with drunk old men if you want to work in papers.”

“I’m scared.”

Pete reeled his head in surprise. “Why?”

She wasn’t sure how to say it. “You’re a bit brutal sometimes.”

“Only with an audience.” He looked at her for a moment and went back to spinning his glass. “I’m a show-off. My audience is suspicious of kindness.”

“Yeah, that’s the trouble with working here. Everyone’s a cynic.”

His eyes softened. “We’re all heartbroken idealists. That’s what no one gets about journalists: only true romantics get jaded. What do you want to know about Dempsie?”

She bent over her knees towards him. “Do you remember the case?”

Pete nodded slowly.

“Baby Brian was taken on Thomas Dempsie’s anniversary. Whoever killed Thomas would be thinking about him then.” She let it linger for a moment.

“I know that,” said Pete quietly.

It wasn’t the reaction she was expecting. “The boys were about the same age. Plus Thomas was found in Barnhill, half a mile from where the arrested boys live.”

Pete sighed heavily and sat back in his chair. “Look,” he said seriously, “I’m not sitting here with you ten feet away and not even a drink in your hand. What will you have?”

“I don’t really drink.”

Pete looked skeptical. He raised a finger at McGrade, dropping the tip to point at Paddy. McGrade brought over a half-pint of sweet Heineken, a beer mat to sit it on, and a stale cloth to wipe the table with. She had to shift her chair around the table to get away from the smell, coincidentally moving closer to Pete. He nodded approvingly and gestured to her drink. She took a sip and found it tasted nicer than she expected, like ginger beer but more refreshing. Pete looked at how much she had taken and nodded approvingly when he saw it was a quarter gone.

Paddy leaned across the table. “Doesn’t that seem strange to you that there are so many similarities between Baby Brian and Dempsie?”

He shrugged carelessly. “You see everything at least twice if you stay in this game long enough. It all comes around again. Same things again and again. It doesn’t mean they’re related to each other.”

“It’s too much of a coincidence.”

Pete picked at a string of tobacco that had stuck to his lip. “Every year, usually just before Christmas, a woman in Glasgow is stabbed to death by her man.”

“That’s not that unusual,” said Paddy.

“With a bit of broken window. They fight, a window gets broken, and he stabs her with a bit of the glass. Every single year it happens in the same way. It doesn’t make sense that it happens then, but it does. Every year. It’s a cycle. It’s inevitable. You see patterns when you work for long enough. In the end, nothing’s new.”

“I’d like to know what happened back then.”

Pete moved the empty whisky glass to the side, pulling the first beer glass to him. “Dempsie was a big story. The coverage was huge. The Moors Murders were relatively fresh in people’s minds, and the child was so very young, sweet- good pictures, ye know?”

“How come you got all the interviews with Tracy Dempsie? Were you assigned them?”

“No, I doorstepped her. I found out the address and waited outside, in the rain, for three hours until she let me in.” He raised an eyebrow. “I really cared in those days. That surprises you, doesn’t it?”

It didn’t, but Paddy nodded to be polite. “Was Alfred there when you interviewed her?”

“Yeah, he was there. I saw him with his other kid, the older one.”

“His stepson?”

“Yeah. He didn’t like that boy, it was obvious, but he loved his son, the wee one. He was torn apart.”

“Is there a chance he did it?”

“Oh, Dempsie was innocent.”

Pete’s chin hardened a little. He lifted his glass of beer, raising his eyes to the door as someone came in. She turned back to see Father Richards standing at the door, looking over at him, furious. Dr. Pete stared back, daring Richards to come over and make him care, but Richards ordered a drink and sat down at the far end of the bar.

“No one really believed Dempsie’d done it, but it had been four months and no conviction. They needed someone. He didn’t have an alibi, and these things have a life of their own. The only person who half believed he was the killer was Tracy. She tried to sell her story after he was convicted, but no one would buy. That was then, of course. They’d buy it now.”

“I heard the Yorkshire Ripper’s wife got ten grand.”

“I heard twenty.” He drank the half-pint of beer in one tip of the glass, put the empty on the table, and looked suddenly younger. He licked his lips, managing a playful eye roll. “Different days. Back then there were about three crime reporters working the city. We could go for a pint together and just decide to leave things alone if we wanted. It’s a different game now. It’s all circulation wars and young bucks. They’d cut the arse off their own mother for a byline. It was about finding the truth and checks and balances when I was starting out.”

“Woodward and Bernstein and Ludovic Kennedy?”

He winked at her. “Exactly, wee hen. Exactly. We were a proud people back then. Not like now.” He gestured around the room. “A troop of whores.”

Paddy smiled. She was enjoying herself, surprised that he was such good company. He had hardly even sworn at her and was going to the trouble of making her feel as if they were in the same business, instead of being a big brainy journalist and a daft wee copyboy.

“The woman,” said Paddy. “Tracy. What did you make of her?”

“Ah, Tracy. Walking wounded, one of life’s casualties. She was loyal to Alfred until he was taken in for questioning, and then she wanted to drop the dime on him. I don’t know what she was like before the baby died, but when I met her she was all over the place, mad with grief. She’d have said anything the police wanted her to say, they only had to ask. She gave them an excuse to arrest him. Told them he wasn’t really home when he said he was, cut an hour out here and there.”

“How do you know that? Did the police tell you?”

“Aye, well, we were all on the case together. They became good friends, those coppers, we grew up together.” He smiled at his drink. “It wasn’t a good thing, though. Makes it harder to question a conviction if your pals won it. It takes an outsider to do that.”

“Tracy can’t have been that soft. She left her previous man.”

“I think Alfred Dempsie came and got her, which is different to leaving. Then Dempsie killed himself.” He raised his beer glass. “Large ones all round.” He looked at Paddy’s glass and twitched the corners of his mouth down. “You’re not drinking. The news trade works on alcohol. You’d better learn if you’re as ambitious as you seem.”

She wasn’t halfway through her first drink yet but accepted another to please him, and McGrade brought it over. She took a slurp and Pete checked the level in the glass again.

“Not so good this time.”

She tried again.

“Better,” he said, lifting the fresh whisky nearer to his hand.

“But if you all knew it was wrong, why was Dempsie in prison for five years before he killed himself? Why didn’t anyone question the conviction?”

“Weight of evidence. Heavy-handed policing. They’d planted everything on him to get the conviction. You can overturn one bit of evidence, but not three or four. Then it hints at police corruption, and the courts don’t want to get into that.” He nodded at her. “See, there was only one bit of evidence planted in the Meehan case.”

“I know.”

“The paper from the Rosses’ safe found in Griffiths’s pocket after he was shot. You interested in Paddy Meehan?”

“A bit.”

“I know him, by the way, if you want to meet him.”

It was a bit sudden; Paddy didn’t have her defenses up. “Oh,” she said. “No. No, not really.”

“He’s a tricky bastard. Always annoyed. Not unreasonably, I suppose.”

“I heard that.”

Pete bellowed in a rich baritone: “Are you going to talk to me?”

Startled, Paddy sat up before she realized that he was talking to someone behind her. Richards was walking towards them, his face thunderous.

“You’re wasting your time, Richards. I don’t give a monkey’s anymore.”

“You phoned in sick.” Richards sneered. “And then coming in here? What’s wrong with you?”

“Liver cancer.” Pete drank down his beer and set the empty glass to the side. “I’ve got cancer.”

A horrible hush descended on the room. Paddy could see Richards processing the information, thinking it over, wondering whether Dr. Pete would dare lie about something like that.

“Balls.”

“I got the word yesterday, and this bar is where I want to be.”

Richards paused momentarily and then backed off, walking slowly back to his seat at the bar, checking Pete over his shoulder to see if he was joking. Everyone in the bar pretended they hadn’t heard him and turned the pages in their papers or placed their glasses back on tables, muffling the silence.

When they were left alone, Paddy thought she should say something. “That must have been a blow.”

“It’s one way to get the word out, eh?” Pete looked at his drink and nodded dreamily. “This bar,” he said slowly, “I like this bar.”

McGrade scurried over with a fresh round of drinks from Richards, who stayed far away and nodded to them both. Paddy looked at her new half-pint. She had three glasses in front of her and hadn’t finished the first one yet.

“Those Baby Brian Boys,” said Pete, trying to get back to the conversation they were having before the bomb. “The police’ll get a conviction. They’ll have to.”

“Could they have planted evidence on the Brian Boys?”

Pete curled his lip. “I’d put money on the evidence being good. If you know how to watch for the pattern, planted evidence only comes out weeks later, when they’re getting frustrated. They don’t start off with a plant in a big case. They might put corroborating evidence down, though. It goes on more than you think.”

The bar was starting to fill up. Behind Pete a man passed on his way to the toilet, undoing his fly before reaching the door. She didn’t belong here and wanted to leave. She lifted her sleeve and carefully checked her watch as a preliminary move.

Pete spoke quietly. “Please don’t go.”

“But I need-”

“If you go, Richards’ll come over here. It’s been a long day, and it’s hard work being pitied.”

So they sat together, a man facing the end of his life and a young girl struggling to kick-start hers. They drank together, and then Paddy started smoking with him. Cigarettes and drink complemented each other perfectly, she discovered, like white bread and peanut butter. She drank an all-time personal best of four half-pints.

They talked about anything that came to mind, their thoughts swimming sympathetically, barely connecting. Paddy told him about the Beatties’ stuff in the garage, about how she’d always hated it when she saw the Queen’s picture up in offices, because of what she represented. She always saw her smiling and handing out OBEs to the soldiers who shot into the crowd on Bloody Sunday, but she’d looked at the Beatties’ portrait of her and thought she might actually be quite a nice woman, doing her best. She talked about her Auntie Ann, who raised money for the IRA with raffle tickets and then went on antiabortion marches.

Dr. Pete talked about a wife who had left for England years before and how she would cook a leg of lamb for special occasions. She stuck the meat with rosemary she grew in their garden and sat potatoes under it to roast in the lamb fat. The meat was as sweet as tablet, as moist as beer; it lingered on the tongue like a prayer. Before he met her he had never eaten food that made him feel as if he had just woken up to the world. The way she cooked that lamb was beautiful. She had black hair and was so slight he could lift her up and swing her over a puddle with one arm around her waist. He hadn’t talked about her in a long time.

The doors were busy with men finishing their shift. Another couple of journalists drifted towards the table, looking for a seat and a joke, but Pete blanked them and they moved off elsewhere.

More uninhibited than she had ever been, Paddy confided in Dr. Pete that she loved his writing in the Dempsie articles and asked him why he didn’t write anymore.

His jaundiced eyes slid across the floor of the pub and he blinked slowly. “I’m writing a book. I’ve been writing a book about John MacLean and Red Clydeside. They keep you back… My wife left…”

Even through the haze of alcohol, Paddy knew he was making excuses. Everyone at the News was writing a book; she was writing a book about Meehan in her head. Pete had just given up and joined the other lazy cynics. She couldn’t imagine him fit enough to lift a woman over a puddle with one hand. She wanted to say something nice but couldn’t think of a pleasantry appropriate to a man who’d pissed his life away.

Both doors opened simultaneously, letting a blast of bitterly cold air swirl into the bar. A number of men clattered noisily towards the table. It was the morning boys, coming in team-handed to visit their leader. Unbidden, they pulled over seats and settled around the table. Paddy stood up, staggering to the side a little, surprised by how drunk she was. She and Dr. Pete nodded to each other. Their time was over.

“Let that be a lesson to you,” said Pete, and he broke eye contact with her, looking back at his drink. Paddy took her half-pint with her as she pulled away into the crowd.

By now the Press Bar was heaving. The air was treacle thick with smoke and the sweet smell of spilled drink. Farquarson was standing by the door, disagreeing with a short man in front of him. A sharp, attention-grabbing, acid undertone was coming from the near corner: a sports boy had snuck in a vinegar-soused fish supper and was surreptitiously eating it off his knees. Apart from Paddy there were only three other women in the room: one, a redhead in a purple sequined top, was flirting with a table of men and being bought drinks; the other two were sitting together, one of them the beady-eyed woman who’d cried as the squat-faced policeman showed her out of the interview room. Both women stared blankly ahead as they nursed small red drinks in round glasses. Keck was hanging around a table of sports guys, laughing and leaning over while they ignored him, forcing himself on the reluctant company.

Paddy decided to go home. She tried to slip behind Farquarson, but he turned to let her squeeze through and the moment for pretending not to have seen each other was past. He tried to incorporate her into the conversation he was having about football with the small man, but she didn’t know anything about it.

“Ah ha,” he said. “More of a rugby woman, are you?”

“I don’t really watch sport.”

“Right.” Farquarson took another sip. “Ah, Margaret Mary McGuire.” He grabbed the arm of the redhead, who was sidling past. “How the devil are you?” Margaret Mary didn’t seem very pleased to see Farquarson, but he persevered. “Have you met our own Patricia Meehan? She’s something else, something else.” He swung away abruptly, leaving the two women stuck with each other.

Margaret Mary, who was too old to be wearing a sparkly top and too ginger to be wearing a purple anything, looked Paddy up and down. Her face soured. “What age are you?”

“Eighteen,” said Paddy, bold with drink. “Why, what age are you?”

“Get stuffed,” said Margaret Mary, and recommenced her sashay to the toilets.

“Hiya.”

Keck was pressing just a little closer to Paddy than the crowd warranted. It hurt her neck and eyes to look up at him.

“Right, Keck?”

“Come on over and I’ll introduce you to the guys.” He motioned towards the sports journalists, who hadn’t even noticed he’d gone.

“I’m all right, Keck. I’m finishing my drink and going in a minute.”

“You should come over, it’s a brilliant laugh.” His eyes swiveled paranoiacally around the noisy room. “Women don’t like sport, eh? What do women like, anyway?” He looked at Margaret Mary’s back. “What do they want from men? Big cars? You’re chiselers, eh?”

“Yeah,” she said, itching to get away. “If you keep coming out with crap like that the only women who’ll keep you company’ll be self-loathing nut-jobs. There are lots of nice women in the world.”

He smiled like a hostage trying not to alert the police. “I’m always frightened to talk to you in case you think, ‘What’s that dirty wee bastard been thinking about me?’ ” His glassy eyes were fixed on her neck. She could tell he was thinking about her tits but didn’t have the courage just to stare at them. “I’m an animal in bed, you know.”

Paddy drained her glass and feigned bewilderment. “How does that work? Have you got a magic mattress or something?”

At the door she turned for a last fond look round the bar and found Pete staring after her in silent entreaty, asking her to get him out of there. Paddy waved good-bye, pretending she had misread his eyes, and left him to be enveloped in a crowd of his own kind.

II

She sobered up on the train home, sucking her way through a packet of mints to cover the smell of drink and fags. She looked out the window at the passing lights of Rutherglen town hall and thought about the witness who had seen the boys on the train. The witness might not be credible. McVie knew all the policemen in Glasgow; he’d be able to find out something about it for her.

The house was dead. Trisha sat stiffly in the front room as Paddy ate in the kitchen, watching Adam and the Ants on Top of the Pops. They both knew she only had it on for the noise, so they wouldn’t be left alone together in the crushing silence. Paddy finished her dinner, watching the back of her mum’s head, enjoying the detached numbness afforded by the alcohol. She filled her pockets with custard creams and went upstairs to her bed.

She lay on top of the covers, staring at the ceiling and eating mechanically through the biscuits, letting the crumbs spill into her hair and ears. Valentine’s was on Saturday- just one more lonely day to go. He might not phone tomorrow night, but she knew she’d see him on Saturday. It would be frosty at first, but they’d kiss and touch and sort it out. Sometimes, when she thought about Sean, his handsome face melted into Terry Hewitt’s, with his pretty manners and hesitant smile.

There were definite noises downstairs: someone coming in and getting their tea, and then another couple of people in the living room, everyone talking quietly and abruptly to one another. Muffled footsteps came up the stairs, and someone stopped off to use the toilet. The bedroom door opened and Mary Ann came in, looking serious. She shut the door carefully, climbed across her own bed to Paddy’s, and sat down, poking Paddy in the ribs.

“It’s finishing on Saturday,” she whispered. “We’re having a tea for you, and that’ll be it over.” She kissed Paddy’s forehead, excited as a child at Christmas. “You smell like a brewery.”

Mary Ann went out to change into her nightclothes in the bathroom and left Paddy alone. She took another biscuit from her pocket and chewed it meditatively. To hell with them. She wasn’t going to be in on Saturday. She was going out with Terry during the day, and in the evening she’d be out at the pictures with Sean.