Field of Blood

I

It was ten o’clock in the morning and the frost still lingered in the shadow of the high-rise blocks. A sniping wind was gathering strength, sweeping down the sides of the buildings, flicking hair and hems as Paddy and Terry picked their way carefully down the long flight of steps, avoiding the icy edges. The housing scheme they were walking through was a low-level offshoot of the Drygate high flats, built for pensioners and sickly people, no children allowed. The modest lawns between blocks were interspersed with giant yellow sandstone, left over from a monumental time.

“That’s all that’s left of Duke Street Prison. See over there?” Terry pointed to the bottom of a bit of yellow wall. “That’s where the condemned cell was. They used to hang them on that patch of grass.”

Paddy looked and nodded, pretending to listen.

“You’re quiet today.”

She hummed an answer. She was afraid to speak. Panic was swelling the back of her throat, gagging her. If she spoke she might just denounce herself.

“And you look knackered.”

“Piss off.”

But she knew he was right. She’d hardly slept the night before. Wide-eyed, she’d lain on her back, tracing patterns in the ceiling plaster, thinking about Callum and what he had said. She’d lain awake looking at it every way she could, willfully misinterpreting what he had said and trying to make it sit comfortably. It was three thirty before she finally admitted to herself that Callum was telling her Naismith was innocent.

“So,” said Terry cheerfully, “Tracy Dempsie: is there anything else you want to warn me about?”

“The carpet in the hall- it’s horrendous.”

He nodded seriously. “Thanks for that. I’d hate to be caught unawares.”

Paddy smiled at the unexpected return. Terry was always slightly sharper than she expected him to be. She glanced over and saw his little belly jiggling under his shirt as his foot hit the step.

“I see ye,” he muttered.

She looked up to find him watching the ground in front of him.

“You see me what?”

“You, giving me the glad eye.”

She smiled and found her eyes filling suddenly. It would be easier to bear if he weren’t so sweet.

Blinking back a tide of guilt, Paddy led him across the crumbling floor of the car park and into the Drygate lobby. Both lifts were out of order: a small, handwritten notice in jagged capitals was pinned to the lift doors.

They trudged up the grim stairwell, kicking through glue tins and plastic bags on one landing and the loose pages of a pornographic magazine on another. Paddy let Terry lead so that he wouldn’t be staring at her fat behind.

Up on Tracy’s landing the suction weight of wind pulled the landing door so tightly closed that it took both of them to lever it open. The deafening wind flattened her hair and tugged at her heavy coat. Terry clutched the neck of his heavy leather jacket as they crept along the inside wall of the balcony. Paddy knocked heavily on Tracy Dempsie’s door.

She had raised her hand to knock again when Tracy opened it, wearing yesterday’s makeup in all the wrong places. She had taken an extra pill or two, and her housecoat was buttoned one step out. She blinked slowly when she saw Paddy and raised her cigarette to her mouth. The hot ash tip flew into her hair, singeing it.

“You’re not Heather Allen.”

Paddy hoped Terry hadn’t heard.

“I saw her picture in the paper. You’re not her. She’s dead.”

Terry looked curious. Paddy could feel his eyes on her face.

“Tracy, I heard Henry Naismith was arrested.”

At the mention of her ex-man the fight went out of Tracy. Her head dropped forward on her neck and she turned and walked away down the hall. A swirling gust of wind jerked the door open. Paddy wiped her feet before stepping in. Shutting the door carefully behind him, dulling the noise, Terry looked from the busy carpet to Paddy and let off a silent scream.

Following the trail of smoke through the hall and into the living room, they found Tracy slumped on the settee, staring blankly at her knees. The angry wind hissed outside the window.

“Henry,” she said quietly. “They said he confessed to killing Thomas as well. He couldn’t have. He wouldn’t have.”

Paddy sat down on the edge of the settee next to her, their knees almost touching. She desperately wanted to say something kind and helpful, but there was nothing to say. As if she could see it in her eyes, Tracy reached out and took Paddy’s hand, holding it by the thumb, absentmindedly lifting and dropping it as she took a draw from her fag.

“He was a hard man, though, wasn’t he?”

Tracy sucked smoke through clenched teeth and tipped her head back. “Henry’s a good man. He was in the gangs when he was younger, aye, but the gangs just fight each other. And anyway, he’s a born-again Christian now, he’s not going to attack a wean.”

“But he confessed, Tracy.”

“So what?” She looked up at them, pleading, as if they had any authority in the matter. “They could just be saying that.”

Paddy had almost forgotten Terry was standing behind her until he hovered into her line of vision. He cleared his throat carefully before he spoke.

“Mrs. Dempsie, why would he confess if he didn’t do it?”

Tracy shook her head at the carpet and looked bewildered. “They’d mibbe make him?” Her medically dulled eyes slowly traced the dervish pattern on the carpet as she thought back. She blinked slowly at the floor and then blinked again, her eyebrows forming a plaintive little triangle. “Henry won’t kill hisself like Alfred did. He’s got religion.”

Paddy watched Tracy bring the cigarette to her mouth and knew in a sudden, chilling moment that she was staring at carnage she had created. She was the policeman who had planted paper in James Griffiths’s pocket. She had never in her life wanted to go to confession, but she did now.

She squeezed Tracy’s hand hard. “I’m so sorry for all your troubles.”

Bewildered but touched, Tracy squeezed back, shaking Paddy’s hand awkwardly by the thumb. “Thanks.”

“I mean it.” She clasped Tracy’s hand tightly in both of hers as shame overwhelmed her. “I’m really so sorry. Honestly.”

Tracy Dempsie was on long-term medication and had treated herself to a little extra dose today, but even she was finding Paddy’s behavior odd. She smiled uncomfortably and wriggled her hand free.

Terry stepped forward.

“Mrs. Dempsie, I wonder if you would have a photograph of Henry? We don’t want to use the police photo, we want a nice one for the paper.”

It was a smart lie. The police hadn’t released a photo of Naismith, and they weren’t likely to either, but Terry had guessed that Tracy didn’t know that and would want Henry to look his best in the paper. His professionalism was a reproach to Paddy, who sniffed and dabbed the damp tip of her nose with the back of her hand.

“Aye.” Tracy bumped her bum to the edge of the settee and stood up awkwardly, tottering a step to the side before shuffling out into the hall.

Terry waited until Tracy was out of earshot. “Fucking hell,” he murmured. “What is going on with you?”

She tried to breathe in but her chin crumpled. Terry kicked the underside of her foot and growled at her. “Go to the toilet and sort yourself out.”

She stood up. “Don’t you be cheeky to me.”

“Don’t act like a silly cow, then.”

She kicked him hard on the ankle bone, leaving him panting and cursing her under his breath.

Out in the dark hallway she could hear Tracy raking noisily through papers behind one of the doors. The bathroom had a little ceramic sign on the door, a picture of a toilet with a wreath of roses around it. The room had been decorated in the same era as the hallway. Orange wallpaper was blistered at the edges, pleading to be pulled off. The fixtures were a clashing pink, the bath stained rusty brown where the cold tap had dripped and corroded the plug hole. An orange bar of soap was welded between the sink taps, and the pale lemon carpet smelled of dust and bleach.

Paddy locked the door and pulled down the toilet lid, sitting down and curling over her knees. She tried to think of something Terry had done wrong to mitigate her offense to him. She thought through her night in his bed, this morning, his behavior at work, but couldn’t think of anything. She knew she had to phone the police and take the blame for the ball of hair in the van. She could feel it as a vibration, but every fiber of her being balked at the prospect of owning up. She’d lose everything, but it was right that she should: she’d killed Heather and framed Naismith.

She made herself sit up straight. In the dock at the high court Paddy Meehan had given a dignified speech after his conviction. He must have felt more beleaguered than she was now. She stood up and looked at herself in the cloudy mirror. “You have made a terrible mistake,” she whispered quietly. “I am innocent of this crime and so is Jim Griffiths.” She sniffed hard and straightened her duffel coat, ruffling her black hair to make it stand up again. She looked herself in the eye and saw nothing but guilt and fear and fat. “You have made a terrible mistake.” She had integrity. She wouldn’t sacrifice a man’s life for her career. She might contemplate it, and she knew that was terrible, but she wouldn’t do it.

Flushing the toilet for effect, she drew a deep breath, unlocked the door, and stepped across the hall to the living room.

Terry had taken her place on the settee next to Tracy and was smiling dutifully at an open photo album. It was bound in red plastic with gold trim around the edges. She had stored it under something heavy, and some of the cellophane sheets had been flattened the wrong way and were hanging out.

Tracy had a new fag lit and was pointing at a picture. “Me on holiday. Isle of Wight. Good legs, eh?”

“Yeah,” Terry said, looking up at Paddy as she came in and giving her a conciliatory smile. “Look,” he said. “Tracy in a swimming costume.”

Paddy walked over to Tracy’s arm of the settee and looked over her shoulder. The Tracy in the picture was younger and quite pretty, posing carefully on a bank-holiday-busy beach, one foot propped in front of the other like a fifties model. Paddy nodded. “Great.”

On the opposite page Henry Naismith was dressed in drainpipe trousers and a powder blue drape coat. Hanging on his arm was young Tracy in bobby socks and a pink shift dress, her hair in a high ponytail, her eyes accidentally closed at the moment the shutter blinked.

Terry caught Paddy’s eye but she broke off quickly. He touched the face of the photograph.

“Did Henry ever hit the kids when you were together?”

“Me and Henry only had Garry. Alfred was Thomas’s daddy.”

Terry carried on as if he’d known that all along. “And did Henry hit Garry?”

“No. He mostly ignored us until I went with Alfred, and then he went mental, kicking in doors and that, going to Alfred’s work and waiting for him.” She seemed flattered at the memory. Her mouth twitched in an uncertain smile. “Alfred just went out the back way. Course, just after Thomas died Henry got religion. He was so sad about Thomas you’d have thought it was his own wean that died. He tried to make up for how he’d been, tried to be a good dad to Garry. Devoted all his time to him.”

She turned the album page to a photo of herself in a maxicoat and knee-high boots with a baby perched on her hip. The child stared at the camera with an odd intensity.

“What a beautiful baby,” said Terry. “He’s lovely looking. Is he yours?”

“That’s my Garry.” Tracy covered the child’s face with her fingertips. “My wee boy.”

Paddy hardly dared to ask. “Have ye got any more of him?”

Tracy did have other photos of Garry. She flicked through his first Christmas, a neighbor’s wedding scramble, a granny’s birthday, and the boy grew up in front of Paddy’s eyes. She had assumed that Naismith and Tracy’s child was still young, that he had been only a few years older than Thomas Dempsie when he died. In fact he would have been about twelve when Thomas died. Old enough to take the child himself. Tracy turned a page and suddenly Garry was grown up, standing by his dad’s grocery van in summer, sunlight glinting off a gold stud in his ear. Paddy recognized him perfectly. He was the handsome boy she had met in Townhead the night before Heather was murdered, the boy who called himself Kevin McConnell.

Paddy couldn’t hear the wind or what Terry was saying about the pictures. All she could hear was her own heartbeat, and all she could feel was the cold sweat on her spine. The shady sexual threat in Callum Ogilvy’s words came back to her as imminent and personal. The night they met, Garry must have followed her from Tracy’s to Townhead. He must have heard from Tracy that a journalist called Heather Allen had been in the house and traced her footsteps, waiting patiently before approaching so that she wouldn’t connect him with his mother. Garry wasn’t just vicious, he was careful. He might be in this flat right now. She mapped the fastest route to the front door. If he came at her she could hit him, use something to hit him. She could defend herself.

“Does Garry live here?” she asked quickly.

“Naw.” Tracy scratched her thigh through her housecoat. “He stays up in Barnhill with his dad. They’re as close as brothers, those two. Do everything together. Garry does whatever his dad says. This picture”- she pulled back the crackling cellophane cover and peeled the Teddy boy photograph off the glue striations-“this is the nicest one.”

“How about this one?” Terry turned the page back to one of Naismith standing in the garden in Townhead.

Paddy could feel her pulse on her throat. She felt sure that Tracy would be able to see the throb in her jugular if she looked up.

“He’d do anything for our boy. He’s training him to take over the van. He’d never hurt a child-”

Paddy cut across her. “We’d better go.”

Terry’s mouth dropped open a little.

“We should,” she said insistently. “I need to go.”

“We’ll just get the picture,” said Terry carefully, taking the photo album from Tracy before she had time to object and lifting out the picture he wanted.

Paddy was starting to sweat. “I’m off.”

He looked at her defiantly. “We need to thank Tracy for all her help.”

But Paddy was already at the door of the living room. “Good-bye.”

She hurried across the hall and opened the door to the howling vortex, narrowing her eyes against the stray dust, racing along the balcony to the stairs. She pulled at the door, using her weight when she felt that it wouldn’t give. For a terrifying moment she thought Garry was behind it, smiling calmly and holding it closed effortlessly. Terry leaned over her shoulder and pushed open the door with one hand. She tumbled into the echoing stairwell, into the acrid stench of solvent and piss.

“Are you nuts? What the hell was all that about?”

She spun to face him, grabbed his neck with both hands, and shook, mistaking Terry for the real threat, making him lose his footing until his flailing hand fell on the metal banister and he managed to steady himself.

They stood still, Paddy holding his neck, Terry bent curiously towards and away from her, averting his eyes in submission. The muffled vibration of their struggle throbbed through the thick concrete. Horrified, she opened her fingers and Terry stood up slowly. He straightened his jacket without looking at her. They walked down together, Paddy panting until she got her breath back, Terry saying nothing. Downstairs, they crossed the lobby, walked out into the day, and parted without speaking.

II

Dr. Pete was propped up on marshmallow pillows, looking out the window at a high statue of the Protestant Reformationist John Knox. She was quite sure they weren’t his own pajamas. They had the stiffness of institutionally laundered clothes. Boil-washing had faded them to a sun-bleached blue that clashed horribly with his yellow skin. The crisp white sheet in his lap was folded neatly down, and sometimes, while he was talking, he would stroke it thoughtfully.

“Ludicrous. Knox was an anti-iconoclast. He wouldn’t have approved of a statue.” He smiled distantly. “If they weren’t Calvinists you’d suspect the memorial committee of having a sense of humor.”

Paddy didn’t know anything about the various Protestant splinters, but she smiled to please him.

It was a modern extension to the old hospital, with copper-tinted windows facing onto the necropolis, a jagged Victorian mini-Manhattan of exuberant architecture, erected when celebrating death wasn’t yet taboo. The three other beds in Dr. Pete’s room had a large floor space around each for all the equipment they might need. The patient in the bed across the way was unconscious, an unpromising strip of skin under a paper-pristine sheet. Expensive equipment was conferenced around his bed: a heart monitor, a hissing pump, a drip, and a blinking television screen. Next to him his ruddy-cheeked wife sat reading the Sun, squinting as if it required concentration.

It was an unhappy accident that the cancer ward overlooked the graveyard, but one which Dr. Pete, full of medication and clear of pain for the first time in months, was enjoying. Sober, pepped-up, and without his habitual pained slouch, he was suddenly a very different man. It no longer seemed infeasible that he had swung women over puddles or written beautifully. He had been talking about John Knox’s statue at the top of the hill for ten minutes, picking his words carefully as he related the history of its construction and why it had been built in the middle of what became a huge graveyard.

“But by then no one cared where he was. Why did you come?” Pete’s steady eyes seared into hers.

“Just wondered how you were,” she lied. “I wanted to see how ye were.”

Pete watched his fingertips running over the stiff hem of the sheet. “Well, I’m dying, as you can see.”

She smiled politely again. She had come here to hide for half an hour. The visit was supposed to be a lighthearted stopover to break up a very bad day, but it wasn’t working out at all. She decided to hand over her token gift and get out. The cellophane wrapper crackled loudly as she pulled a bottle of garish orange energy drink out of her bag.

“Lucozade.”

He sat up, genuinely pleased, and patted the top of his bedside locker. “Put it up there.” She opened the door to the cabinet, but he stopped her. “No, no, put it on top.”

He glanced around the room, and she followed his eye to the other patients’ lockers. Every one of them had bottles and bags of sweets and flowers and cards stacked on them, but Pete’s was completely bare.

“I was rushed in this time. When I came in before, I brought my own. I won’t be pitied by bloody nurses.”

He wouldn’t have said it if he hadn’t been on morphine, and she was shocked to hear that he was so alone. Whenever she’d been to visit relatives in hospital she’d had to queue in the corridor, waiting for a batch of family to leave before she could get in. She felt ashamed for him and changed the subject.

“I’ve always wondered,” she said, “why do they call you Dr. Pete?”

“I am a doctor. I’ve got a doctorate in divinity.”

She waited for him to laugh at her credulity and admit it was a joke, but he didn’t.

“Why did you do that?”

“I wanted to be a minister. I’m a son of the manse.”

“Your dad was a minister?”

“And his father before him.”

“You’re less like a minister than anyone I’ve ever met.”

“I was a disappointment. I liked what you said to Richards, about substituting the basic text. My family couldn’t conceive of a life outside the kirk. I’m just getting there myself.”

“I lost my faith early, before I made my first communion. I still can’t tell my family.”

He reached across, a beatific light in his eye, and patted her hand. “Lie to them. Let them not worry. I hurt my father. It was needless. I didn’t change his mind and he didn’t change mine. We argued on the day he died.”

Paddy shook her head. “I can’t fight with my father. He’s very meek.”

“Ah, the meek. Playing the long game. Sneaky bastards.”

The man across the room let out a soft groan. His wife reached out and patted the bed without taking her eyes off the paper.

“That man’ll be dead in the morning,” said Pete. “If he’s lucky.”

Paddy glanced over at the man and felt her face flush suddenly. She hadn’t come here to have her nose rubbed in the inevitability of death. Pete saw her eyes redden and looked alarmed.

“No, it’s not about you,” she blurted, realizing too late that it would be wrong to say she didn’t care that he was going to die. “Oh God almighty, Pete, I’ve done an awful thing. I planted evidence on Henry Naismith and now he’s confessed to killing Brian Wilcox. I was sure it was him.”

“What did you plant?”

“Hair.” She rubbed her eyes hard. “Heather Allen’s hair. And he confessed to killing her and Thomas Dempsie as well.”

“Naismith didn’t kill Thomas Dempsie. He was in the cells that night.”

“I know. So if he’s confessing to that as well, how genuine can the confession to Baby Brian be?”

Pete’s eyes widened calmly. “Why would he make a false confession?”

“It was his son. He’s protecting his boy.”

Pete frowned for a moment. “Garry Naismith.”

“That’s right. Garry killed Thomas and let Alfred take the blame.”

“Did Alfred Dempsie know that’s what happened?”

“Maybe. I think Naismith found out about Garry and blamed himself. I think he’s been covering up for his son ever since.”

“Makes sense. Henry saw the light after Thomas died. Changed his life.” Pete could have been discussing biscuits. “Naismith’s giving up his life to save his boy. Greater love hath no man.”

She nodded at the familiar phrase heard out of context. “You did do divinity, didn’t you?”

The curtain on the far side of the bed swept back suddenly, and a neat nurse looked at them accusingly.

“What are you doing here?” She addressed Paddy, pulling her lips back in a smile that wouldn’t have fooled anyone. Her eyes were set wide and prominent.

“Visiting,” said Paddy.

The nurse’s mouth spasmed wide, and she busied herself tidying the folds in the curtain. “Family are allowed to visit outside visiting hours, but I’m afraid everyone else has to come between three and eight.” She turned to face Paddy square on. “You’ll have to leave.”

Confused and embarrassed, Paddy reached for her bag.

“Iona, Iona.” Pete pushed himself up on the pillow, coming alive at the possibility of a fight. “Get your thumb out of your arse. She’s my daughter.”

Nurse Iona glanced at his ring finger.

“That’s right, she’s a bastard. A love child. I wouldn’t marry her pregnant mother because she was ugly and below marriageable age.” He lifted his bandaged hand. “In Texas. Give me more?”

The nurse was staring unkindly at Paddy, taking in her cheap black sweater. It was bobbled under the arms and stretched at the bottom from being self-consciously tugged down to hide her body whenever she stood up off the bench.

“It’s not time for more, Mr. McIltchie, as well you know.” She looked from Paddy to Pete but couldn’t find any echo of his face in hers. “If she is your daughter, why isn’t she down as your next of kin?”

“She’s untrustworthy. A dipsomaniac.” Pete’s face was bright with innocent enjoyment. “When I die she’ll be in here pulling rings from my fingers before you can say ‘cock and balls.’ ”

Iona thanked him not to use that language and pissed about a bit, taking his pulse and looking at her watch, before leaving them alone again. Pete sighed contentedly and stroked the sheet.

“There, you have to come back and visit me now.”

“She’s a bit scary.”

Pete pulled himself up and leaned across the bed confidentially. His breath smelled foul. “She’s a fucking cow. I watch her going around this room bullying them all. I try to frighten her back. She scratches when she washes me. Every time.” He leaned back against the pillow and looked at the door. “I don’t want to die in here. Have to keep fighting.” He frowned briefly at the sheet, banishing whatever thought was interfering with his medication. “Sad.” He shook his head. “As if we’re not scared enough in here. I’d hate to recant at this stage.”

Paddy didn’t know what to say, so she apologized again. He didn’t notice. “I’m dying,” he told the sheet, sounding surprised to hear it himself. “And I don’t believe in God. I hope I don’t get scared at the last minute.”

“I’ve got to go, Pete.”

“Where?”

“I need to get the bus to Anderston and tell that wee bastard Patterson what I’ve done. There’s nothing else for it.” She half hoped he’d think of something.

“Right enough.”

She saw into her future, and the best she could hope for was a job in a shop or a factory. She wouldn’t marry; she knew that she’d only marry someone if she panicked now and didn’t have a career. The disappointment was so bitter it made her bones ache.

“I’ll never be a journalist now.”

“That’s right.”

She looked at him. He was staring up at John Knox. She wasn’t at all sure he was really listening. He had other things on his mind, she supposed.

“It would be a shame to recant at this stage,” she said quietly.

He became animated suddenly. “Wouldn’t it? Fear. ’S fear. There are ministers and lay preachers and hairy beasts patrolling the corridors of this hospital, waiting. They can smell moments of weakness. I don’t want to weaken. I’d die sad. This, here”- he pointed at the cannula on the back of his hand-“this is my last defense against them. I’d like to go out on a big burst of that.”

It took her the rest of the visit to work out that he was talking about his four-hourly doses of morphine.