The Field of Blood (12 page)

“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.

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 forever. 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.