The Field of Blood (18 page)

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.”

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 checkin time.

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.