The Field of Blood (21 page)

Between the tax office and the hotel they could see Loch Ryan, and beyond the hills, to the molten black sea. Big red ferryboats for Belfast and the Isle of Man bobbed on the gentle lift and sway of the water. A few lorries were already parked there, drivers sleeping in the cabs, waiting for the first crossing.

“Fuck it,” said Meehan, stubbing out his fag in the ashtray. “This is pointless. Let’s get back to Glasgow and get a breakfast at the meat market.”

The meat dealers’ café opened at four in the morning. Their fry-ups had rashers as thick as gammon steaks, and they sold mugs of cheap whisky. Griffiths took a puff on his cigarette, shaking his head as he exhaled a string of smoke. They had shared a cell for two months and could read each other’s breathing. Griffiths was vexed. He shook his head at Paddy, smiling a little, and relented.

“Okay, okay.” He turned the key in the ignition, leaving the lights off as he reversed out of the dark corner. “Let’s get some brekkie.”

Fifty miles north of Stranraer, in the small, wealthy suburb of Ayr, Rachel and Abraham Ross were in the bedroom of their bungalow, getting ready for bed. Rachel, in a sky-blue nightie and pink chenille dressing gown, sat on the side of her twin bed and watched her husband winding his watch. A single, convulsive cough shook her. She fought it off and waved a dismissive hand.

“It’s nothing.”

“Sure?” said Abraham, putting his watch on the bedside table.

Rachel patted his bed. “I’m fine, I’m fine,” she said. “Dr. Eardly said it would come and go for a little while after the operation, didn’t he? I’m fine.”

She smiled reassuringly for her husband, showing a little of her bare pink gums. They had spent the past month lying in their respective beds, listening to the texture of Rachel’s bronchial cough. It had left them both exhausted. The cough was so violent that it had cracked one of her ribs and caused her to have an operation. Abraham had fallen asleep in his office in the Alhambra Bingo Hall yesterday and seen Rachel cough up a river into their bedroom. She had always been the stronger, five years older than him and barren too, but in both their minds the stronger.

She pulled back the covers on her bed and took off her dressing gown, folding it carefully in half, laying it along the bottom of her bed.

“Good night, dear.” She kissed her own hand and touched his cheek with her fingertips to save her bending down.

“Good night, my dear.”

He waited until she was well tucked in, then pulled the string above his head to turn off the light. A cozy blue settled on the room, broken only by the puddle of yellow light from the hall. In unison they took off their spectacles, folded them and set them, side by side, on the nightstand. Rachel was propped up on pillows, having been told to sleep sitting up as much as possible to let the fluid settle at the bottom of her lungs, where it would take up less surface area. She folded her hands in front of her over the coverlet.

“Busy night?”

“Aye, a good night.”

“Good takings?”

“Six thousand, give or take.”

“Same as last Friday?”

“Aye, that’s right,” he said, and she could hear him smiling. “About the same.”

She smiled too, reaching across for his bed but finding only air and patting that instead. “Well done.”

They settled back, listening to each other’s breathing, Rachel rasping a little sometimes but mostly even, Abraham taking long, deep breaths to set an example. They slept little now but liked to be in bed listening to each other, without the necessity of speech or the need always to be doing things. They lay for forty minutes together in the soft blue gloom. Once, Rachel reached out and patted the air again, moved by some tender memory.

A sudden loud snap just outside the bedroom door made Rachel turn her head sharply.

They both watched as a black shadow fell across the pool of light from the hall, and suddenly the door was thrown open, smashing off the bedroom wall. Two figures, maybe three, came running in. One held a blanket high and flew at Abraham, covering the old man’s head with it. The other stepped on Abraham’s bed and swung himself across the room, making for Rachel.

He grabbed both Rachel’s wrists, wrenching her off the bed and onto the floor on the far side, kneeling on her operation scar, making her cry out with the pain. He let his weight settle on her chest. Retracting his arm at the elbow he shot his fist forward and punched her on the jaw. He could see her in the light from the hall, her toothless mouth, her thinning hair and wiry neck. He punched her again, on the cheek, on the neck, on the jaw again.

Abraham heard his wife from under the blanket and used all of his one-hundred-and-ten-pound frame to wrestle the man who was holding him. He heard the man’s short breaths, sensed his surprise. He had strong fingers from doing the count every night and found the man’s arm, sticking his fingers into the soft armpit, squeezing hard. The man shouted.

“Get this cunt off me, Pat!”

He was from Glasgow, Southside, Gorbals possibly, where Rachel and Abraham both grew up.

Suddenly Rachel breathed normally again and Abraham stopped struggling. He hadn’t managed to shake off the blanket and sat still, holding the man’s arm, listening keenly, wondering what the new swishing noise was. An iron bar swung through the air and made contact with his back, with his legs, his arms, his back again.

They took everything: the money, travelers’ checks, what little jewelry there was, and Rachel’s watch, pulled off her arm as she lay bleeding and crying. When it was all done they tied them up, Abraham black and blue under his blanket, his whimpering wife next to him. He lay under the blanket trying to remember things about the men. They were both Glaswegian, one called Jim or Jimmy, one called Pat; one was big and stocky, the other thin.

The men decided not to leave until the sun came up so as not to raise suspicion. Settling down in the living room, they drank the last of a bottle of fifteen-year-old Glenmorangie Abraham had been keeping for best.

Left alone in the bedroom, Abraham tried to free himself but couldn’t.

“Don’t.” Rachel was struggling to stay awake. “Please. Stay still. They’ll hit us.”

So Abraham stayed still for his wife. He stayed still and listened to her dry breath rattle around the room they had shared for thirty years.

Eventually a watery white light began to seep through the blanket.

“Is it getting light?” he asked, but Rachel didn’t answer.

The men were there again, in the room, walking over to them. Abraham flinched away, but they weren’t there to hit him. They tied more ropes around them, tightening the ones already on the couple. They were standing up to leave when Rachel spoke again.

“Please,” she said, her breath shallow, “send an ambulance for me. Please.”

They didn’t answer. They walked to the door.

She called again. “Please send an ambulance—”

“Shut up, shut up. We’ll send an ambulance. All right?”

The door slammed behind them and they were gone.

Meehan and Griffiths were outside Kilmarnock on the deserted road to Glasgow, doing eighty and singing a dirty song about the different-colored hairs on a whore’s cunt, both pleased that they hadn’t taken the risk of robbing the office, when they passed a crying girl in a miniskirt and shiny white boots.

“Stop!” shouted Meehan. “Slow down.”

Griffiths sat upright suddenly, looking around for cop cars.

“Did you see her?” Meehan thumbed behind them. “There was a girl crying back there.”

Griffiths slowed the car and pulled over, squinting into his rearview mirror. He threw the car into reverse and careered backwards towards her.

Irene Burns didn’t have the legs for a miniskirt. She had calves like a navvy but a big chest, and to Meehan’s and Griffiths’s eyes that balanced her out a bit. She had a drink in her but was only sixteen and wasn’t used to it. She was sobbing so hard she could barely explain what had happened. She had been hitchhiking with her pal Isobel when two men offered them a lift home. They got into a white car, an Anglia, and one of the men got out a half bottle of whisky. They were driving along and Isobel started winching one man, but Irene didn’t fancy hers, wouldn’t let him touch her, so the men got annoyed, stopped at the side of the road, and put her out. Now Isobel was all alone in a car with two strange men, Irene was ten miles from home, drunk for the first time in her life, and she didn’t know what she was going to tell Isobel’s mother.

Meehan reached into the back of the Triumph and opened the passenger door. “You get in, pet,” he said. “If anyone can catch that car it’s this man.”

Griffiths grinned out at her. He was missing quite a lot of teeth, and it made her smile a little. He gave her a salute and called “Hello there” in a silly voice, like Eccles from The Goon Show. Irene climbed in the back, feeling better already.

Before he became a thief Griffiths was a racer, and he was a talented driver. Within five minutes they saw the white Anglia in front of them on the road. It was going slow, doing about thirty, weaving back and forth across the road. Griffiths slowed and pulled up, keeping shoulder to shoulder. The other driver was a young country boy spruced up for a night out. In the back of the car a girl with a mashed-up beehive was necking another guy.

“Isobel!” squealed Irene. “That’s her! That’s her with him.”

The driver looked at them and Meehan gestured to him to pull over to the side. He saw the country boy hesitate, his eyes flickering from the road in front of him to their car, trying to work out who they were and why he should comply. Irene wound down her window and shouted for her friend, but Isobel ignored the call and carried on kissing ferociously, her new friend’s hand lost in her candy-floss hair. The country boy slowed and pulled off to the side. Griffiths had barely stopped the Triumph in front of them when Irene pulled open the passenger door and ran out, heaving open the Anglia door and tugging her friend out of the backseat and into the road. Isobel shook her off with a single bat of her hand. She was a big girl who didn’t look like she would ever need saving. Below her miniskirt her tights had made a suspension bridge between her knees.

In the Triumph, Meehan sighed. “What d’ye reckon? Maybe we should just leave them.”

They watched for another minute. Isobel pulled up her tights by the waistband. Irene was howling again. She seemed to be having a drama of her own, as if she was in a completely separate movie.

“They’re just wee girls, though,” said Meehan, watching Isobel move in a way that made her big, fluid breasts tremble beneath her jersey.

Griffiths flashed him a cheeky smile. “Isobel’s game, though, eh?”

Meehan’s face broke into a wonky smile. He cleared his throat and smeared his hair down. Exaggerating his hard-man swagger, he walked over and put his hand in his jacket pocket as if he had a blade.

“These girls are too young to be out at this time. I’m taking them home.”

The men in the car glanced at each other, dropping their shoulders.

Meehan leaned down, filling the open window. “Want to make something of it?”

The boys shook their heads.

Meehan gestured to the girls to get in the back of the Triumph. Isobel burped and pulled down her jersey as Irene, too drunk to realize that the danger was by, sobbed and dragged her towards the Triumph.

“Right, boys,” said Meehan, enjoying himself, playing it like an off-duty policeman. “Back up and pull out.” He slapped the roof of the car. “On your way.”

Far from fulfilling her promise as a jailbait temptress, Isobel fell asleep as soon as she got into the car. She sat with her fat legs sprawled across the backseat, snoring vehemently. Irene sobbed with fright and drink all the way to Isobel’s and then on to her own house. Whenever she managed to stop crying, she told Meehan and Griffiths that they were awful good, dead kind, and the thought would start her crying again. She was irritating the life out of them.

The sun was halfway up in the sky and the milkmen were finishing their rounds by the time they arrived at a row of brown-and-white prefabs on the outskirts of Kilmarnock. The curtains were open in Irene’s living room, the lights on inside.

“My ma’ll be frantic,” she said, rubbing her swollen, itchy eyes. “She’ll be phoning the polis and everything.”

They made her get out quickly at that. Griffiths sped all the way back to Glasgow. They’d missed the meat market and skipped breakfast, parting slightly sick of each other, knowing they’d be pals again after a sleep and a feed.

Mr. and Mrs. Ross lay on the floor for two more nights and two more days. They heard children playing in the street outside and cars rolling past their house. The telephone rang in the hall. A couple of dog walkers met on the pavement outside their bedroom window and chatted for a while. They lay on the floor until Monday morning at ten o’clock, when their cleaner turned up for work as usual and used her own key to get in.

Rachel Ross sighed her last breath as the ambulance drew to a soft stop outside the hospital.

HEATHER’S LUCKY BREAK

1981

Heather gathered the keys for her mother’s car from the hall table and tiptoed out of the house. Heavy rain masked the noise of the closing door and Heather’s feet crunching over the moat of gravel around the house. She swung her bag into the passenger seat, shut the door carefully, and started the red Golf GTI, leaving the lights off until she had cleared the drive.

The country roads were quiet all the way into town and stayed quiet as she approached the city center. It was just past midnight on a Friday night, but the rain had chased everyone off the streets. Every third car was a cab. Even the buses had stopped. Going at full speed, the windscreen wipers only managed to pull back the curtain of rain periodically, and sheets of water rippled down hills.

Waiting at a traffic light, Heather rummaged in her handbag on the seat next to her, feeling for her cigarettes. The lights changed before she could take one out of the packet, and she found herself on the green side of every light into town. It wasn’t until she reached Cowcaddens that she managed to put one in her mouth and press the lighter on the dashboard. She inhaled, and the smoke made her lungs feel dirty and clogged. On the way out it did the same to her teeth. It felt good.