The Field of Blood (22 page)

The Pancake Place was straight across the road from a shuttered and padlocked side entrance to Central station. A big van was parked right in front of the doors, so she parked a few spaces back and checked her makeup in the rearview mirror. Her lipstick was coming off in the middle where she had sucked her cigarette. She took the No. 17 Frosty Pink from her handbag and one last puff before touching up her lips. She opened the door, stepped out into the wet street, dropping the half-smoked cigarette to hiss to death into the wet, and ran into the café.

The Pancake Place menu was a testament to the versatility of the humble pancake: it was offered with everything, from a dollop of cheap jam to a pair of eggs and black pudding. Open until four a.m., the café had become a haven for late-night shift workers, students on their way home from the dancing, and tired street prostitutes giving their feet a rest. The overwhelming impression of the decor was dark brown. Plastic timbers had been grafted into a suspended ceiling and fake oak partitions built between the tables. To add a touch of olde worlde authenticity, laminated menus were propped up in darkwood stands.

It was quiet, and Heather immediately spotted the man sitting at the back table reading a copy of yesterday’s Scottish Daily News, just as he had promised. He was younger than she had expected from his voice and looked too rough for the paper he was reading. He was dressed like a construction worker, in a heavy jacket and a black woollen hat pulled down over his ears.

“Hello,” she said, trying to look unexcited and professional.

He seemed puzzled. He looked her up and down, taking in her expensive red overcoat and thick lipstick, and went back to reading his paper.

“You called me?” she said.

He looked up at her again, annoyed this time. “Do I know you?”

It was a different voice from the one on the phone, and Heather looked behind her to see if there was another man in a donkey jacket reading the Daily News. There wasn’t. She checked her watch. It was one in the morning. She was right on time.

“I think …” She looked at the empty seat across from him. “May I?”

“May you what?”

“May I sit down?”

He folded his paper shut and cleared his throat. “Gonnae leave me alone?”

“Didn’t you phone me and ask me to come here?”

“I never phoned ye.”

“But someone phoned me.”

“Well,” he said, opening his paper again, “it wasn’t me that phoned ye.” He glanced at her and saw how disappointed she was. “I’m very sorry.”

“I was to look for a man in a donkey jacket reading the Daily News.”

“I think someone’s playing a joke on ye. Sorry.”

Heather suddenly understood. It was one of those bastards at the Daily News, one of the morning-shift boys having a laugh at her expense. They’d be watching her. They’d be in here or across the road, laughing at her.

“Okay,” she said, her voice cracking on the second syllable as the disappointment choked her. “Thank you.”

She backed off, glancing around the café, making sure there wasn’t someone else in the room who met the description. Two tarty women in high heels and evening wear were huddled together near the back; a stoned mod girl was sitting with two boys in leather jackets, each red-eyed and slow moving; an old, old man hunched in an overcoat with tobacco-stained arthritic fingers. No one looked back at her.

She stood inside the door looking out at the shitting rain, blinking hard and trying not to cry. She lifted a paper napkin from under the cutlery on the nearest table and wiped the itchy lipstick off. There would be no London. She would never get a job up here either, because the union had taken against her and those bastards never forgot a grudge.

They were inside, she guessed; someone in the café was watching her. She fumbled a cigarette from her packet and lit it, taking a deep, bitter drag. She felt fat tears welling up, uncontrollable, because she was tired and it was late at night and she’d set such hopes on coming here.

She opened the door and stepped out into the rain, pulling the car keys from her pocket, only vaguely aware of the figure following her out. The street was empty of parked cars, but somehow the big van had backed up nearer to the Golf, so that she would have to reverse first to get out. Cursing it, herself, and every spiteful shit who worked at the Daily News, she turned sideways to slip between the van and the bonnet of the little red GTI.

The van door flew open, hitting her in the face, breaking her nose with a dull thunk. A large, rough hand fell over her face, covering it entirely, smearing what was left of her Frosty Pink lipstick over her chin. She heard him behind her, the man from the café. She heard him speak to the grabbing man, heard him object. Thinking him her savior, she tried to turn to him, but the hands in front of her grabbed her neck, lifting her by her throat into the back of the van.

Donkey Jacket hardly spoke above a whisper. “Wrong fucking bird, ya mug ye.”

When Heather came to she knew she was in the van and felt it moving fast, along a motorway or a good flat road. She was lying on her side, on a flat surface, with a towel that smelled of sour milk hooked over her head. She was missing a shoe, and her hands were tied together with rope behind her back. Through the waves of shock and nausea she realized that her face was very swollen; the pain seemed to radiate out from the bridge of her nose, engulfing her eyes and cheeks and ears, almost meeting round the back of her head again. Her nose was blocked with blood. She tried to blow it clean, but it hurt too much. She could hear the faint sound of a radio coming from the front of the cab, a sound of voices, and poor, dead John Lennon’s “Imagine” came on.

At first she thought again that it must be some of the morning boys playing a prank that had gone too far, but they were never sober enough to drive, especially not late at night, and they wouldn’t have hurt her physically. She wondered for a moment if Paddy Meehan’s family were exacting their revenge, but that couldn’t be right either. She remembered the hand around her throat and realized, suddenly and clearly, that she didn’t know these men and they didn’t know her. They were going to kill her.

Moving carefully, rubbing a relatively pain-free part of her chin repeatedly against her shoulder, she tried and failed to get the smelly towel off. She began to panic, rubbing frantically, regardless of the pain. When the driver hurried or slowed she drifted a little over to the side.

She was struggling with the rope around her wrists and feet, getting nowhere, when the van pulled off the road, took a couple of sharp turns that slid her around the floor, and then came to a creeping stop in a very dark place. The driver got out and a bright overhead light came on. They were outside, somewhere dark. She could hear a river and feet crunching around to the side of the van.

Heather worked her hands up and down, her skin rubbing hard against the tight rope, trying to loosen the cord but embedding it instead in her raw skin. The van door opened, the hood was unhooked from her head, and the man in the donkey jacket looked in at her. He was holding a short-handled shovel. Heather tried to smile.

When Donkey Jacket saw her brutally swollen face, eyes like oranges, chin and hair smeared with blood and snot, he looked perplexed. “That’s not her.”

From around the side of the van she heard another voice muttering, “Ye said ye’d follow her out and ye did.”

An older face looked in at her, frightened, shaking his head. She couldn’t be sure, seeing him upside down, she couldn’t be altogether sure, but she thought his eyes were wet for her and sorry for what he had done. His sympathy made her think for a moment that they might let her go, and relief swept from her crown to her toes, a cold wash that unclenched her aching jaw and eased her throbbing shoulders.

Donkey Jacket lifted the spade from his side, holding it with both hands near the shovel end. “And ye said she was dead,” he said.

The older man’s cracked voice gave his emotion away. “She’d stopped breathing. I thought she was.”

Donkey Jacket nudged him playfully and raised the shovel to chest height. “See? You teach me about things.” His voice was rich and calm. “And now I can teach you things.”

He swung his arm freely, bringing the metal shovel down fast and crushing Heather’s skull against the van floor.

Paddy’s weekend was as poor and friendless as she could remember. She spent the whole of Saturday skulking around the big library in town, keeping out of the house, reading old newspapers about the Dempsie case that told her nothing she didn’t already know.

She hadn’t realized the degree of local animosity towards her until she passed Ina Harris, a vulgar woman she knew to be a friend of Mimi Ogilvy’s, on her way home from the library. Ina turned quite deliberately and spat at Paddy’s feet. She was hardly an arbiter of good manners herself: she often answered her door without her teeth in and was a famously light-fingered cleaner. She kept having to change her job all the time because the day and hour she started anywhere she’d look for the fiddle, steal what she could, and had to leave before she got found out. She got a job cleaning operating theaters once and came home with a bag full of scalpels and gauze. Everyone in Eastfield knew about her.

When Paddy opened her drowsy eyes on the Sunday and saw the two cups of hot tea on her side table, she thought for a moment it was a normal weekend. Con’s only chore around the house was to make the Sunday-morning cuppas and deliver them to the bedrooms, easing everyone up and getting them ready for ten o’clock mass. Paddy blinked, feeling especially excited about seeing Sean at chapel. It was only when she recalled why seeing him meant so much to her that she remembered it wasn’t a normal time.

She sat up in bed, sipping her tea, thinking about all the disapproving Ina Harrises she would have to face today. Sean would be there and would ignore her. Her family wouldn’t speak to her, and everyone in town was watching her and whispering about her crime. Mary Ann would stand loyally by her, but she’d laugh an eloquent articulation of Paddy’s shame and fright.

She listened as everyone in the house took their turn of the bathroom. Mary Ann was rinsing her teeth when Trish called up the stairs to tell them it was half nine, mind now, they’d need to set off in ten minutes. Mary Ann came back into the bedroom and made an astonished face to see Paddy still in bed. Paddy made the face back and Mary Ann giggled, gave her one last open-mouthed gawp, and left.

Paddy lay in bed, still wearing her pajamas, reading L’Etranger, a book Dub had lent her, because she knew the French title would upset her father. She heard the scuffle and whispers at the bottom of the stairs, followed by Con’s tread. He stopped outside, knocked, and opened the door, looking around the room expectantly. She wanted to sit up and challenge him, say something incendiary that would make him speak to her and have a fight for once in his pathetic life. But she didn’t. She sat in bed with her eyes fixed on the page, slowly slipping under the covers, protecting her father’s dignity at the expense of her own.

Con snorted angrily twice and left, shutting the door to the room tight to show how annoyed he was. He tramped downstairs again, she heard the front door shut, and like bubbles bursting, the family was gone.

A calm fell over the house. Paddy listened just to make sure no one had been left behind. They were really gone. She was alone in the house for perhaps the first time in ten years. Even if no one else was in the house, Trisha was usually in the kitchen or at least near it. Paddy threw back the covers and bolted downstairs to the phone.

Mimi Fucking Ogilvy answered in her best Sunday voice.

“Is Sean there?”

“Who may I say it is?”

“Can I speak to Sean, please?”

Paddy could feel Mimi’s tiny mind grind out a thought before she hung up on her.

Paddy waited in the hall, sitting briefly on the stairs, knowing that Sean would have been in the house getting ready for mass and would have heard the phone ring. He’d know it was her: no one else he could possibly know would need to phone on a Sunday morning, because they were all on the way to the chapel and would see each other anyway. He wasn’t going to call her back. She checked her watch. He would have left to get to mass now. He wasn’t calling back.

Back upstairs she threw on some clothes and took off her engagement ring, leaving it sitting by her bed, knowing her mum would come in to make the bed while she was out and would see it there. She hoped it would worry her.

She ate a quick breakfast of cereal. She could have made six boiled eggs, but the grapefruit were all off, and the chemical reaction didn’t work without them. Filling her canvas bag with biscuits, she set off for the town, hurrying to get the train past Rutherglen station before mass came out. She didn’t want to run into half the congregation. Sitting on the train, Paddy looked at her chubby hands dispassionately. She liked them better without the poor ring.

In town she bought a ticket to an afternoon showing of Raging Bull, not because she wanted to see it, but so that she could tell Sean she had already seen it if he asked her later. She didn’t want him thinking she would wait around for him all the time. She felt like a friendless idiot, handing her single ticket over to the usherette. Unprompted, Paddy told her that her friend who had been coming with her was prone to illness and wasn’t well enough to come and that’s why she was alone. The usherette was hungover and dressed like a bellhop, in a washed-out red-and-gray uniform. She let Paddy finish her excuse and then silently pointed the way upstairs with her ticket skewer.

Paddy sat near the back, calculating that fewer people would be able to see her there, and opened her handbag of biscuits. One hour into the film she realized that she had never enjoyed a movie as much in her life. She wasn’t wondering what Sean thought about it or making jokes or checking that she got her share of the sweets, she was just enveloped by the music and the dark. She even forgot to eat.

She arrived back in Eastfield a full hour before anyone could reasonably expect their tea to be ready. It was too painful to go and sit in her bedroom before tea as well as after. The curtains were thick in the living room window, and the settee was too low to see anyway, but she could tell from the quality of the blueness of the light that the telly was on. A head stood up from an armchair— one of the brothers— and went into the kitchen. She had another whole night of internal exile ahead of her.