The Field of Blood (26 page)

“And yet your accent sounds from the East.” She raised her perfect eyebrows.

Meehan tried not to smile: he hadn’t said enough for her to hear his accent.

“I do not know many German speakers here.” She touched her white blond hair gently, drawing his eye to the intricacies of the coloring. “I find myself quite lonely.”

Jonny looked at Meehan, pursing his lips approvingly. He moved away to the far edge of the counter, leaving them alone. Meehan took out some pens from under the counter and let her look at them, lifting them and putting them down again, stroking the tortoiseshell casing on one, smiling at the extra-large inkwell on another. Their fingers touched once as he handed over a Cross with a calligraphic nib, his fingertip brushing her inner wrist. Her hand was as soft and warm as butter, and he would have given up the job just to touch it with his lips. He began to perspire.

She was a gorgeous twenty-five-year-old blonde, put together like a Miss World. Meehan knew what he looked like: he was five foot eight, acne-scarred, and out of shape. Done up he wasn’t much of a prize, but wearing a cheap uniform blazer and standing behind a counter, he must look a mess.

“Well, it was very nice to meet you,” she said, proffering a hand. “Perhaps I may come in again and talk with you in German?”

“Das wäre schön,” he said, and took her hand, intending to shake it firmly but professionally. She put her pretty hand in his, her fingertips curling as she pulled away, stroking the full length of his palm and making his mouth water. She turned on her perfect heels and clip-clopped away.

Jonny was at his elbow in a moment. “Patrick, you’re a hit with the ladies. I’d never have guessed. Is she coming back in? What was that ye said to her?”

“She said she’d come back in.” Meehan caught his breath. “And I said that would be lovely.”

“That coat must have cost what we earn in a month,” said Jonny, catching a final glimpse of her heading for the stairs to the exit. “From Paris, by the look of it.”

Meehan left the job two months later without ever telling Jonny his suspicions about her. The beautiful German appeared to him just once more, in the pub where he was meeting James Griffiths before their recce jaunt to Stranraer— the night he’d never be able to forget.

He and Griffiths had arranged to meet on the phone, and Griffiths had blurted out the name of the pub. He wasn’t the brightest and he couldn’t remember the code. Paddy was just pleased that he hadn’t said “tax decal robbery” and “Stranraer” on the phone as well.

The woman was alone when he came in. She was drinking a small lemonade and standing at the bar. She chatted with Meehan, expressing surprise at their meeting again, having no trouble remembering where she had seen him before. Meehan didn’t handle it well. He knew she was there because of Griffiths’s mistake and was wary and afraid. He was a little rude to her. She was wearing the coat again but this time had higher shoes on, beige court shoes, and a pale blue scarf at her throat. When she left, the entire pub turned and watched, staring at the door as it shut and bounced open again, giving them one more flash of her perfect ankle.

Later, after Rachel Ross died, during his seven long years in solitary confinement, Meehan remembered the woman and the way she slipped her hand through his, the way her hips moved inside her coat, the touch of her lipstick-sticky lips against each other. He had never seen such a beautiful woman outside the movies. He wondered whether she might have been his in another life. If he’d had an education, been born three miles to the west or south of the Gorbals, maybe he could have been charming and rich, a sophisticated linguist, a poet or painter, good enough for a woman like her.

He made up a history for her: She was a spy, yes, but she had been forced into it after escaping from the East. The British had threatened to hand her back over if she didn’t work for them. She had a husband, a handsome man with a job in science, but he had died young and left her alone. Meehan liked to think that although good-looking, the dead husband might have been a short man with bad skin, that Meehan might remind her of him in some way. She became a golden light in the dark years ahead. It was the one good thing about the aftermath of the East and Stranraer and the subsequent years of hell: being caught in the middle of it all meant that he had met her.

Seven years later Meehan was on exercise, walking around a concrete yard in a burst of black rain. Water smashed off the concrete, bouncing up his trouser legs, making his bare legs wet. He walked in a slow circle, his collar pulled up, while the guards watched him from the shelter of the doorway. He only got out once a fortnight. Apart from two months somewhere in the middle, he had always been kept in a solitary cell because he refused to work.

He wished he could draw. He’d do a picture of the yard and put it up on his wall and imagine himself out here whenever he wanted. He’d draw the Tapp Inn in the Gorbals, where all his cronies drank. Meehan had laughed louder and longer in the Tapp Inn than anywhere else. He’d draw it from outside, the colored glass windows and high white walls, and leave the door open so he could see the bar and fat Hannah Sweeny cleaning the glasses.

Over the years he had spent most of his time in Peterhead Prison on the gray, wind-lashed Aberdeen coast, and he had been in his present cell for eight months, but wherever they kept him the cells all looked the same. The walls were painted with thick paint, a gloss so that it could be washed clean whatever happened, even if a man had his throat cut and sprayed blood everywhere.

The thick paint meant that prisoners could scratch messages into the wall with the softest of implements: a sharpened spoon or a nail from a bed, sometimes even with a bit of flint found in the exercise yard. Paddy had read every single word on these walls. He had made up stories for the messages to pass the time. J. McC. TWO YEARS + FIVE DAYS was a street fighter from Edinburgh who robbed a post office. SHITEBALLS was a ned, a nonearning thug who beat his wife to death with a shoe. The stories had become so familiar that Paddy had fallen out with some of them. He was sure LICK MY CUNT had been written by a nonce, and the Rangers graffiti wound him up so he had stuck some of his pictures over them. The messages from one poof to another annoyed him. He felt implicated by their sexiness and tender words, so he stuck pictures over them too. The things he hung on his wall formed a senseless pattern, some up high, some down low— full stops to imaginary arguments.

Prisoners weren’t usually allowed to put up pictures in solitary, but they let Meehan do it because he had been in for so long. He had seven things on his wall, one for every year he had served for Rachel Ross. He felt it was an important statement that he hadn’t chosen to put up scuddy pictures of birds like guys who were waiting out their time. Instead, he had chosen to pin up important letters about his case, including a Crown Office letter stating that his application to sue the police for perjury had been received. He wasn’t allowed to bring the case but was proud that he had tried; it was an obscure part of Scots law, and he had discovered it himself. The Sunday Times special investigation into his case was pinned to the wall as well, and nearby a Scottish Daily News front page: a confession to the murder of Rachel Ross by Ian Waddell. Waddell wouldn’t name the second man, the only person in the world who could corroborate his story and release Paddy Meehan.

The only color picture on the wall was the red-and-black script on the cover of the book Ludovic Kennedy had written about his conviction. Next to it a one-page point-by-point dismissal of the case, from the disputed traces of Rachel Ross’s blood on Meehan’s trousers to the paper scraps from Abraham’s safe being found in Griffiths’s pocket.

He was trying hard to keep his mind. He counted things over and over: the bars, the squares of the mesh covering the window, the bangs on the pipes as they heated up in the morning and cooled at night. He had tried to count every cut in the wall, every line scratch, but the distinctions became too technical, and he couldn’t decide between continuous lines that changed direction and individual incisions. He talked to himself in a normal voice, without shame or embarrassment, quite unworried about who would hear him. He said the same things over and over. Bastards. Arseholes. Not me, pal, it wasn’t me. Das wäre schön. Das wäre schön, Lieben. Mein Lieben.

She sauntered through his cell a hundred times a night, asking for pens and finding herself lonely, moving her snaky hips like a dancer. Sometimes she danced for him, tiny steps, raising a foot and then another, the belt on her leopard-skin coat swinging to and fro. A Mediterranean summer gleam shone around her. She rarely looked at him, keeping her grassy-green eyes on her feet as she danced and staring straight ahead when she walked. He didn’t just see her when he wanted a tug either. He saw her when he felt low; when he saw himself in his filthy surroundings and read the messages from the men who had been in here before him; when he suspected that he was just like them, no better, no mistake. Then she would come and bring the light and speak to him in broken German. When his appeals were turned down and the home secretary decided against reopening the case, then she would come to him. Sometimes she would sit on his horsehair bed and hold his hand. Her skin was soft, like air. Other times he didn’t see her but just knew she was out of his line of vision. He reached back to touch her sometimes, and she might touch his neck with her manicured fingertips before floating away, leaving him warm and happy.

He had to ration her company to keep it special. During the worst times he tried to keep her out of his thoughts altogether, afraid she would become tainted by the association.

Coming back from exercise, Meehan walked through the open door into his cell and stood dripping onto the floor, keeping his back to the door so the screw couldn’t see him smiling. He loved the rain.

1981

The waitress brought her over a mug of tea and two poached eggs on toast. It was a café no one from the News ever used because it was up a very steep hill, next to Rotten Row maternity hospital. The plates were chipped, the mugs were stained, but the place was clean in the corners and the pattern on the Formica worktops had been worn away with endless scrubbing and bleaching. Paddy liked the warm room, liked it that they used butter instead of margarine, and that the eggs were freshly made to order. The large window onto the street was always steamed over, reducing the outside world to passing ghosts. Paddy had chosen poached eggs on toast because it was a bit like the Mayo Clinic Diet: eggs was eggs after all.

She took the clippings envelope out of her pocket and slipped two fingers in, pulling out the folded, yellowing newspapers to read while she ate. The articles hadn’t been opened for years and had dried around one another in a tidy little package. She flattened them carefully and flicked through, finding an interview with Tracy Dempsie from the time just after Thomas was found dead but before Alfred was accused. Tracy said that whoever did this to her boy should be hanged and it was a shame that they weren’t hanging people anymore because that’s what she’d like to see. Even in sanitized quotes she sounded a bit nuts.

Another story made it clear, through aspersion and innuendo, that Tracy had run away from her first husband to be with Alfred. They seemed to have met at the ballroom dancing, which was a fancy way of saying that despite being married, Tracy was hanging around a meat market looking for a man. The photographs showed her looking not a minute younger than she had when Paddy went to visit her. Her hair was pulled up in exactly the same style, but the skin on her face had less give. She was sitting in a living room strewn with toys and clutching a photograph of her young son. Thomas had big eyes and blond hair that curled at the tips. He grinned at the person holding the camera, squeezing tight every muscle on his tiny face.

As she reread the text of the long articles, she was struck by how beautifully written they were. The language was so crisp that wherever her eye landed it skidded effortlessly to the end of the paragraph. She looked for the byline and found that they were all written by Peter McIltchie. She was staggered: she had never known Dr. Pete to produce anything like usable copy. He wasn’t even trusted to churn out holiday cover for the Honest Man column, a despised weekly opinion piece cynically shaped to chime with the readership’s most ill-informed prejudices. Being saddled with the column was more than a sign that a journalist’s star was sinking, it was the professional equivalent of a tolling bell.

Paddy carefully dried the grease off her fingers with a paper napkin before folding up the clippings along their well-established creases, setting them on top of one another in chronological order, and slipping them carefully back into the stiff brown envelope. She finished off her last bite of buttery toast and stood up to put on her coat.

Terry Hewitt was standing in front of her, wearing his black leather with the red shoulders. If Sean had been drawn with a ruler, Terry was a sketch, all crumpled shirt and uneven skin. His fingertips were balanced nervously on the back of a chair. He looked away and wrinkled his forehead, as if they were at the end of the conversation instead of the beginning, and twitched a one-second smile, more of an entreaty than a greeting.

“What are you doing here?”

“Having my lunch.” She was about to extrapolate into a joke or a gibe about how fat she was but stopped herself, remembering his calling her a fat lassie in the Press Bar. She picked up her bag and pulled on her coat. “I’ll leave you my table.”

She turned to go, but Terry reached across and tugged at her sleeve. “Wait, Meehan.” He blanched, embarrassed at the intimacy of using her name. “I want to talk to you.”

Paddy bristled. “What about?”

He smiled at her, his lips retracting across his teeth again. She liked that. It made him look so hesitant. “Baby Brian. I heard you talking to Farquarson.”

She stopped and crossed her arms. “You’re not going to try and steal my story, are you? Because I’ve had enough of that for one week.”