The Field of Blood (28 page)

He shrugged carelessly. “You see everything at least twice if you stay in this game long enough. It all comes around again. Same things again and again. It doesn’t mean they’re related to each other.”

“It’s too much of a coincidence.”

Pete picked at a string of tobacco that had stuck to his lip. “Every year, usually just before Christmas, a woman in Glasgow is stabbed to death by her man.”

“That’s not that unusual,” said Paddy.

“With a bit of broken window. They fight, a window gets broken, and he stabs her with a bit of the glass. Every single year it happens in the same way. It doesn’t make sense that it happens then, but it does. Every year. It’s a cycle. It’s inevitable. You see patterns when you work for long enough. In the end, nothing’s new.”

“I’d like to know what happened back then.”

Pete moved the empty whisky glass to the side, pulling the first beer glass to him. “Dempsie was a big story. The coverage was huge. The Moors Murders were relatively fresh in people’s minds, and the child was so very young, sweet— good pictures, ye know?”

“How come you got all the interviews with Tracy Dempsie? Were you assigned them?”

“No, I doorstepped her. I found out the address and waited outside, in the rain, for three hours until she let me in.” He raised an eyebrow. “I really cared in those days. That surprises you, doesn’t it?”

It didn’t, but Paddy nodded to be polite. “Was Alfred there when you interviewed her?”

“Yeah, he was there. I saw him with his other kid, the older one.”

“His stepson?”

“Yeah. He didn’t like that boy, it was obvious, but he loved his son, the wee one. He was torn apart.”

“Is there a chance he did it?”

“Oh, Dempsie was innocent.”

Pete’s chin hardened a little. He lifted his glass of beer, raising his eyes to the door as someone came in. She turned back to see Father Richards standing at the door, looking over at him, furious. Dr. Pete stared back, daring Richards to come over and make him care, but Richards ordered a drink and sat down at the far end of the bar.

“No one really believed Dempsie’d done it, but it had been four months and no conviction. They needed someone. He didn’t have an alibi, and these things have a life of their own. The only person who half believed he was the killer was Tracy. She tried to sell her story after he was convicted, but no one would buy. That was then, of course. They’d buy it now.”

“I heard the Yorkshire Ripper’s wife got ten grand.”

“I heard twenty.” He drank the half-pint of beer in one tip of the glass, put the empty on the table, and looked suddenly younger. He licked his lips, managing a playful eye roll. “Different days. Back then there were about three crime reporters working the city. We could go for a pint together and just decide to leave things alone if we wanted. It’s a different game now. It’s all circulation wars and young bucks. They’d cut the arse off their own mother for a byline. It was about finding the truth and checks and balances when I was starting out.”

“Woodward and Bernstein and Ludovic Kennedy?”

He winked at her. “Exactly, wee hen. Exactly. We were a proud people back then. Not like now.” He gestured around the room. “A troop of whores.”

Paddy smiled. She was enjoying herself, surprised that he was such good company. He had hardly even sworn at her and was going to the trouble of making her feel as if they were in the same business, instead of being a big brainy journalist and a daft wee copyboy.

“The woman,” said Paddy. “Tracy. What did you make of her?”

“Ah, Tracy. Walking wounded, one of life’s casualties. She was loyal to Alfred until he was taken in for questioning, and then she wanted to drop the dime on him. I don’t know what she was like before the baby died, but when I met her she was all over the place, mad with grief. She’d have said anything the police wanted her to say, they only had to ask. She gave them an excuse to arrest him. Told them he wasn’t really home when he said he was, cut an hour out here and there.”

“How do you know that? Did the police tell you?”

“Aye, well, we were all on the case together. They became good friends, those coppers, we grew up together.” He smiled at his drink. “It wasn’t a good thing, though. Makes it harder to question a conviction if your pals won it. It takes an outsider to do that.”

“Tracy can’t have been that soft. She left her previous man.”

“I think Alfred Dempsie came and got her, which is different to leaving. Then Dempsie killed himself.” He raised his beer glass. “Large ones all round.” He looked at Paddy’s glass and twitched the corners of his mouth down. “You’re not drinking. The news trade works on alcohol. You’d better learn if you’re as ambitious as you seem.”

She wasn’t halfway through her first drink yet but accepted another to please him, and McGrade brought it over. She took a slurp and Pete checked the level in the glass again.

“Not so good this time.”

She tried again.

“Better,” he said, lifting the fresh whisky nearer to his hand.

“But if you all knew it was wrong, why was Dempsie in prison for five years before he killed himself? Why didn’t anyone question the conviction?”

“Weight of evidence. Heavy-handed policing. They’d planted everything on him to get the conviction. You can overturn one bit of evidence, but not three or four. Then it hints at police corruption, and the courts don’t want to get into that.” He nodded at her. “See, there was only one bit of evidence planted in the Meehan case.”

“I know.”

“The paper from the Rosses’ safe found in Griffiths’s pocket after he was shot. You interested in Paddy Meehan?”

“A bit.”

“I know him, by the way, if you want to meet him.”

It was a bit sudden; Paddy didn’t have her defenses up. “Oh,” she said. “No. No, not really.”

“He’s a tricky bastard. Always annoyed. Not unreasonably, I suppose.”

“I heard that.”

Pete bellowed in a rich baritone: “Are you going to talk to me?”

Startled, Paddy sat up before she realized that he was talking to someone behind her. Richards was walking towards them, his face thunderous.

“You’re wasting your time, Richards. I don’t give a monkey’s anymore.”

“You phoned in sick.” Richards sneered. “And then coming in here? What’s wrong with you?”

“Liver cancer.” Pete drank down his beer and set the empty glass to the side. “I’ve got cancer.”

A horrible hush descended on the room. Paddy could see Richards processing the information, thinking it over, wondering whether Dr. Pete would dare lie about something like that.

“Balls.”

“I got the word yesterday, and this bar is where I want to be.”

Richards paused momentarily and then backed off, walking slowly back to his seat at the bar, checking Pete over his shoulder to see if he was joking. Everyone in the bar pretended they hadn’t heard him and turned the pages in their papers or placed their glasses back on tables, muffling the silence.

When they were left alone, Paddy thought she should say something. “That must have been a blow.”

“It’s one way to get the word out, eh?” Pete looked at his drink and nodded dreamily. “This bar,” he said slowly, “I like this bar.”

McGrade scurried over with a fresh round of drinks from Richards, who stayed far away and nodded to them both. Paddy looked at her new half-pint. She had three glasses in front of her and hadn’t finished the first one yet.

“Those Baby Brian Boys,” said Pete, trying to get back to the conversation they were having before the bomb. “The police’ll get a conviction. They’ll have to.”

“Could they have planted evidence on the Brian Boys?”

Pete curled his lip. “I’d put money on the evidence being good. If you know how to watch for the pattern, planted evidence only comes out weeks later, when they’re getting frustrated. They don’t start off with a plant in a big case. They might put corroborating evidence down, though. It goes on more than you think.”

The bar was starting to fill up. Behind Pete a man passed on his way to the toilet, undoing his fly before reaching the door. She didn’t belong here and wanted to leave. She lifted her sleeve and carefully checked her watch as a preliminary move.

Pete spoke quietly. “Please don’t go.”

“But I need—”

“If you go, Richards’ll come over here. It’s been a long day, and it’s hard work being pitied.”

So they sat together, a man facing the end of his life and a young girl struggling to kick-start hers. They drank together, and then Paddy started smoking with him. Cigarettes and drink complemented each other perfectly, she discovered, like white bread and peanut butter. She drank an all-time personal best of four half-pints.

They talked about anything that came to mind, their thoughts swimming sympathetically, barely connecting. Paddy told him about the Beatties’ stuff in the garage, about how she’d always hated it when she saw the Queen’s picture up in offices, because of what she represented. She always saw her smiling and handing out OBEs to the soldiers who shot into the crowd on Bloody Sunday, but she’d looked at the Beatties’ portrait of her and thought she might actually be quite a nice woman, doing her best. She talked about her Auntie Ann, who raised money for the IRA with raffle tickets and then went on antiabortion marches.

Dr. Pete talked about a wife who had left for England years before and how she would cook a leg of lamb for special occasions. She stuck the meat with rosemary she grew in their garden and sat potatoes under it to roast in the lamb fat. The meat was as sweet as tablet, as moist as beer; it lingered on the tongue like a prayer. Before he met her he had never eaten food that made him feel as if he had just woken up to the world. The way she cooked that lamb was beautiful. She had black hair and was so slight he could lift her up and swing her over a puddle with one arm around her waist. He hadn’t talked about her in a long time.

The doors were busy with men finishing their shift. Another couple of journalists drifted towards the table, looking for a seat and a joke, but Pete blanked them and they moved off elsewhere.

More uninhibited than she had ever been, Paddy confided in Dr. Pete that she loved his writing in the Dempsie articles and asked him why he didn’t write anymore.

His jaundiced eyes slid across the floor of the pub and he blinked slowly. “I’m writing a book. I’ve been writing a book about John MacLean and Red Clydeside. They keep you back … My wife left …”

Even through the haze of alcohol, Paddy knew he was making excuses. Everyone at the News was writing a book; she was writing a book about Meehan in her head. Pete had just given up and joined the other lazy cynics. She couldn’t imagine him fit enough to lift a woman over a puddle with one hand. She wanted to say something nice but couldn’t think of a pleasantry appropriate to a man who’d pissed his life away.

Both doors opened simultaneously, letting a blast of bitterly cold air swirl into the bar. A number of men clattered noisily towards the table. It was the morning boys, coming in team-handed to visit their leader. Unbidden, they pulled over seats and settled around the table. Paddy stood up, staggering to the side a little, surprised by how drunk she was. She and Dr. Pete nodded to each other. Their time was over.

“Let that be a lesson to you,” said Pete, and he broke eye contact with her, looking back at his drink. Paddy took her half-pint with her as she pulled away into the crowd.

By now the Press Bar was heaving. The air was treacle thick with smoke and the sweet smell of spilled drink. Farquarson was standing by the door, disagreeing with a short man in front of him. A sharp, attention-grabbing, acid undertone was coming from the near corner: a sports boy had snuck in a vinegar-soused fish supper and was surreptitiously eating it off his knees. Apart from Paddy there were only three other women in the room: one, a redhead in a purple sequined top, was flirting with a table of men and being bought drinks; the other two were sitting together, one of them the beady-eyed woman who’d cried as the squat-faced policeman showed her out of the interview room. Both women stared blankly ahead as they nursed small red drinks in round glasses. Keck was hanging around a table of sports guys, laughing and leaning over while they ignored him, forcing himself on the reluctant company.

Paddy decided to go home. She tried to slip behind Farquarson, but he turned to let her squeeze through and the moment for pretending not to have seen each other was past. He tried to incorporate her into the conversation he was having about football with the small man, but she didn’t know anything about it.

“Ah ha,” he said. “More of a rugby woman, are you?”

“I don’t really watch sport.”

“Right.” Farquarson took another sip. “Ah, Margaret Mary McGuire.” He grabbed the arm of the redhead, who was sidling past. “How the devil are you?” Margaret Mary didn’t seem very pleased to see Farquarson, but he persevered. “Have you met our own Patricia Meehan? She’s something else, something else.” He swung away abruptly, leaving the two women stuck with each other.

Margaret Mary, who was too old to be wearing a sparkly top and too ginger to be wearing a purple anything, looked Paddy up and down. Her face soured. “What age are you?”

“Eighteen,” said Paddy, bold with drink. “Why, what age are you?”

“Get stuffed,” said Margaret Mary, and recommenced her sashay to the toilets.

“Hiya.”

Keck was pressing just a little closer to Paddy than the crowd warranted. It hurt her neck and eyes to look up at him.

“Right, Keck?”

“Come on over and I’ll introduce you to the guys.” He motioned towards the sports journalists, who hadn’t even noticed he’d gone.

“I’m all right, Keck. I’m finishing my drink and going in a minute.”

“You should come over, it’s a brilliant laugh.” His eyes swiveled paranoiacally around the noisy room. “Women don’t like sport, eh? What do women like, anyway?” He looked at Margaret Mary’s back. “What do they want from men? Big cars? You’re chiselers, eh?”

“Yeah,” she said, itching to get away. “If you keep coming out with crap like that the only women who’ll keep you company’ll be self-loathing nut-jobs. There are lots of nice women in the world.”