Denise Mina - Field of Blood

Paddy found it hard to understand why the boys had gone all the way to Steps. The whole of Barnhill was rich in abandoned yards and empty tracts of land that wee wild kids from the area played on and knew better than anyone else. She remembered looking out at the landscape through the beaded window of the bus, on the way back to the Southside with the Ogilvy mourners. They had passed St. Rollox, a dying train coach engineering works with innumerable crumbling outbuildings. She had seen fields of blackened, twisted metal, abandoned railway lines, and another yard of what looked like rows of ingredients set out in good order: huge containers of sun-yellow sand, stacks of timber, and coils of wire as tall as a man. Small boys would know a hundred hiding places for a guilty secret.

Aware of a shadow at the side of the table, she looked up and found the chief reporter, JT, hovering near her. He smiled modestly, self-consciously, as if thinking of himself as seen by her and, oddly, supposing himself admired. He couldn’t have thought himself attractive: he had a round face that fell into his neck and a nose covered in prominent blackheads. Paddy was suddenly conscious of a thin rim of custard at one side of her mouth.

“Mind if I sit?”

She gathered up all the newspapers, arranging them into a tidy pile, and JT sat down, putting a mug of tea on the table together with a plate of chips zigzagged with ketchup, a bacon roll perched on top.

“Thanks so much.” He smiled again, taking off his suede jacket and throwing it onto the windowsill with what he imagined was panache. “How are you, Patricia? Are you all right?”

He couldn’t have heard anyone say her name. He must have seen it written down. She smiled but didn’t answer.

“When I first came here copyboys wouldn’t have been allowed to eat in the canteen with journalists.” A smile twitched at one corner of his mouth. “I was a copyboy once, at the Lanarkshire Gazette . Can ye believe that?”

He left a space for her to respond, so she did.

“Can I believe that a man as important as you was ever a copyboy, or that Lanarkshire had its own gazette?”

He ignored her, continuing with the conversation he wanted them to be having. “In those days a copyboy sitting in the canteen would have been as welcome as a fart in a space suit.” He smiled and looked away, leaving a pause for her laughter. She didn’t fill it. The crack was a Billy Connolly joke, circa 1975. JT was trying to sound like him, all drawly delivery and camp surprise. Since Connolly’s rise to stardom a lot of dull Glaswegian men had started monkeying his delivery without having the material. He had made an urban hero of the pub bore.

It seemed it was Paddy’s turn to speak again. “’S that right?”

“Aye, aye, that’s right.” He looked suddenly sad. “Patricia, are you all right?”

She nodded.

He dropped the Connollyesque bonhomie and spoke in a careful, tiptoey tone, the sort of voice an adult would use to lie to a child. “Really? Can you be feeling all right? Well, why are you sitting here?” He gestured to the throbbing mass of the canteen. “ Alone. ”

She was sitting by herself because the other option was listening to ugly old men making snide jokes about her tits for forty minutes. “I got sent on first lunch.”

“Are you sure you’re all right?”

“Uh huh.”

JT dropped his voice to a whisper. “The past few days must have been awful for you.”

Paddy looked at him for a minute, letting her eyes have the run of his unctuous face. If George McVie had been sitting there doing the act he did on Mr. Taylor, she’d have opened up a little at least before remembering to be cautious. She had admired JT, but only by reputation and results. Close up he was a weasel. She suddenly understood why the other journalists hated him so blatantly.

He leaned over the table, waiting for an answer.

“Yeah, well, you know…”

He looked at her empty cup. “D’you want another coffee? I’m going to have one. Have one, on me.” He stood up and turned back, waving over at Kathy serving behind the now quiet counter. He raised an imperious finger. “Two coffees over here.” He turned back to Paddy, smiling and muttering confidingly, “Let’s see if we get them.”

Behind him, Kathy whispered to her boss, Scary Mary, who looked angrily over at JT and shouted, “Self-service.” She held up a small card from next to the till and shook it at him. “Self-service!”

JT didn’t hear her. “So, Patricia-”

“Look, everyone calls me Paddy.”

“I see. Well, Paddy, I heard that you’re related to one of the boys who did this…” He tapped the word “evil” on the stack of papers and shook his head. “Dreadful, dreadful .”

Paddy hummed in agreement.

JT tipped his head to the side. “Are you close to him?”

“No,” she said, hoping he’d be disappointed. “He’s my fiancé’s wee cousin. I’ve only met him once, and that was at his father’s funeral.”

“I see, I see. Can you get me in to him?”

She was too shocked to be indignant. “No.”

“What’s your fiancé called?”

She had the presence of mind to lie. “Michael Connelly.” She could almost hear his brain making the scratchy sound of graphite on paper.

He nodded. “What would make someone do that to a child?” He left the question hanging in the air.

“Well, the boys are only ten or eleven years old themselves.”

JT shook his head. “These were hardly children. Sure, we all did stupid things when we were kids, but did you ever lure a toddler away and kill him for fun?”

Paddy looked at him, dead-eyed. He had adopted without question the lazy, pat explanation.

“No,” said JT, oblivious to the waves of hate coming from his audience of one. “That’s right. Neither did I.”

“They’re children,” said Paddy.

JT shook his head. “These boys aren’t children. The age of legal responsibility is eight in Scotland. They’ll be tried as adults.”

“They don’t stop being children just because it doesn’t suit us anymore. They’re ten and eleven. They are children.”

“If they’re children, why were they so sneaky about it? They hid on the train to Steps. No one saw them.”

Surprised, she half laughed. “No one saw them?” she echoed.

He was disconcerted. “The police are still appealing for witnesses. It was in the evening. It’s quiet then.”

“How does anyone know they took the train, if they weren’t seen?”

“They had tickets on them.”

“I bet they don’t find any witnesses that can put them on that train.”

“Oh, they definitely will. They’ll find a witness whether anyone saw them or not. They always do in missing-kid cases. Women, always women, see kids everywhere. I don’t know if it’s for attention or what, but some woman’ll say she’s seen everything.” He looked at her, his breath drawn, on the verge of drawing a conclusion about the stupidity of women. He stopped himself.

Scary Mary was at the side of the table, holding the sign from the till, waiting for JT to look up. “Self-service canteen,” she said again, furiously shaking the small card in his face. “The clue’s in the fucking name.” She sucked her teeth noisily and moved off.

A silence fell over their end of the room, everyone smirking, enjoying JT’s humiliation. JT glared at Paddy.

“I think those boys are innocent,” she said unreasonably.

JT coughed indignantly. “Of course they’re not, ya mug. They had the child’s blood all over them. Of course it was them.” He looked her up and down, then, sensing that he had lost her, softened his approach. “How are your family coping?”