Denise Mina - Field of Blood

Queen Street station was a cavernous Victorian shed with a fanned glass roof spanning five platforms. Only the pub and the Wimpy bar remained open. Reading the railway timetable plastered to the wall, she saw that the trains left for Steps every half hour and it would have taken the boys seventeen minutes at most to get there. The ticket office was off to one side of the station, and Paddy noticed that the barriers were not guarded at night like they were in the rush hour. It would have been easy for the boys to sneak onto the train without paying.

The ticket office was empty and the man serving at the ticket window was reading a newspaper.

“Hello,” she said. “Can ye tell me how much a half return is to Steps?”

The man frowned at her. “You’re not a half.”

“I know. I don’t want to buy one, I just want to know how much it costs.”

He still looked skeptical. Paddy was bored with the Heather Allen lie, so she told another one. “My nephew needs to go there to visit his auntie on his own this Monday coming, and my sister has to give him the money for his fare.” It sounded elaborate enough to be true.

The attendant watched her as he typed it into the ticket machine. It cost sixty pence, twice as much as the bus.

Back out on the concourse she read the boards and realized that the next train to Steps was due to pull out. She took out her Transcard, but no one asked to see it as she climbed onto the quiet train. The train doors slid shut and the carriage jolted forward. There didn’t seem to be a conductor on board.

The train passed through a long, dark tunnel, emerging on the other side between two steep banks of earth, hewn away to make room for the railway lines. The jagged banks were so steep that after a hundred years of perseverance the grass still hadn’t managed to grow on them. The carriages were quiet, and she could easily see small boys managing the whole journey without being spotted.

The first stop was Springburn station, eight minutes out of Queen Street. The platform was built in a deep valley with stairs up to the street. It was quiet for the moment but obviously well used: the platform was broad and had a chocolate machine and even a telephone kiosk on it. On the far side of the station, beyond the double railway tracks, a white picket fence marked off the surrounding land. It was dark behind the fence, in the wild wastes where thin trees and malnourished bushes struggled. The wilderness went on for so long that Paddy’s eye got lost in it. The train started up again, shaking her awake.

The journey on to Steps took the train along a short track before forking off away from the low-level Barnhill station. She could see it through the bushes on her left-hand side, a poor, lone platform with broken lights and a single bench next to stairs up to the road. It was around here that Thomas Dempsie’s tiny body had been left. She found the thought of him being left somewhere so dark almost more upsetting than his death.

She looked back at Barnhill station, disappearing behind her. It was ridiculous. The boys wouldn’t have passed their home to take the baby somewhere else. Even if they had jumped on the wrong train they would have got off at Springburn and walked the few hundred yards.

The train rumbled on to Steps, passing the Robroyston high flats, forty-story paragons of architectural crime built on the top of barren hills with nothing around them to give them human scale. Beyond that it passed through dark, empty lands of bush and scrub bordering a marsh for five whole minutes. In the cold moonlight Paddy could see fields and hedges, a strange landscape halfway between abandoned industrial site and countryside.

The approach to Steps was heralded by a strip of houses on a hill. They were big and had gardens she could see into when the train slowed. It didn’t seem like the sort of place that would draw wee boys from a ghetto, and it definitely didn’t look like a better place to hide a guilty secret than the industrial wilderness they’d come from.

The Steps station platform was clean and neat, if a little exposed. On one side a huge wild field stretched off until it reached a school building; the other side faced the backs of houses. There was no ticket office or guard there to witness the boys’ arrival. Enameled signs informed travelers that they would have to buy their tickets from the conductor on the train. No one else got off the train. Paddy didn’t like to admit it, but JT might have been right: the boys could have made it all the way there without being seen. But that didn’t explain how they had hidden the baby for the eight hours before they got on the train.

She loitered alone on the platform, looking down the long, straight tracks back to Springburn and onwards to Cumbernauld. The station exit was a gentle ramp up to the road. Paddy walked up it and let herself through the gate to the little humpback bridge over the tracks.

The break in the bushes across the empty road wouldn’t have been obvious without the small pile of flowers and cards and soft toys on the pavement in front of it. It was a dark lane, overhung with bushes and trees. Paddy glanced behind her, making sure she wasn’t being followed, and stepped over a bunch of withered carnations into the velvet dark.

The lane ran between the railway line and the far ends of long gardens belonging to big houses, evergreen bushes preserving their privacy. A craggy, leafless bush clung to a high wall of chicken wire on the railway side. The ground beneath her feet was uneven and frozen, and she walked slowly, trying to find the faint tread line in the grass.

It didn’t take long to reach the blue-and-white police tape blocking the path. Beyond it she could see the hole in the chicken-wire fencing, low down, just high enough for small boys to get through. She ducked under the tape and climbed through, catching her tights on a loose wire and ripping a bullet-sized hole in the right knee.

She was standing in an area of disturbed grass. She crouched down on her haunches and ran her flat hand over it. The thin light from the distant train platform showed the pale silver undersides of the blades, uniformly flattened by the wind or a sheet, she thought, not broken by feet. Paddy felt as calm as she had in the alleyway with McVie, and reminded herself to keep an open mind about what had happened here. Anything was possible; the police weren’t always right. They’d questioned and eliminated the Yorkshire Ripper nine times before he was arrested.

She stood up, walking along the rail track for twenty feet, heading away from the station until the grass became upright and undisturbed. No big feet had been milling around here gathering evidence. Dew from the blades clung to her tights, soaking into the wool, making the ankles sag.

It only caught her eye because it was a perfect square. Across the twin rail track was a geometrical patch of shadow beside a small bush. She recognized the signs from paddling pools left upended in her own family’s garden for seasons at a time: the little square of grass had been starved of wind and frost for a few days. It was where the tent had been placed, where Brian had been killed and found again. Beyond it, in a diagonal slash across the lip of the hill, a dirt path had recently been formed by a hundred journeys to and fro.

The darkness was a blanket over her mouth and ears, muffling the noise of distant traffic and the world beyond the tracks, thickening the air so that she couldn’t draw breath. A crisp packet fluttered against the fence, and to Paddy’s alert ears the cellophane crackle sounded like a stunted cry. She backed up to the fence, holding tight, letting the wire dig into her fingers while she blinked away Brian’s imagined final moments. A bright screaming train flew towards her, filling her ears, and Paddy closed her eyes to the grit and wind, glad of the heart-stopping intrusion.