Denise Mina - Field of Blood

The train passed and Paddy stood in the dank dark, looking down the railway line towards the bright station. It didn’t feel safe, but she scampered over to the far bank, slipping slightly on an oily wooden tie, the momentary lack of balance sending a shiver of nerves up the back of her neck.

Next to the flattened square of grass, the bush had branches cut from it: recent ones severed with a sharp knife, older ones twisted until the branches came off in a stringy mess of bark and sap. She remembered what Farquarson had said about sticks being put in the baby’s bottom. The sharp cuts suggested someone gathering evidence.

Paddy stepped beyond the flat grass where the tent had been and climbed up the frozen mud embankment, helping herself up by clinging onto stray roots and stones. She found herself in a large field, plowed into furrows. The unlocked gate was only fifty yards away. She could hear the sound of cars speeding past on a road nearby. A hundred tire tracks from the police cars scarred the mud in front of her. She stood up straight.

The boys hadn’t stumbled on the baby after playing in a swing park for toddlers. They hadn’t managed to hide for eight hours or come here invisibly on an expensive train or trampled down an unfamiliar dark alley to a hole in the fence they didn’t know was there. Someone else had been here with them. All three of them had been driven to this spot by someone. It was obvious to her, and should have been obvious to anyone else who looked. But no one was looking. As it stood, the Baby Brian murder was a good story, a clean story about other people, far away.

Paddy stood in the bitter field, her hair flattened against her head, listening to the brutal February wind and all the callous cars rushing home to warmth and kindness. The story suited everyone and wouldn’t be questioned until the evidence was overwhelming. It was Paddy fucking Meehan all over again. No matter how much evidence he had produced or how many people saw him on the night of Rachel Ross’s murder, the police were determined it was him.

Meehan would spend the remaining twenty-five years of his life poring over the details of the night he didn’t kill Rachel Ross. He told the story so often that it changed meaning: the names of the girls became pleas for understanding; the timing, where the cars were parked, when the lights went on and off at the hotel, all became a hollow mantra to be chanted when a new journalist or lawyer took a passing interest in his case.

At the time, the night seemed like nothing but another disappointing recce, like a thousand other nights in the life of a professional criminal.

They had been sitting in the hotel car park for three hours, watching people arrive and leave the bar, slumping down when a man came past walking his dog, watching and waiting for the lights to go off so they could scan the office next door, which issued automobile tax decals. James Griffiths was slumped in his stiff car coat and kept coming back to the same thing.

“I’ll steal one for ya,” he said, his thick Rochdale accent putting the inflection at the end of the sentence, turning it into a question. “Happilee, happilee, happilee.” He stubbed his Senior Service out in the ashtray. Until James helped himself to the turquoise Triumph 2000 from outside the Royal Stewart Hotel in Gretna, the four-year-old car’s ashtray had never been used. Now it was overflowing with snapped stubs and flaky ash.

Meehan sighed. “I’m not taking them on holiday to East Germany in a nicked motor, for Godsake. We wouldn’t get far. The Secret Service are watching me all the time.”

“You won’t get done,” said Griffiths casually. “I never get done. Been getting away with it for years.”

“You never get done?” Meehan stared at him.

“Never,” said Griffiths, only faintly uncomfortable at the blatant lie.

“What were you doing in my cell on the Isle of Wight, then? Visiting?”

“Yeah.” Griffiths grinned, but Meehan didn’t reciprocate.

The first time they met was on the Isle of Wight, when Griffiths was doing a three-year stretch for car theft. Griffiths was a halfwit sometimes. He did and said whatever came into his mind at the time; that’s why he got the strap so often inside. Paddy had seen him without his shirt on often enough: his back looked like Euston station.

Meehan needed the car to get the family to a holiday in East Germany. He didn’t really want a holiday. What he really wanted was to show his kids that he could speak German and Russian, that he was receiving a payment from a foreign government, that he wasn’t just another Glasgow thug. Before they got much older he was going to give them good memories of their father. He had spent the previous winter sitting next to his own father’s hospital bed while he was eaten away by cancer, and during the long nights he couldn’t recall a single happy time with him. Not one. There wasn’t a moment spent together as a family that wouldn’t have been better had his father been out. Meehan wanted to be more than that to his kids, and he couldn’t take them away in a stolen car. They’d be picked up before Carlisle, he was sure, stopped at the side of the motorway and sent home fatherless. He could already see their hurt and humiliated eyes looking up at him from the backseat of a panda car.

“I dunno what you’re worried about,” said Griffiths. “I’ve been picking so many cars up here I’ve been rolling them over a cliff up into the water ’cause I got nowhere to sell ’em. And good ones, too, Jags and that. Not rubbish. I’ll steal one for ya.”

He was apologizing, Meehan knew that. They’d spent a lot of time together over the years, and he knew Griffiths’s shorthand for sorry. He was apologizing because the tax decal job he’d brought Meehan to scope in Stranraer wasn’t going to happen. As the hotel lights gradually went out and the patrons left in ones and twos, followed by the staff, it became clear that the spotlight on the roof of the tax building would stay on. Even if it went off, the hotel kept dogs, big bastards by the sound of them. So they sat at the dark edge of the car park, smoking and watching, Meehan going quiet to hide his dejection, Griffiths getting chatty to cover his embarrassment.

Between the tax office and the hotel they could see Loch Ryan, and beyond the hills, to the molten black sea. Big red ferryboats for Belfast and the Isle of Man bobbed on the gentle lift and sway of the water. A few lorries were already parked there, drivers sleeping in the cabs, waiting for the first crossing.

“Fuck it,” said Meehan, stubbing out his fag in the ashtray. “This is pointless. Let’s get back to Glasgow and get a breakfast at the meat market.”

The meat dealers’ café opened at four in the morning. Their fry-ups had rashers as thick as gammon steaks, and they sold mugs of cheap whisky. Griffiths took a puff on his cigarette, shaking his head as he exhaled a string of smoke. They had shared a cell for two months and could read each other’s breathing. Griffiths was vexed. He shook his head at Paddy, smiling a little, and relented.

“Okay, okay.” He turned the key in the ignition, leaving the lights off as he reversed out of the dark corner. “Let’s get some brekkie.”

Fifty miles north of Stranraer, in the small, wealthy suburb of Ayr, Rachel and Abraham Ross were in the bedroom of their bungalow, getting ready for bed. Rachel, in a sky-blue nightie and pink chenille dressing gown, sat on the side of her twin bed and watched her husband winding his watch. A single, convulsive cough shook her. She fought it off and waved a dismissive hand.