Denise Mina - Field of Blood

On the opposite page a kidney victim (31) was trying to raise money for a dialysis machine by holding a sponsored tea party. The Evil Baby Brian Boys were still being investigated. Their old school was pictured, a photo of the empty playground in an eerie light with sweet wrappers and crisp packets floating around, the debris of a hundred packed lunches. It mentioned that the school was Roman Catholic twice in the text and once below the picture.

Paddy looked at the picture of Heather again. They had been kicking around Townhead on the same evening. If Paddy had met her she might still be alive. Maybe they would have had a fight and made up and Heather would have invited her along to the Pancake Place to meet a contact. But they wouldn’t have made up and Heather would never have shared a contact or an advantage if she could help it.

Paddy dropped the cigarette between her legs and into the toilet bowl, folded her paper neatly, and went up to the clippings library.

Helen was off sick, they said, with a head cold, and Paddy was glad of it. The other librarians were difficult and rude, but she knew they’d give her what she wanted. The woman serving her was Sandy, Helen’s right hand in the library. Sandy was secretly a very pleasant, helpful woman, but it was a side of her personality she only got to show when Helen wasn’t there to tut at it.

Paddy told her that the police had requested any gray slips filled out by Heather Allen in the last week and a half.

“Slips?”

“Yeah, what clippings she requested in the last week or so. They want me to take it down to them.”

Sandy bit her lip. “God, isn’t it awful sad?”

“It’s her family I feel for,” said Paddy.

“I know, I know.” She opened a drawer beneath the counter and pulled out a foolscap file marked “A,” searching through it with nimble fingers. “Nothing in the last week. But she’d a lot of stuff two weeks before that.” She pulled out the sheets and flipped through them. “Yes, I remember those ones. All about Sheena Easton and Bellshill.” She pulled them out of the file and sat them on the counter. “She was writing an article.”

“But nothing in the last week?”

“Nothing for two weeks.”

“Oh, and Farquarson wants any clippings on an old case.” Paddy tried to look nonchalant. “Thomas Dempsie. It’s an old murder. Some of them’ll be under Alfred Dempsie.”

The afternoon was busy, and Paddy didn’t get the chance to read the clippings before she went home. She left them hidden in a drawer in the photographers’ office, underneath the picture editor’s portfolio, knowing they would be safe there.

On the train home she leaned her head against the window and imagined Heather up in Townhead on the same night as her, asking questions and banging on doors. She might have met Kevin McConnell as well, but Paddy didn’t think so. He wouldn’t have wasted time flirting with Paddy if Heather had been there.

The house was a husk. They had now been ignoring her for nearly a week, and Mary Ann couldn’t say when it would end. The silence had hardened from a sorrowful quiet to a bitter sneer. Marty smirked straight at her when they passed each other on the stairs; Trisha no longer served her careful dinners but dished up carelessly overboiled potatoes and unsalted soup; and her father and brothers stayed out as much as possible.

Things were getting worse, but Paddy had come to enjoy the solitude and silence of it. It left swathes of space in her head, and across these great prairies she stumbled from Thomas Dempsie to the layout of Townhead and the railway in Steps where Baby Brian had been found. The elements were there, she was sure, but her unpracticed mind couldn’t tease sense from them.

She sat in her bedroom looking out the window at the garden, watching the steam from the washing machine curl up the outside wall. She imagined Sean sitting near her, just out of the scope of her vision. In her mind she reached back and touched him, comforting herself. He kissed her neck and floated off to another part of the house, leaving her warm and happy. She was getting used to being alone.

It was a quiet Tuesday before Christmas and the department store was half empty. Meehan wiped the top of the glass cabinet with a yellow cloth, paying attention to his hands so that he didn’t drift off. He could get the boxes out from under the counter and change the order around- that would keep him busy. He was thirty-three years old and only just learning the rudimentary goldbricking skills everyone else knew by their fifteenth birthday.

It was a parole job, to keep the board happy. It choked him, taking orders from wee Jonny, a fairy who wore hair spray and had twenty years on the shop floor, but Meehan’s father was dying of cancer and he couldn’t get revoked just now. He had never been much to the old man, but he was determined to be there for him now. The old man had never been much to him, right enough. He couldn’t remember his father ever making him happy, or giving him time; mostly he was a figure feared in the house for random violence. He dreaded to think how his own kids would remember him.

Jonny minced up to the counter. “May I assist?”

“I am thinking of sending a pen as a gift to my friend in Germany.”

Meehan hadn’t heard that accent since Rolf handed him over to the British consulate. He turned and blurted, “Sind sie Deutsch?”

The woman looked up, surprised and delighted, and stepped immediately along the counter to him.

“Are you East German?” Meehan asked.

“Yes, I am,” she said in crisp English. “I am from Dresden.”

Meehan looked into her sea-green eyes as she spoke, but his attention was on the periphery. She was tall and blond, dressed in an elegant leopard skin coat with leather trim and matching belt, pulled tight to show off her slender waist. Her nails were painted beige, and she was holding a pair of beige kid gloves that matched her handbag. She drew the gloves softly through her free hand, over and again. She looked too good for Glasgow, too good for the Lewis’s fountain pen counter, and it made him suspicious.

Meehan had come to expect them. After George Blake escaped and they discovered the two-way radio in his cell, the Secret Service had come back to him, drilling him for the information he’d freely given them in West Berlin after Rolf handed him over. They moved him into solitary for three months with meals through the door, his only human contact periodic visits from the Service, alternately angry and calm, coaxing and threatening. They were convinced he was holding out. He couldn’t tell them that he had no loyalties, not to them and not to the East, where the guards didn’t shake hands and Rolf could pretend to like him for a year and a half. Meehan’s only loyalty was to his mates and his family, and he didn’t even like most of them that much.

They released him on parole but followed him all the time. He often found well-dressed men watching the front of their house in the Gorbals high flats. A stranger had been seen using a key to get in and out of his mother’s house on a day when everyone else was at work. The telephone clicked loudly after they picked it up. If Meehan made an arrangement by phone, an immaculate loner with a copper’s haircut would be sitting in the pub or club or café when he arrived, always reading a paper but never turning the page.

The woman was a beauty, though. Not police. Definitely Secret Service.

“And how do you come to be in Glasgow?” he asked her.

“My husband is English, in the diplomatic service, and we are posted here.” Her gaze slipped from his to the glass-topped counter, and she added quietly, “His work is very secret.”