Denise Mina - Field of Blood

Terry sighed. “Shall we go?”

It was then that Paddy realized what was wrong with the scene. Gina’s house was up the road. The children were all waiting in completely the wrong place. The grocery-van man had told her that the ice-cream van stopped in front of Gina’s house.

The music got louder as the van turned the corner, the tinny tune bouncing off the flats and rolling up the street towards them.

“Eh?”

She looked at Terry. He was waiting for an answer.

“Eh, what?” she said abruptly.

“Eh, shall we go?”

She looked back down the road. The ice-cream van might have moved its stop position. It might have been thought insensitive to keep stopping outside the Wilcox house. Maybe they didn’t want the association and moved down the street.

“Hang on a minute.”

She opened her door and stepped out into the street, shutting the car door behind her, looking for someone to ask. A small blond boy in a blue anorak was running towards her on his way to the small crowd at the van.

“Son,” she said.

He ignored her and continued to head past her to the van and the quickly dissipating queue.

“Son.” She stood in his way. “Wee man, I’ll give ye tenpence.”

The boy glanced at her and slowed. He was skinny, and the lip up to his nose was chapped raw.

Paddy took the big coin from her pocket. “Does the ice-cream van always stop down there?”

“Aye.” He held out his hand.

“Did it always, or just recently?”

“Aye, always.” He licked at his raw top lip with a dexterous tongue.

“Did it not used to stop up there?” She pointed back at Gina Wilcox’s.

The boy put his hands on his hips and huffed up at her. “Missus, I’m not missing that van,” he said definitely.

Paddy gave him his coin and he belted off down the road. Terry was watching her, frowning from inside the car. She held up a finger and walked down towards the ice-cream van. By the time she was halfway there the engine had started up and the van was moving off, leaving the satisfied children eating happily. Paddy watched the van pass Terry’s car and the Wilcox house, drive up out of sight, and reappear again on the cross, heading over to Maryhill. The music wasn’t sounding, and it wasn’t stopping again anytime soon.

She turned back to the kids. The boy in the anorak was clutching a quiver of Curly Wurlys, pointing at Paddy and explaining his wealth to another child.

“Did that ice-cream van ever used to stop there?” She pointed back towards the Wilcox place.

“Nut,” said the parka boy, and the wee girls around him confirmed what he said.

“It stops here,” said a plump girl in glasses.

“It always stops here,” said a bigger girl.

Paddy nodded. “What time does your grocery van come on a Saturday?”

The children looked blankly at one another. It was a ridiculous question. Most of them were far too young to tell the time, never mind predict patterns in retail provision.

“Is it in the afternoon? Is it soon?”

“Aye, soon, but his sweets are mostly rubbish,” said the parka boy, misunderstanding the purpose of her interest.

Paddy thanked them and walked back to the car, opened the door, and held on to the roof, hanging in. “Terry, listen, I’m going to go into town from here. I need to get home, really. Is that okay?”

He frowned and nodded at the window. “Sure, fine. Get in and I’ll drive you down to the station.”

She patted the roof twice and glanced up the road. “Aren’t you going back to the office to finish up?”

“Finish up what?”

“Finish up what you were doing earlier.”

“Oh.” He smiled, shaking his head a little too adamantly. “Yeah, I could, yeah. I’ll do that, yeah.”

He had a pleading little look in his eye. Paddy couldn’t stop herself. She knelt on the dimpled plastic seat, leaned over, gave him a perfectly soft kiss on his cheek, and pulled back before he could do anything with it.

“I’ll see you later, Terry.”

She slammed the door as he answered and never heard what he said in return. She walked off down the road, cutting across a bit of lawn, heading into the heart of the housing scheme.

Paddy waited for almost forty minutes in the dark mouth of the lane beside the Wilcox house. It was a balding sliver of ground left between the two houses, worn into a single track by scuffling feet. Sometimes it seemed to Paddy that the whole of the built-up city was nothing more than a series of interludes between patches of abandoned waste ground and wartime bomb sites. Grass on either side of the path glistened, black diamonds trembling on the razor-sharp tips. The far end of the dark path blossomed into a brightly lit street, and across the road she could see the low picket fence around the swing park, empty now but lit by orange streetlights, dark shadows pooling under the swing seats and slides.

She smoked a cigarette to pass the time, thinking of poor Heather sitting on the bin and being annoyed in the editorial toilets. Paddy’d give anything to be back there again. She dropped the cigarette and stepped on it, watching her toe rub it into the soft mud, bursting the paper and spreading speckled tobacco shreds over the grass.

A movement at the far end of the lane caught her eye. The black outline of a woman, holding the hand of a small girl, was looking down into the lane, hesitant when she saw Paddy’s dark profile, androgynous and threatening.

“I’m waiting for the grocery van,” Paddy called reassuringly.

Still the woman waited, her hand tightening around the balled fist of the small girl. Paddy stepped back out into the light in front of the Wilcox house, and the woman moved towards her, muttering something to the child.

“Sorry,” said Paddy as she approached. “I didn’t mean to scare ye.”

Close up, the woman was younger than her beige mac and headscarf implied. She shot Paddy a disgusted look and yanked the child across her path, away from Paddy. She was right in a way: Paddy shouldn’t be hanging around in dark lanes frightening women and children going about their business.

“Is the fella Naismith’s van due soon?”

The woman didn’t look at her, but muttered aye, ten minutes. Might not be Naismith but. Sometimes his son drove it for him.

Paddy took the two unrequested sentences as forgiveness and watched the retreating back of the woman moving down the street. At most she was two years older than Paddy, already a mother and already pinched and angry.

She could see Sean at home, sitting in his mum’s hall, on the black plastic seat attached to the telephone table, holding the moss-green receiver to his ear, listening to the phone ring on the telephone table in her mum’s hall. Trisha would tell him Paddy wasn’t in, and then he’d be worried. He might not be bothered about contacting her, he might have decided to ignore her for another month beyond the family shunning. She didn’t feel she could predict him anymore, and it made her like him less but want him more. She looked up to find a black velvet stain racing across the sky.

The rainstorm came without warning, so heavy and abrupt that although she ran the hundred yards to a block of flats, the water running down the street was soon deep enough to reach over the sole of her boots and sneak in through the stitching. She stood in the doorway, holding up her hood with both hands, watching as the sky dropped cold slits of silver, obliterating the ambient noise from the motorway and the chanting of the protest marchers. The road surface was a rippling black sheet. The rain gathered at the bottom of the hill, bubbling around drains. Her feet were wet, her black woollen tights soaking up the water like blotting paper, distributing it evenly around her ankles.