Denise Mina - Field of Blood

Paddy blinked back, tacitly agreeing to ignore it.

“Who was driving the van?” asked Sean.

“James’s pal.”

“Mr. Naismith?” asked Paddy.

Callum forgot to ignore her. “Aye, Mr. Naismith. With the earring.”

“He doesn’t have an earring, does he?”

“Aye.”

“I’ve met him, and I didn’t see an earring.”

Callum shrugged. “Maybe he hasn’t got one, then. He’s James’s pal.”

If the overhead light had not been on, Paddy might have missed the sideways flicker in his eyes, sliding over to another thought somewhere out of sight.

“He’ll rip my arsehole with his cock if I tell on him, but he’s not a fucking poof, right?”

Both Sean and Paddy shuddered. Sean dragged his eyes across the page of the comic. Paddy saw her reflection in the window. She was disguising her disgust with a grotesquely cheerful smile, but it didn’t reach her eyes. The tiny child in the window was watching her.

“He’d wipe his cunt with you anyway,” he whispered.

She turned back and reached out to pat his knee under the blanket, but Callum whipped his leg away, repulsed. She let her hand land on the bed near him and patted that instead.

“Thanks, son. It can’t be nice being asked about that.”

Callum casually turned a page on his comic and murmured, “Stinky cunts.”

The way Sean stood in the lift made Paddy think of an old, sad man: he hung from his bones. She leaned against the opposite wall, wishing she hadn’t asked Callum about any of it. Naismith didn’t have an earring. A Teddy boy would never have an ear pierced. If Callum was telling the truth, she’d set Naismith up for something he didn’t do. Terry Hewitt’s career would be ruined. Frightened, she reached over to slip her hand into Sean’s, but he shook her gently off.

Outside in the bitter evening air Sean took out his cigarettes and gave her one. They lit up in the shadow of the dead hospital. He dipped at the knee and took her hand again, squeezing kindly, but still unable to look at her.

Sean thanked her dutifully for making him go to see Callum. He was going back, he said, he was going back and, God help that boy, Sean knew he was innocent. The wee soul hadn’t done anything wrong.

“But they found his fingerprints on the baby and everything.”

“They could have been planted. I know he didn’t do it.”

“How can you know?”

“I know he didn’t do it. He just said, ‘I never did it.’ I’m going to start a campaign for him.”

It was more of a loyalty test than a matter of abstract truth.

“I don’t think he is innocent.”

“Did you just meet the same child as me?”

“Sean, there’s a difference between a hunch and a wish,” she said sharply, preoccupied with her own catastrophe.

Sean kept hold of her hand but slackened his grip. Each alone, they walked down to Partick, keeping to the back roads and the dark places.

Down at the train station they showed their travel passes and took the escalator up to the high platform. There was nowhere to sit in the waiting room at the top of the stairs. It was full of commuters, and the air was uncomfortably moist and warm from their breath. It was dark outside on the platform. From the high vantage point they could see the big sky over the river and the silhouette of short-headed shipyard cranes, once busy but now still, dinosaur skeletons against the orange sky. She wanted to tell Sean what she’d done, confess the arrogance that had led her to set Naismith up, but the words caught in her throat, making her heart race.

The warm train arrived and they took seats near the front, sitting close together, silent and tired, their thighs pressing against each other, their hands touching sometimes when they shared a cigarette. When Sean handed over the cigarette and his lean fingertips touched hers, she wanted to grab him with the other hand and tell him she had done an unforgivable thing to a man, she’d told an awful, world-ending lie. But Naismith had confessed to everything: he had tried to attack her and had followed her to her work. She began to wonder if he did reach for her after all, if they were Heather’s hairs she had seen on the brown towel.

She made him get off at Rutherglen and leave her on the train, but she stood up on the quiet carriageway and saw him to the door, as if it were her home.

“I’ll phone you tomorrow,” he said.

“Gonnae?”

He leaned down for a hug, holding his pelvis a foot away from her and bending in, as if she would attack him if he touched her. He sighed a pleasured groan into her ear, for an embrace as warm as a poke with a sharp twig.

She stayed on her feet as the train moved, and watched him walk down the cold platform, his hands in his jacket pockets, his head hanging heavy on his shoulders. As the moving train passed him Paddy felt he was sliding into her glorious yellow past; ahead was nothing but the lonely gray devastation she had created. But she still had a glimmer of hope. Maybe, somehow, she was still justified. Callum could be wrong.

It was ten o’clock in the morning and the frost still lingered in the shadow of the high-rise blocks. A sniping wind was gathering strength, sweeping down the sides of the buildings, flicking hair and hems as Paddy and Terry picked their way carefully down the long flight of steps, avoiding the icy edges. The housing scheme they were walking through was a low-level offshoot of the Drygate high flats, built for pensioners and sickly people, no children allowed. The modest lawns between blocks were interspersed with giant yellow sandstone, left over from a monumental time.

“That’s all that’s left of Duke Street Prison. See over there?” Terry pointed to the bottom of a bit of yellow wall. “That’s where the condemned cell was. They used to hang them on that patch of grass.”

Paddy looked and nodded, pretending to listen.

“You’re quiet today.”

She hummed an answer. She was afraid to speak. Panic was swelling the back of her throat, gagging her. If she spoke she might just denounce herself.

“And you look knackered.”

“Piss off.”

But she knew he was right. She’d hardly slept the night before. Wide-eyed, she’d lain on her back, tracing patterns in the ceiling plaster, thinking about Callum and what he had said. She’d lain awake looking at it every way she could, willfully misinterpreting what he had said and trying to make it sit comfortably. It was three thirty before she finally admitted to herself that Callum was telling her Naismith was innocent.

“So,” said Terry cheerfully, “Tracy Dempsie: is there anything else you want to warn me about?”

“The carpet in the hall- it’s horrendous.”

He nodded seriously. “Thanks for that. I’d hate to be caught unawares.”

Paddy smiled at the unexpected return. Terry was always slightly sharper than she expected him to be. She glanced over and saw his little belly jiggling under his shirt as his foot hit the step.

“I see ye,” he muttered.

She looked up to find him watching the ground in front of him.

“You see me what?”

“You, giving me the glad eye.”

She smiled and found her eyes filling suddenly. It would be easier to bear if he weren’t so sweet.

Blinking back a tide of guilt, Paddy led him across the crumbling floor of the car park and into the Drygate lobby. Both lifts were out of order: a small, handwritten notice in jagged capitals was pinned to the lift doors.

They trudged up the grim stairwell, kicking through glue tins and plastic bags on one landing and the loose pages of a pornographic magazine on another. Paddy let Terry lead so that he wouldn’t be staring at her fat behind.