Denise Mina - Field of Blood

Terry caught Paddy’s eye but she broke off quickly. He touched the face of the photograph.

“Did Henry ever hit the kids when you were together?”

“Me and Henry only had Garry. Alfred was Thomas’s daddy.”

Terry carried on as if he’d known that all along. “And did Henry hit Garry?”

“No. He mostly ignored us until I went with Alfred, and then he went mental, kicking in doors and that, going to Alfred’s work and waiting for him.” She seemed flattered at the memory. Her mouth twitched in an uncertain smile. “Alfred just went out the back way. Course, just after Thomas died Henry got religion. He was so sad about Thomas you’d have thought it was his own wean that died. He tried to make up for how he’d been, tried to be a good dad to Garry. Devoted all his time to him.”

She turned the album page to a photo of herself in a maxicoat and knee-high boots with a baby perched on her hip. The child stared at the camera with an odd intensity.

“What a beautiful baby,” said Terry. “He’s lovely looking. Is he yours?”

“That’s my Garry.” Tracy covered the child’s face with her fingertips. “My wee boy.”

Paddy hardly dared to ask. “Have ye got any more of him?”

Tracy did have other photos of Garry. She flicked through his first Christmas, a neighbor’s wedding scramble, a granny’s birthday, and the boy grew up in front of Paddy’s eyes. She had assumed that Naismith and Tracy’s child was still young, that he had been only a few years older than Thomas Dempsie when he died. In fact he would have been about twelve when Thomas died. Old enough to take the child himself. Tracy turned a page and suddenly Garry was grown up, standing by his dad’s grocery van in summer, sunlight glinting off a gold stud in his ear. Paddy recognized him perfectly. He was the handsome boy she had met in Townhead the night before Heather was murdered, the boy who called himself Kevin McConnell.

Paddy couldn’t hear the wind or what Terry was saying about the pictures. All she could hear was her own heartbeat, and all she could feel was the cold sweat on her spine. The shady sexual threat in Callum Ogilvy’s words came back to her as imminent and personal. The night they met, Garry must have followed her from Tracy’s to Townhead. He must have heard from Tracy that a journalist called Heather Allen had been in the house and traced her footsteps, waiting patiently before approaching so that she wouldn’t connect him with his mother. Garry wasn’t just vicious, he was careful. He might be in this flat right now. She mapped the fastest route to the front door. If he came at her she could hit him, use something to hit him. She could defend herself.

“Does Garry live here?” she asked quickly.

“Naw.” Tracy scratched her thigh through her housecoat. “He stays up in Barnhill with his dad. They’re as close as brothers, those two. Do everything together. Garry does whatever his dad says. This picture”- she pulled back the crackling cellophane cover and peeled the Teddy boy photograph off the glue striations-“this is the nicest one.”

“How about this one?” Terry turned the page back to one of Naismith standing in the garden in Townhead.

Paddy could feel her pulse on her throat. She felt sure that Tracy would be able to see the throb in her jugular if she looked up.

“He’d do anything for our boy. He’s training him to take over the van. He’d never hurt a child-”

Paddy cut across her. “We’d better go.”

Terry’s mouth dropped open a little.

“We should,” she said insistently. “I need to go.”

“We’ll just get the picture,” said Terry carefully, taking the photo album from Tracy before she had time to object and lifting out the picture he wanted.

Paddy was starting to sweat. “I’m off.”

He looked at her defiantly. “We need to thank Tracy for all her help.”

But Paddy was already at the door of the living room. “Good-bye.”

She hurried across the hall and opened the door to the howling vortex, narrowing her eyes against the stray dust, racing along the balcony to the stairs. She pulled at the door, using her weight when she felt that it wouldn’t give. For a terrifying moment she thought Garry was behind it, smiling calmly and holding it closed effortlessly. Terry leaned over her shoulder and pushed open the door with one hand. She tumbled into the echoing stairwell, into the acrid stench of solvent and piss.

“Are you nuts? What the hell was all that about?”

She spun to face him, grabbed his neck with both hands, and shook, mistaking Terry for the real threat, making him lose his footing until his flailing hand fell on the metal banister and he managed to steady himself.

They stood still, Paddy holding his neck, Terry bent curiously towards and away from her, averting his eyes in submission. The muffled vibration of their struggle throbbed through the thick concrete. Horrified, she opened her fingers and Terry stood up slowly. He straightened his jacket without looking at her. They walked down together, Paddy panting until she got her breath back, Terry saying nothing. Downstairs, they crossed the lobby, walked out into the day, and parted without speaking.

Dr. Pete was propped up on marshmallow pillows, looking out the window at a high statue of the Protestant Reformationist John Knox. She was quite sure they weren’t his own pajamas. They had the stiffness of institutionally laundered clothes. Boil-washing had faded them to a sun-bleached blue that clashed horribly with his yellow skin. The crisp white sheet in his lap was folded neatly down, and sometimes, while he was talking, he would stroke it thoughtfully.

“Ludicrous. Knox was an anti-iconoclast. He wouldn’t have approved of a statue.” He smiled distantly. “If they weren’t Calvinists you’d suspect the memorial committee of having a sense of humor.”

Paddy didn’t know anything about the various Protestant splinters, but she smiled to please him.

It was a modern extension to the old hospital, with copper-tinted windows facing onto the necropolis, a jagged Victorian mini-Manhattan of exuberant architecture, erected when celebrating death wasn’t yet taboo. The three other beds in Dr. Pete’s room had a large floor space around each for all the equipment they might need. The patient in the bed across the way was unconscious, an unpromising strip of skin under a paper-pristine sheet. Expensive equipment was conferenced around his bed: a heart monitor, a hissing pump, a drip, and a blinking television screen. Next to him his ruddy-cheeked wife sat reading the Sun, squinting as if it required concentration.

It was an unhappy accident that the cancer ward overlooked the graveyard, but one which Dr. Pete, full of medication and clear of pain for the first time in months, was enjoying. Sober, pepped-up, and without his habitual pained slouch, he was suddenly a very different man. It no longer seemed infeasible that he had swung women over puddles or written beautifully. He had been talking about John Knox’s statue at the top of the hill for ten minutes, picking his words carefully as he related the history of its construction and why it had been built in the middle of what became a huge graveyard.

“But by then no one cared where he was. Why did you come?” Pete’s steady eyes seared into hers.

“Just wondered how you were,” she lied. “I wanted to see how ye were.”

Pete watched his fingertips running over the stiff hem of the sheet. “Well, I’m dying, as you can see.”

She smiled politely again. She had come here to hide for half an hour. The visit was supposed to be a lighthearted stopover to break up a very bad day, but it wasn’t working out at all. She decided to hand over her token gift and get out. The cellophane wrapper crackled loudly as she pulled a bottle of garish orange energy drink out of her bag.