Denise Mina - Field of Blood

“You raped him, didn’t ye?”

“Those weans came to me .” She heard him thump his chest with his fist and was glad she couldn’t look up to see his face. “They came looking for me . They needed me . No one else gave a fuck about him, and let me tell you, that dirty wee bastard James needed no convincing. He wanted things I’d never thought of. Even brought his pal with him.”

She could imagine poor, fatherless Callum doing anything he could to impress Garry- Garry with a job, Garry with a cool earring, Garry with a clean house and a van full of sweets outside the door. It must have been a safe place to go, the Naismiths’, a relatively clean place. If she were Callum she’d have come here with his friend. Boys that age craved heroes.

“Wasn’t Callum’s idea to take the baby, though, was it? That was you. Was it Thomas’s anniversary that made you think of him?’ ”

He didn’t speak. She felt the weighty seconds drag by and imagined him raising his hand above her, raising a baseball bat, raising a knife. His foot came off her face, and she glanced up to see his tortured smile.

“Do you think of Thomas on his anniversary?”

“I think about Thomas all the time.”

“Why did you kill him?”

“Never said I did.”

“I’m not asking for a confession. I just want to know why.”

He shrugged. “It was an accident. When we were playing.”

“And Henry helped you cover up?”

“He wanted to be a good dad. A better dad. Better than Dempsie.”

“And he did that by throwing your wee brother’s body onto the railway line to be cut in half? He was willing to kill me to protect you, and now he’s confessed to everything? Why would he feel that guilty about you?”

“You”- he had his eyes shut, and his booming voice managed to drown her out-“don’t understand how it is between men. Women don’t understand. There’s no point in explaining.”

“He did it to you, and you did it to them? Is that how it is between men? Did you get them to kill Brian so they’d be like you? So you’d have something over them, the way Henry held Thomas’s death over you?”

He stood up suddenly, flaring backwards, and took her forearm with both his hands, dragging her backwards up the stairs, bumping her awkwardly like a big cardboard box. Paddy knew that upstairs was not going to be good for her. She scrabbled her feet, trying to grab hold of something, looking for a banister to jam her feet in, but it was a sheer wall.

Garry yanked her up, almost pulling her arm out of its socket, bumping her heavily on her hip and buttocks. She couldn’t catch her breath enough to speak until they got to the top of the stairs.

“What about Heather Allen? She hadn’t done anything to you.”

“We made a mistake.” Garry let go of her and lifted a sunshine-yellow lamp off the hall table. He was sweating. “Got the right girl this time, though, eh?”

He brought the lamp down heavily onto her head, and she passed out.

The pain behind her eyes was excruciating. She peeled them open and found herself on the floor in the bedroom, sitting on a red acrylic carpet at the side of a double bed, jammed between the divan and a cold wall. Above her the curtains were drawn on a small window, but she could see thin daylight glowing behind the cheap red material. Her wrists were tied behind her back, a rough hemp rope cutting into the skin. Her feet were out in front of her on the floor, her ankles bound in an incomprehensible series of knots.

The door to the room was open slightly. He wasn’t afraid of anyone’s coming home. They were completely alone. A white plastic fitted wall unit covered the facing wall, and a large Bible sat open in the dressing table insert, gold edging to the pages. She saw a small crucifix on the wall above the bed and knew she was in Henry Naismith’s bedroom. There was no help to be had.

She bent forward, managing to get her hands between the base of the bed and the mattress, and pushed herself up to her feet. She looked up, staggering backwards and falling onto her bruised backside when she saw a blood-splattered woman across the room, peering tentatively from behind the wall unit. She sat straight up, pulling at the bedding, tucked her legs under her, and looked for the terrifying woman, trying to be ready for her. It was a mirror. A black lump of blood-matted hair was clumped above one of her ears. Scarlet lines ran horizontally across her cheek to her mouth where she had been lying on her side. Her face was swollen and bruised.

If Ludovic Kennedy were writing this story, she would just have to wait to be saved. Her tenacity and willingness to confess would be her salvation. But it wasn’t a story, and she realized suddenly, to her horror, that she was going to die and no one would do anything about it. They might not even find her body. There was no justice.

Outside the room soft steps crept across the landing. The only advantage she had over him was that he didn’t know she was conscious. She curled up on her side. He was going to kill her, and all she could think about was the front page of the Daily News carrying the story of her death. Just the facts and not the details. Not the detail that the room smelled of a man’s greasy hair; not that the carpet hadn’t been hoovered and she was looking at a layer of dust under the bed; not that the door was opening behind her and the feet were coming into the room.

He kicked her hard in the back. “Get up.”

She twitched at the blow but kept her eyes shut. He leaned down, crouching over her. She could smell soap on his skin. He felt her blood-encrusted hair, touched the cut on her scalp with a fingertip; she could hear the wet sound. He pressed to provoke a response, but Paddy kept her face slack. The skin was numb anyway.

“It’s about time,” he told her softly, “that you learned who’s in charge here.”

Fitting his hands under her arms, he lifted Paddy, yanking the dead weight of her half onto the mattress before walking around to the other side and pulling her on properly.

He was going to pull off all her clothes under the harsh light and look at her and touch her. He was going to kill her, and she hadn’t done anything yet, had never been out of Scotland or got thin or lived alone or made any kind of mark on the world. She couldn’t stop herself crying. Her face contorted and she sobbed aloud, keeping her eyes shut because she was too afraid to open them.

“That’s good,” he said, climbing onto the bed, tucking himself in behind her so he was lying along the length of her, not touching. “Keep it up, make it loud. I like it.”

He leaned his face over her from behind and, as he whispered, his soft lips brushed her earlobe, his hot breath tickled the tiny hairs in her ear canal, making her raise her shoulder defensively. He saw girls like her all the time. All the time. He knew she wanted it- is that what she was crying for? Because she wanted it so much. She had to take what she could get because she was fat.

As Paddy heard him say that, a hot flush ran up her spine. It was too much, to be called fat at her last moment on earth. She kept her eyes shut and swung her face around to meet his, opening her mouth as wide as she could, and bit down hard. She squealed a furious wet gurgle and locked her teeth on a loose piece of flesh. The metallic tang of blood flooded her mouth. She opened her eyes. She was biting his lower lip. Garry yelped and pulled away far enough for the side of his face to be in focus. One green eye was wide open, the white showing all around, like the eye of a frightened horse. He was hitting her again, and she knew from the wet heat on her face that she was bleeding, but she was too afraid to open her mouth and let go. She would have to eventually, but when she did he would kill her. Before then she would mark him, such a deep mark that they couldn’t fail to find him.