Field of Blood

SEVEN . FEARS ARE GROWING

I

Paddy was shielding her eyes against the sleet, standing at the side of Gra

II

She pushed open the doors and entered the newsroom, hanging her wet duffel coat on a hook by the door. Dub was already sitting on the copyboy bench. Keck, the head copyboy, was standing in front of the bench, uncertainly pivoting back and forth on one foot as Dub looked up at him distastefully.

“No,” corrected Dub with mock patience, “you’re not being fu

Keck pulled the skin tight on his face, affecting nonchalance, and wandered off to the sports desk.

“What was that about?”

Paddy picked up a copy of the News and ran her eye over the front page. The Brian Wilcox story had JT’s byline: two young boys were being questioned about his disappearance.

“That guy’s a prick,” said Dub softly, watching the room for calls. When he didn’t see any he settled down to read again, folding one gangly leg over the other. He was wearing red-and-green checked trousers and a brown suede-fronted cardigan. One Monday morning Paddy had seen traces of eyeliner between his blond lashes. Dub knew the names of all the local bands, the ones Paddy only heard of after they split up or left for London.

She went back to reading the paper. The boys had been taken in and questioned overnight. Two witnesses had come forward claiming they had seen the boys leading the baby away from his mother’s front garden. Paddy reread the article. She could tell JT had left something out. The Daily News lawyers often censored important bits of information from copy, and she could sense it here. The boys were there and the baby was there, and then suddenly he was dead: the story read as if the causal paragraph was missing. A boxed insert to the story had been added at the eleventh hour, just before the edition was published. It said that the two boys had been moved to a secret location after a mob had formed outside the police station. Meehan had been mobbed outside Ayr High Court when he was arrested in 1969, and she’d done a pilgrimage there one Saturday while she was still at school to see the wide courtyard where the crowd had gathered. It had scared Meehan half to death, and he was a hardened criminal. She couldn’t imagine how a child would cope with it.

She nudged Dub. “What’s the deal with this Wilcox story? What aren’t they saying?”

Dub shrugged.

“Are they looking for the men behind it all, or have they found them?”

“They’re just looking for the baby’s body as far as I know.” He went back to his reading.

Dub never listened to office gossip. She didn’t know why he’d applied for the job at the paper; he was hardly even interested in news.

She slapped the underside of his music paper. “Someone must have said something.”

“They’re looking for the baby,” he repeated indignantly. “What can I tell you?”

Sudden movement across the room made them look up. A crowd of men were gathered around a telephone on the news desk, rapt, watching a standing man receive news that made him smile and nod and give the audience a thumbs-up.

“I don’t know how you can read that crap.” Paddy nodded at his music paper. “It’s written by pretentious idiots.”

“This is crap? You read true crime books, and they’re not even writing.”

“Don’t be stupid. If it’s written, it’s writing.”

“They’re pe

She kicked his ankle. “Dub, Macbeth’s a true crime story. The New Testament’s a true crime story.”

He’d lost the point but wouldn’t concede. “I’d never trust the taste of a woman wearing monkey boots.”

Paddy smiled down at her feet. The ankle boots were only made from laminated cardboard, but they were cheap and black and they matched everything.

Across the room, Keck whi

Paddy flicked through the inside pages of the paper, looking for any interesting crime stories she could follow up on. Dub let her get comfortable, waiting until her guard was down, and then he kicked her back. Luckily he was wearing inch-and-a-half-deep soft crepe soles.

“Hmm, yes, very sore. Is Heather in?”

“She’s in the building somewhere.”

The cavernous newsroom was divided into three sections, one for sports, one for news, and another for features. A large table sat at the center of each section, heavy gray steel Atex typewriters and blank workspaces laid out for the editors. Each desk had a different character: features considered itself intellectual, news was pompous and self-important, and sports was the good-time gal of the floor, the desk where they always had nice cakes and a laugh and seemed to be perpetually chewing chalky indigestion tablets that they left on the table.

Paddy found Heather sitting on the edge of one of the spare desks, in the distant cold corner of the office where the specialist reporters and freelancers worked on their copy. She was flipping through an envelope of clippings about the Great Depression that an economics correspondent was using. Heather only worked part-time; the rest of her week was spent studying at the polytechnic up the hill, where she was editor of the student paper. If Paddy was ashamed of her ambition, Heather was deliciously bombastic about hers: she had convinced Farquarson to let her research an article for the student paper about journalists, and out of it had wangled a union card and a monthly column about student life. Paddy felt lumpen and graceless next to Heather. She was the sort of woman who could tell one type of flower from another and wore her long hair loose. She didn’t suck up to the drunks or the bullies and had the definite air of someone passing through on their way to a national paper. Even Terry Hewitt seemed a bit intimidated by her.

Heather’s box pleat slipped from her knee, navy-blue tights patterned with bows and dots perfectly outlining her elegant calf. It was obvious from twenty feet away that she was flirting with the economics man, touching his arm, listening as he drew parallels between this recession and that one. He was short and had the shoulders of a twelve-year-old boy.

“God.” Heather slid a hand under her mane of wavy blond hair and flicked it over her shoulder. “That’s amazing.” She glanced, saw Paddy, and gri

“Hiya.”

“Hiya, Paddy. Coming for a smoke with me?”

Paddy shrugged. She didn’t smoke, but Heather never remembered. Dropping the papers on the little man’s desk, Heather stood up and followed Paddy over to a corner, where they pulled themselves up on the sill, sitting knee to knee. Heather flipped open a ten-pack of Embassy Regal, took out one of the stubby cigarettes, and lit it.