Field of Blood

“So, listen, what time are you finishing today?”

“Four o’clock,” said Paddy. “Why?”

“I’ve been invited out in the calls car with George McVie. D’you want to come?”

Paddy felt a trill of envy on the back of her neck. The calls car had a police-frequency radio in it and drove around at night picking up incidents and dramas all over the city. A good quarter of the paper’s news pages could be filled with stories from the calls car. Every journalist had done the shift at some point. There were wild tales of leaps from multistory blocks of flats, of parties where the drink was of the bathtub variety, of domestic altercations that turned into street riots. Despite all the naked-city action, no one wanted to work the car: the working culture at the Daily News forbade enthusiasm, and it was much harder graft than sitting around the office at night taking occasional calls. Secretly, though, Paddy couldn’t wait for a shift. Her favorite part of the car harvest was the smaller stories, bittersweet snapshots of Glasgow street life that never made the paper: a woman with a hatchet in her skull, still in shock, making polite conversation with an ambulance driver; a man masturbating in a bin shed, killed when a pigeon coop collapsed and crushed him; a violent fight between a couple that ended in the man’s being battered to death with a frozen side of pork.

“How did you get invited to that?” she asked, trying to mask her mean-spiritedness. “Did Farquarson ask you to go?”

“McVie said I could tag along for a couple of hours. I’m thinking of writing a piece about the calls car shift for the poly paper.”

It was all Paddy could do not to roll her eyes. Heather wrote the same two pieces over and over: she wrote about being a student journalist for the Daily News, and about being a journalism student for the poly paper.

“Yeah, all right, then.” She tried to act casual. “I’d like to come.”

But Heather could tell she was pleased. “Don’t get too excited, though. I might drop out if the article doesn’t pan. I’ve to meet him in the car outside here at eight.”

She pushed herself off the windowsill and walked off, trailing smoke through the newsroom. She had left a long blond hair on the sill. Paddy picked it up and wound it around a finger, watching after Heather as she sidled through the tables, her tight little bottom drawing the eyes of the men she passed.

Paddy slid clumsily off the windowsill, lifting her legs high to avoid ripping the back of her black woolly tights on the metal ledge. The tights were going baggy at the knee already and they’d come straight from the wash that morning.

III

Farquarson’s office door shut for the two o’clock editorial meeting and everyone in the newsroom relaxed into an unofficial break or started making personal phone calls. One of the news desk boys took the call.

“Brian Wilcox is finally dead,” he a

Someone in the room said “hurray” faintly, and the other journalists laughed.

Keck nudged Paddy. “You have to pretend to laugh,” he said quietly. “It’s what we do when these things happen.”

Paddy tried. She pulled the sides of her mouth wide, but she couldn’t smile convincingly.

“You don’t have to,” Dub muttered across Keck’s face. “It’s not essential to lose your humanity, it’s just useful.”

Sulking, Keck responded to a hail, leaving them alone on the bench. The journalist who had taken the call about Brian ripped the sheet off his pad with a flourish and stood up, striding to the door of Farquarson’s office, rapping on the window and opening the door.

“They found Brian Wilcox’s body,” he said. Paddy could hear Farquarson shout a loud, sincere curse. No one wanted a brand-new headline in the middle of an editorial meeting. “They strangled him and left him at the side of a railway line near Steps station.”

Paddy nodded at Dub. Steps was miles away, far too far for the boys to walk from Townhead. “An adult took them there.”

Dub shook his head. “You don’t know that.”

“Bet ye any money.”

“Any money it is, then.”

Through the open door, Paddy heard Farquarson cursing and ordering this schedule to be moved, that to be dropped, the police statement for page one, telling someone to get JT down to Steps with a photographer. “Check that those kids are still being held, and tell one of the boys to get me a large whisky from the Press Bar.”

A features subeditor stuck his head around the door and looked at Paddy. “Did ye hear that?”

Nodding, Paddy stood up and headed for the stairs.

Down in the bar, McGrade was quietly filling up the back shelves with tiny tinkling bottles of mixers. Two journalists were warming up the table for the lunchtime rush. McGrade gave her a large Grouse when he heard it was for Farquarson and wrote it down in the big blue book he kept under the counter.

When she got back upstairs everyone in the newsroom was either out or on the phone. Farquarson was sitting alone at his desk with his head in his hands. She slid the drink between his elbows and he glanced up gratefully.

“Let me know when you’ve finished, Boss. McGrade’ll want his glass back.”

“Thanks, Meehan.”

“Um… Boss? Me and Heather Allen are going out in the calls car with George McVie, if that’s all right? Just for a couple of hours, for work experience.”

Farquarson smiled wryly into his drink. “McVie’s awful nice, isn’t he? Check with the Father of the Chapel first, make sure it’s okay with the union. And Meehan? Calls car is a hard shift, night shift is hard. George may be… lonely. Keep your hand on your ha’pe

She nodded.

Father Richards was in the canteen eating a Scotch pie crowned with beans and smoking simultaneously. The cut under his eye was healing, but he was still having to manage without his glasses. His face looked raw without them.

“Ah, here she is,” he said when he saw Paddy standing at the side of his table. “Chair to the Union of Catholic Mothers.”

Paddy ignored it. She explained that McVie had invited Heather Allen, who in turn had invited her. Richards dropped the fork to his plate with a loud clatter and took a lascivious draw on his John Player Special.

She held up her hand. “Stop. I don’t need you telling me. I’m well warned about him by Farquarson. I just want to check the union isn’t bothered about it.”

“Why would the union bother about McVie trying to ride two birds at once?” said Richards, and he laughed until his face was pink.

Paddy crossed her arms and waited patiently until he had finished. “Can I go, then?”

“Aye,” said Richards. “Please yourselves. If ye were my daughter, I’d say no.”

To cover her excitement Paddy pointed at his eye. “I hope ye got that sore eye from the last woman ye laughed at.”

He drew lugubriously on his cigarette and ran his gaze all over her. “You’re the last woman I laughed at. Would you like to hit me?”

The words were i

“No,” she said, threatening him in the only way she knew how. “But I’d like to take your job.”