Field of Blood

Mass was conducted by her hairy-nosed confessor. He spoke throughout in the priestly four-step, a punctuation-free method of delivery that bleached all interest and meaning from his words:

And now we see

That God so loved

The world that he

Gave his only begotten

Son for our sins

Suddenly Miss Stenhouse was in the aisle, conducting the children with her fingers, bringing a boy and a girl out of each side to walk up to the altar rail and kneel down. Paddy followed the finger, clip-clopping up to the rail in her white sandals, and knelt on the velvet cushion.

Father Brogan approached, flanked by the altar boys. She was glad he would be there. She hoped he’d get scars on his neck. An altar boy held a silver plate under her chin.

“Body of Christ.”

She amen’d, shut her eyes tight, squeezing a panicked tear from her left eye, and opened her mouth to receive the Holy Eucharist. It melted quickly in her hot mouth. The priest moved off but Paddy stayed on her knees, eyes shut. Miss Stenhouse had to tap her on the shoulder to get her to move.

She crossed herself and went back to kneel in her pew. She gri

Outside, Paddy had her photo taken many times. Mary A

And Jesus didn’t do anything. Paddy watched for him at school and at mass. She waited for their dog to die or her parents to fall ill. She waited for weeks.

It was after tea on a particularly bad-tempered day. Paddy and her sisters were hanging listlessly around their living room, climbing over furniture, being mean to one another because they were trapped indoors, frustrated by heavy rain. Their mother was busy in the kitchen and the radiogram was tuned to a local station, turned up loud to drown out the noise of the bickering children. It was the first item on the Scottish news. Paddy Meehan had been convicted of murdering Rachel Ross. He had been sent to live in a prison for the rest of his life.

Mary A

Caroline nodded. “You killed a lady.”

Paddy tipped her head back and screamed at the ceiling.

When Con Meehan arrived home after work, he sat down in the big chair and pulled his sobbing youngest daughter onto his knee, holding the newspaper open and making sure she was nice and comfy so he could read to her. He read the description of the court, the who-said-what, the technical things she couldn’t possibly understand, rolling through it in a boring voice to calm her. Mr. Paddy Meehan had given a speech in the court, he said. He had stood up and talked to them after they found him guilty. “I am i

Paddy sniffed and wiped her nose dry with the back of her hand. “Is it right, Daddy? Did they make a mistake?”

Con shrugged. “Might be, Sunshine. We all make mistakes. And Mr. Meehan is a Catholic as well.”

“Are the people who put him in prison Orange men?”

“They might be.”

She thought about it for a moment. “But he didn’t do anything wrong.”

Con paused. “The prisons are full of i

Paddy considered it briefly and began to scream again.

“Oof, for petesake.” Con stood up, letting her slide messily off his knee to the floor. “Trisha,” he shouted, climbing over her and heading for the kitchen. “Trisha, come and do something with her.”

While he was out of the room Mary A

But Paddy couldn’t stop crying. She cried so much that she threw up her macaroni and cheese.

V

The ongoing drama of Meehan’s imprisonment unfolded slowly as Paddy grew up. She read and reread every article and interview, watched the Panorama documentary twice, and visited the sites of the case: the high courts in Edinburgh and Ayr and the bungalow in Blackburn Place where Rachel Ross was murdered. She read Chapman Pincher’s account of Meehan’s trip to East Germany and pla

Paddy didn’t stop believing in Jesus, but she didn’t trust him. Unable to conceive of a world without a central story, she substituted Meehan’s, forming it in her mind, replaying his passion and sentence, tracing the buildup to his conviction, trying to shoehorn sense into the mess of his life. Meehan became a noble hero to her, maligned and defamed in a thousand different ways. She drew huge life lessons from the myth and emulated qualities she projected onto him: stoic loyalty, righteousness, dignity, and perseverance. He was released because of the work of a campaigning journalist, so she became a journalist. She gave talks about the case at school and changed her status from pleasant fat girl to intellectual heavyweight.

It was always the myth that fascinated her, never the real Meehan. The real Meehan was morally awkward, compromised by a life of petty burglary, a sour temper, and a bad complexion. Now he was back living in Glasgow, hanging around bars in the city center, spilling his story to anyone who would listen. Several journalists had offered to introduce her, but she didn’t want to meet him. She had to face the uncomfortable truth that Meehan wasn’t a nice man and he wasn’t trying to help anyone but himself.

THIRTEEN . GROCERY VAUGHAN

Every light in the Wilcox house was on and all the curtains sat open, spilling light out into the dark street. Paddy stood on the opposite pavement, her breath crystallizing into speech bubbles, wondering why she had come. She wasn’t a journalist, she didn’t have a legitimate reason for being there. She was just a stupid fat girl who was afraid to go home and face her mother.

The house was a gray rectangle with a big window on the ground floor and a brown front door. In front sat a little rug of muddy garden, tufts of grass left in the corners where Brian’s shoes hadn’t worn it away. Surrounding the garden was a fence of three metal ribbons, painted green and chipped. Wee Brian could just have climbed through the bars and wandered off to the busy motorway access road nearby. Anyone might have picked him up.

Paddy had been to the swing park, and it confirmed everything she thought she’d noticed a couple of nights ago. It was tucked well into the middle of the housing scheme, and Callum couldn’t have found it accidentally. Even if he had he wouldn’t have wanted to play there: it was a kiddie swing park with few attractions for older boys.

She thought of home, and a ball of acid flowered in her stomach. She sagged against the streetlight. If she’d had any money she would have gone to the pictures for the night.

Across the road she saw a flicker in the window. Gina Wilcox was standing in the corner of her living room. She was looking at her hands, and Paddy saw that she was holding a cloth, kneading it. She looked like an ordinary slim young woman cleaning her house, but even from a hundred yards across the road Paddy could see that the woman’s eyes were as red as a summer sunset.