Field of Blood

JT shook his head. “These boys aren’t children. The age of legal responsibility is eight in Scotland. They’ll be tried as adults.”

“They don’t stop being children just because it doesn’t suit us anymore. They’re ten and eleven. They are children.”

“If they’re children, why were they so sneaky about it? They hid on the train to Steps. No one saw them.”

Surprised, she half laughed. “No one saw them?” she echoed.

He was disconcerted. “The police are still appealing for witnesses. It was in the evening. It’s quiet then.”

“How does anyone know they took the train, if they weren’t seen?”

“They had tickets on them.”

“I bet they don’t find any witnesses that can put them on that train.”

“Oh, they definitely will. They’ll find a witness whether anyone saw them or not. They always do in missing-kid cases. Women, always women, see kids everywhere. I don’t know if it’s for attention or what, but some woman’ll say she’s seen everything.” He looked at her, his breath drawn, on the verge of drawing a conclusion about the stupidity of women. He stopped himself.

Scary Mary was at the side of the table, holding the sign from the till, waiting for JT to look up. “Self-service canteen,” she said again, furiously shaking the small card in his face. “The clue’s in the fucking name.” She sucked her teeth noisily and moved off.

A silence fell over their end of the room, everyone smirking, enjoying JT’s humiliation. JT glared at Paddy.

“I think those boys are i

JT coughed indignantly. “Of course they’re not, ya mug. They had the child’s blood all over them. Of course it was them.” He looked her up and down, then, sensing that he had lost her, softened his approach. “How are your family coping?”

Paddy picked up her coffee cup and held it to her mouth. “’S hard,” she said, taking a sip to cover her mouth. “Michael’s very upset.”

“You know,” he said, dropping his voice, “even as an employee of the News, we could pay you for information.”

She drank the dregs of her coffee, narrowing her eyes.

“We could go as far as three hundred for your story and name.”

With three hundred quid Paddy could move out of her parents’ house. With three hundred quid she could enroll for night classes, do exams, get into university, and come back and eat them all.

JT’s eyes brightened when she lowered the cup from her mouth. She lifted it again, drinking down to the very last frothy dribble. JT tilted his head to the side, as if she had been talking and he was waiting for her to continue.

“D’you know what?” She carefully sat the cup in the saucer.

“What’s that?” JT tilted his head the other way, all plastic sympathy.

“I’m late. I’d better get back or I’ll get my arse felt.”

She gathered her papers and worked her way out of the seat, standing on tiptoes to get past the back of his chair. JT was the best they had, but Paddy knew she could do better than that. She could take his job in a few years.

IV

The clippings library was a corridor-shaped room blocked off by a counter four feet inside the door.

The librarians were strict enforcers of demarcation and guarded their tasks and spaces as ferociously as blood-sodden borderlands. No one who was not a librarian was permitted behind the counter. They were not allowed to lean their hands over the counter or even to shout down into the library space. Paddy suspected that they were so defensive because their job was easy and involved nothing more than cutting out paper with blunt scissors and filing.

Beyond the counter, ru

Helen, the head librarian, dressed smartly in twin sets, tweed skirts, and shoes with a token heel. She wore her brown hair pi

Helen glanced over the top of her reading glasses towards the counter, seeing that someone was there but that it was no one important. She ignored Paddy, casually twisting the red plastic beads on her glasses chain. Paddy drummed her fingers, not loudly or for attention, just because she was tense and about to tell a lie.

Helen looked up again, sucked in her cheeks, and raised an eyebrow before dropping her eyes to the paper.

“I’m here for Mr. Farquarson. I need a set of clippings for him.”

Helen looked up for a third time and chewed her cheek for a moment before pushing the chair back violently and coming to the counter. She pulled out one of the small gray forms and put it on the countertop, staring Paddy out as she reached underneath for a pen. Paddy didn’t want a form that could be referred to later if she got into trouble.

“Search word ‘Townhead,’ ” she said quickly. “Full-time search.”

Helen sucked her front teeth, sighed, and put the form away grudgingly, as if Paddy had insisted that she get it out in the first place. She turned and walked over to the gray steel wall and thumb-punched some letters into the keypad. The heavy drum wound itself up and turned. It ground to a stop and Helen glanced back at Paddy for one last cheeky prevarication before opening the postbox flap, reaching in, flicking through a number of files, and pulling out a brown envelope. As she ambled back to the counter Paddy could see that the envelope was full.

Helen leaned into Paddy’s face. “Straight back,” she said, slapping the envelope on the counter.

Paddy picked it up and left, stopping on the stairs to tuck it into the waistband of her skirt on her way to the newsroom toilets, hoping Heather was hiding in a different toilet altogether.

V

She pulled out the chunk of clippings, unfolding the papers on her knees. There were a lot of them. She put half back and balanced the envelope on the toilet-paper holder. The cuttings on her knee were pristine and crisp, folded around one another like dead leaves. Paddy took the time to prise them apart gently, carefully flattening the legs and arms.

Flicking through them randomly, she saw stories about accidental deaths, about the library being knocked down to make room for the motorway, about a street robbery and a scout troop wi

She folded the clippings back together, swapping them for the second batch still in the envelope.

A building in the Rotten Row collapsed while occupied, sliding down the steep hill like a knob of butter in a hot pan. Two injured but no one killed.

The rubbish buildup was averted during the bin-men strike because the maternity hospital had an incinerator.

A three-year-old local boy, Thomas Dempsie of Ke