Field of Blood

The boys looked at each other again, smirking, putting their hands behind their backs and pushing themselves off the wall as if getting ready to pounce. It occurred to Paddy suddenly that one of the boys might be Tracy Dempsie’s other son. Either of them looked poor enough.

“I know your mum,” said Paddy, looking at the wall.

A little disconcerted, the boys glanced at each other again. “Eh?”

She looked at the ringwormed boy, who had spoken. “Is your mum called Tracy?”

He shook his head.

“Mine’s is dead,” said the hood, with such relish she doubted it was true.

Paddy put her hand in her pocket, feeling past the bits of tissue to her house keys, slipping them through her fingers to make a face-ripping fist. She tried speaking again, thinking that any local co

The boys laughed. “She’s a fucking ugly hooker,” said the hood.

Paddy felt suddenly protective of Tracy, as if being insulted by small boys was compounding all the insults life had dealt her. “Hooker? Where’d ye get that word? Off the telly?”

The lift bounced to a stop on the ground floor. The boys stood still, staring at her feet as the doors slid open. The hood tipped his head back, his mouth falling open, eager to see what she would do.

Paddy held on to her bag with one hand and kept the other in her pocket. She worked hard not to turn her shoulder or give way to them, just to walk straight through the middle. She lifted her foot but faltered before taking the first step, prompting a giggle from one of the boys. As she stepped out into the foyer a cold sweat formed over the back of her neck. They could have cut her or raped her or mugged her and there would have been nothing she could do to defend herself. She was out of her depth.

She scuttled out of the lobby and the building, hurrying out of the shadow of the block and across a patch of grass, passing a garden party of old alkie men standing around a burning brazier, too late or too drunk for the Great Eastern Hotel’s seven o’clock check-in time.

III

Distracted by the memory of Tracy’s hollow eyes, Paddy walked up the steep hill to the blackened cathedral and cut around the back of the Townhead scheme to the old Dempsie house. She was walking fast, hurrying away from the fright of the boys and the unfamiliar air of regret in Tracy’s house.

She felt sure she had stumbled on something significant. Someone had killed Thomas Dempsie and left him in Barnhill. If the same person had killed Baby Brian on Thomas’s a

A plyboard wall ran along one side of Ke

Around the shoulder of the crescent she saw a middle-aged man in a navy overcoat walking down the road towards her, his hands jammed into his pockets. Paddy walked towards him and saw him flinch warily, hurrying to get past her.

“Excuse me?”

The man sped up.

“Can I speak to you, sir?”

He stopped and turned, looking her over. “Are you the police?”

“No,” she said. “Why would you think that?”

“Ye said ‘sir.’ You’re not the police?” he repeated, seeming a

“No. I’m Heather Allen, Daily News. I’m here about Thomas Dempsie?”

“Oh, aye, the wee fella that was murdered?”

“Yeah. Do you know which house was his?”

“There.” He pointed to the house with the tires in the garden. “The family moved away after. The mother lives in the high flats down at Drygate. It was his dad that killed him, ye know.”

Paddy nodded. “So they say.”

“Then he hanged himself in Barli

“Aye, I heard that too.”

Together they looked at the house. Beyond the tires and the muddy grass, limp white curtains formed an arch in the window.

The man nodded. “Ye don’t know what goes on indoors, sure ye don’t. At least he was sorry enough to kill himself.”

“Aye. Didn’t they think he was taken from the garden?”

“At the start they did. He just went missing, but of course then it turns out that the daddy had him all along.”

“I see.”

The man shifted his weight uncertainly. “Is that it? Can I go?”

“Oh.” Paddy realized suddenly that the man, ages with her father, had been waiting to be dismissed. “Thank you, that’s all I wanted to know.”

He nodded, backing off before turning and carrying on his way. She watched him go, amazed at the power gleaned from introducing herself as a journalist.

Ke

She had never met anyone like Tracy Dempsie before. Everyone she knew who had suffered terrible tragedy in their lives offered it up to Jesus. She thought of Mrs. Lafferty, a woman in their parish whose only child had been run over and killed, whose husband had died agonizingly of lung cancer, and who had herself developed Parkinson’s, so that she had to have communion brought to her seat during mass. But Mrs. Lafferty was all high kicks and yahoo. She flirted with the young priests and sold raffle tickets. The possibility that suffering could defeat people disturbed Paddy. The only other person she had ever heard of like Tracy was old Paddy Meehan. The unfortunate were supposed to rise above adversity. They should become fat, bitter men in cheap coats boring people in dirty East End pubs.

It took her a moment to register the sound. Coming around the corner towards her was a hurried, scuffed run. For no real reason she thought of the boys in the lift and felt a stab of fright in her stomach, thinking she’d be pushed through the hole in the wall. Without looking to the source, she scurried across the road towards the nearest working streetlight and calmed herself. There was nothing to be afraid of. Tracy had creeped her out, that was all.

She slowed her pace to a walk and turned to see the person behind. He smiled at her with disarming warmth. He was tall, taller than Sean, with thick brown hair and a creamy complexion. He stood thirty feet away, hands in his pockets.

“Sorry, did I frighten you? I was ru

Paddy smiled back. “No.”

“It’s a girl I’m trying to meet. By accident.” He nodded and looked sheepishly back up the street. “You live here?”