Field of Blood

“Fuck it,” said Meehan, stubbing out his fag in the ashtray. “This is pointless. Let’s get back to Glasgow and get a breakfast at the meat market.”

The meat dealers’ café opened at four in the morning. Their fry-ups had rashers as thick as gammon steaks, and they sold mugs of cheap whisky. Griffiths took a puff on his cigarette, shaking his head as he exhaled a string of smoke. They had shared a cell for two months and could read each other’s breathing. Griffiths was vexed. He shook his head at Paddy, smiling a little, and relented.

“Okay, okay.” He turned the key in the ignition, leaving the lights off as he reversed out of the dark corner. “Let’s get some brekkie.”

II

Fifty miles north of Stranraer, in the small, wealthy suburb of Ayr, Rachel and Abraham Ross were in the bedroom of their bungalow, getting ready for bed. Rachel, in a sky-blue nightie and pink chenille dressing gown, sat on the side of her twin bed and watched her husband winding his watch. A single, convulsive cough shook her. She fought it off and waved a dismissive hand.

“It’s nothing.”

“Sure?” said Abraham, putting his watch on the bedside table.

Rachel patted his bed. “I’m fine, I’m fine,” she said. “Dr. Eardly said it would come and go for a little while after the operation, didn’t he? I’m fine.”

She smiled reassuringly for her husband, showing a little of her bare pink gums. They had spent the past month lying in their respective beds, listening to the texture of Rachel’s bronchial cough. It had left them both exhausted. The cough was so violent that it had cracked one of her ribs and caused her to have an operation. Abraham had fallen asleep in his office in the Alhambra Bingo Hall yesterday and seen Rachel cough up a river into their bedroom. She had always been the stronger, five years older than him and barren too, but in both their minds the stronger.

She pulled back the covers on her bed and took off her dressing gown, folding it carefully in half, laying it along the bottom of her bed.

“Good night, dear.” She kissed her own hand and touched his cheek with her fingertips to save her bending down.

“Good night, my dear.”

He waited until she was well tucked in, then pulled the string above his head to turn off the light. A cozy blue settled on the room, broken only by the puddle of yellow light from the hall. In unison they took off their spectacles, folded them and set them, side by side, on the nightstand. Rachel was propped up on pillows, having been told to sleep sitting up as much as possible to let the fluid settle at the bottom of her lungs, where it would take up less surface area. She folded her hands in front of her over the coverlet.

“Busy night?”

“Aye, a good night.”

“Good takings?”

“Six thousand, give or take.”

“Same as last Friday?”

“Aye, that’s right,” he said, and she could hear him smiling. “About the same.”

She smiled too, reaching across for his bed but finding only air and patting that instead. “Well done.”

They settled back, listening to each other’s breathing, Rachel rasping a little sometimes but mostly even, Abraham taking long, deep breaths to set an example. They slept little now but liked to be in bed listening to each other, without the necessity of speech or the need always to be doing things. They lay for forty minutes together in the soft blue gloom. Once, Rachel reached out and patted the air again, moved by some tender memory.

A sudden loud snap just outside the bedroom door made Rachel turn her head sharply.

They both watched as a black shadow fell across the pool of light from the hall, and suddenly the door was thrown open, smashing off the bedroom wall. Two figures, maybe three, came ru

He grabbed both Rachel’s wrists, wrenching her off the bed and onto the floor on the far side, kneeling on her operation scar, making her cry out with the pain. He let his weight settle on her chest. Retracting his arm at the elbow he shot his fist forward and punched her on the jaw. He could see her in the light from the hall, her toothless mouth, her thi

Abraham heard his wife from under the blanket and used all of his one-hundred-and-ten-pound frame to wrestle the man who was holding him. He heard the man’s short breaths, sensed his surprise. He had strong fingers from doing the count every night and found the man’s arm, sticking his fingers into the soft armpit, squeezing hard. The man shouted.

“Get this cunt off me, Pat!”

He was from Glasgow, Southside, Gorbals possibly, where Rachel and Abraham both grew up.

Suddenly Rachel breathed normally again and Abraham stopped struggling. He hadn’t managed to shake off the blanket and sat still, holding the man’s arm, listening keenly, wondering what the new swishing noise was. An iron bar swung through the air and made contact with his back, with his legs, his arms, his back again.

They took everything: the money, travelers’ checks, what little jewelry there was, and Rachel’s watch, pulled off her arm as she lay bleeding and crying. When it was all done they tied them up, Abraham black and blue under his blanket, his whimpering wife next to him. He lay under the blanket trying to remember things about the men. They were both Glaswegian, one called Jim or Jimmy, one called Pat; one was big and stocky, the other thin.

The men decided not to leave until the sun came up so as not to raise suspicion. Settling down in the living room, they drank the last of a bottle of fifteen-year-old Glenmorangie Abraham had been keeping for best.

Left alone in the bedroom, Abraham tried to free himself but couldn’t.

“Don’t.” Rachel was struggling to stay awake. “Please. Stay still. They’ll hit us.”

So Abraham stayed still for his wife. He stayed still and listened to her dry breath rattle around the room they had shared for thirty years.

Eventually a watery white light began to seep through the blanket.

“Is it getting light?” he asked, but Rachel didn’t answer.

The men were there again, in the room, walking over to them. Abraham flinched away, but they weren’t there to hit him. They tied more ropes around them, tightening the ones already on the couple. They were standing up to leave when Rachel spoke again.

“Please,” she said, her breath shallow, “send an ambulance for me. Please.”

They didn’t answer. They walked to the door.

She called again. “Please send an ambulance-”

“Shut up, shut up. We’ll send an ambulance. All right?”

The door slammed behind them and they were gone.

III

Meehan and Griffiths were outside Kilmarnock on the deserted road to Glasgow, doing eighty and singing a dirty song about the different-colored hairs on a whore’s cunt, both pleased that they hadn’t taken the risk of robbing the office, when they passed a crying girl in a miniskirt and shiny white boots.

“Stop!” shouted Meehan. “Slow down.”

Griffiths sat upright suddenly, looking around for cop cars.

“Did you see her?” Meehan thumbed behind them. “There was a girl crying back there.”

Griffiths slowed the car and pulled over, squinting into his rearview mirror. He threw the car into reverse and careered backwards towards her.

Irene Burns didn’t have the legs for a miniskirt. She had calves like a navvy but a big chest, and to Meehan’s and Griffiths’s eyes that balanced her out a bit. She had a drink in her but was only sixteen and wasn’t used to it. She was sobbing so hard she could barely explain what had happened. She had been hitchhiking with her pal Isobel when two men offered them a lift home. They got into a white car, an Anglia, and one of the men got out a half bottle of whisky. They were driving along and Isobel started winching one man, but Irene didn’t fancy hers, wouldn’t let him touch her, so the men got a