Field of Blood

They released him on parole but followed him all the time. He often found well-dressed men watching the front of their house in the Gorbals high flats. A stranger had been seen using a key to get in and out of his mother’s house on a day when everyone else was at work. The telephone clicked loudly after they picked it up. If Meehan made an arrangement by phone, an immaculate loner with a copper’s haircut would be sitting in the pub or club or café when he arrived, always reading a paper but never turning the page.

The woman was a beauty, though. Not police. Definitely Secret Service.

“And how do you come to be in Glasgow?” he asked her.

“My husband is English, in the diplomatic service, and we are posted here.” Her gaze slipped from his to the glass-topped counter, and she added quietly, “His work is very secret.”

It was clumsy and unsophisticated, but she wasn’t embarrassed- like Rolf when Meehan realized he despised him, not a flicker of shame. They all thought he was an idiot. He wanted to show her he knew, to say that he knew who she was and what she was there for, but she was gorgeous and there was just the faintest chance of touching her.

He pointed at the pen in front of her. “Would you like to see one of these?”

“No, thank you, I am simply looking with curiosity. Why is it the case that you speak German?”

Meehan shrugged. “I lived there for a while.” He would have said it was in the East to give them more to talk about, but he didn’t know where Rolf and his friends had kept him. “In Frankfurt.”

“And yet your accent sounds from the East.” She raised her perfect eyebrows.

Meehan tried not to smile: he hadn’t said enough for her to hear his accent.

“I do not know many German speakers here.” She touched her white blond hair gently, drawing his eye to the intricacies of the coloring. “I find myself quite lonely.”

Jo

She was a gorgeous twenty-five-year-old blonde, put together like a Miss World. Meehan knew what he looked like: he was five foot eight, acne-scarred, and out of shape. Done up he wasn’t much of a prize, but wearing a cheap uniform blazer and standing behind a counter, he must look a mess.

“Well, it was very nice to meet you,” she said, proffering a hand. “Perhaps I may come in again and talk with you in German?”

“Das wäre schön,” he said, and took her hand, intending to shake it firmly but professionally. She put her pretty hand in his, her fingertips curling as she pulled away, stroking the full length of his palm and making his mouth water. She turned on her perfect heels and clip-clopped away.

Jo

“She said she’d come back in.” Meehan caught his breath. “And I said that would be lovely.”

“That coat must have cost what we earn in a month,” said Jo

II

Meehan left the job two months later without ever telling Jo

He and Griffiths had arranged to meet on the phone, and Griffiths had blurted out the name of the pub. He wasn’t the brightest and he couldn’t remember the code. Paddy was just pleased that he hadn’t said “tax decal robbery” and “Stranraer” on the phone as well.

The woman was alone when he came in. She was drinking a small lemonade and standing at the bar. She chatted with Meehan, expressing surprise at their meeting again, having no trouble remembering where she had seen him before. Meehan didn’t handle it well. He knew she was there because of Griffiths’s mistake and was wary and afraid. He was a little rude to her. She was wearing the coat again but this time had higher shoes on, beige court shoes, and a pale blue scarf at her throat. When she left, the entire pub turned and watched, staring at the door as it shut and bounced open again, giving them one more flash of her perfect ankle.

Later, after Rachel Ross died, during his seven long years in solitary confinement, Meehan remembered the woman and the way she slipped her hand through his, the way her hips moved inside her coat, the touch of her lipstick-sticky lips against each other. He had never seen such a beautiful woman outside the movies. He wondered whether she might have been his in another life. If he’d had an education, been born three miles to the west or south of the Gorbals, maybe he could have been charming and rich, a sophisticated linguist, a poet or painter, good enough for a woman like her.

He made up a history for her: She was a spy, yes, but she had been forced into it after escaping from the East. The British had threatened to hand her back over if she didn’t work for them. She had a husband, a handsome man with a job in science, but he had died young and left her alone. Meehan liked to think that although good-looking, the dead husband might have been a short man with bad skin, that Meehan might remind her of him in some way. She became a golden light in the dark years ahead. It was the one good thing about the aftermath of the East and Stranraer and the subsequent years of hell: being caught in the middle of it all meant that he had met her.

III

Seven years later Meehan was on exercise, walking around a concrete yard in a burst of black rain. Water smashed off the concrete, bouncing up his trouser legs, making his bare legs wet. He walked in a slow circle, his collar pulled up, while the guards watched him from the shelter of the doorway. He only got out once a fortnight. Apart from two months somewhere in the middle, he had always been kept in a solitary cell because he refused to work.

He wished he could draw. He’d do a picture of the yard and put it up on his wall and imagine himself out here whenever he wanted. He’d draw the Tapp I

Over the years he had spent most of his time in Peterhead Prison on the gray, wind-lashed Aberdeen coast, and he had been in his present cell for eight months, but wherever they kept him the cells all looked the same. The walls were painted with thick paint, a gloss so that it could be washed clean whatever happened, even if a man had his throat cut and sprayed blood everywhere.

The thick paint meant that prisoners could scratch messages into the wall with the softest of implements: a sharpened spoon or a nail from a bed, sometimes even with a bit of flint found in the exercise yard. Paddy had read every single word on these walls. He had made up stories for the messages to pass the time. J. McC. TWO YEARS + FIVE DAYS was a street fighter from Edinburgh who robbed a post office. SHITEBALLS was a ned, a nonearning thug who beat his wife to death with a shoe. The stories had become so familiar that Paddy had fallen out with some of them. He was sure LICK MY CUNT had been written by a nonce, and the Rangers graffiti wound him up so he had stuck some of his pictures over them. The messages from one poof to another a