Field of Blood

Prisoners weren’t usually allowed to put up pictures in solitary, but they let Meehan do it because he had been in for so long. He had seven things on his wall, one for every year he had served for Rachel Ross. He felt it was an important statement that he hadn’t chosen to put up scuddy pictures of birds like guys who were waiting out their time. Instead, he had chosen to pin up important letters about his case, including a Crown Office letter stating that his application to sue the police for perjury had been received. He wasn’t allowed to bring the case but was proud that he had tried; it was an obscure part of Scots law, and he had discovered it himself. The Sunday Times special investigation into his case was pi

The only color picture on the wall was the red-and-black script on the cover of the book Ludovic Ke

He was trying hard to keep his mind. He counted things over and over: the bars, the squares of the mesh covering the window, the bangs on the pipes as they heated up in the morning and cooled at night. He had tried to count every cut in the wall, every line scratch, but the distinctions became too technical, and he couldn’t decide between continuous lines that changed direction and individual incisions. He talked to himself in a normal voice, without shame or embarrassment, quite unworried about who would hear him. He said the same things over and over. Bastards. Arseholes. Not me, pal, it wasn’t me. Das wäre schön. Das wäre schön, Lieben. Mein Lieben.

She sauntered through his cell a hundred times a night, asking for pens and finding herself lonely, moving her snaky hips like a dancer. Sometimes she danced for him, tiny steps, raising a foot and then another, the belt on her leopard-skin coat swinging to and fro. A Mediterranean summer gleam shone around her. She rarely looked at him, keeping her grassy-green eyes on her feet as she danced and staring straight ahead when she walked. He didn’t just see her when he wanted a tug either. He saw her when he felt low; when he saw himself in his filthy surroundings and read the messages from the men who had been in here before him; when he suspected that he was just like them, no better, no mistake. Then she would come and bring the light and speak to him in broken German. When his appeals were turned down and the home secretary decided against reopening the case, then she would come to him. Sometimes she would sit on his horsehair bed and hold his hand. Her skin was soft, like air. Other times he didn’t see her but just knew she was out of his line of vision. He reached back to touch her sometimes, and she might touch his neck with her manicured fingertips before floating away, leaving him warm and happy.

He had to ration her company to keep it special. During the worst times he tried to keep her out of his thoughts altogether, afraid she would become tainted by the association.

Coming back from exercise, Meehan walked through the open door into his cell and stood dripping onto the floor, keeping his back to the door so the screw couldn’t see him smiling. He loved the rain.

TWENTY-FOUR . IMPOSSIBLY SOPHISTICATED SOUP

The waitress brought her over a mug of tea and two poached eggs on toast. It was a café no one from the News ever used because it was up a very steep hill, next to Rotten Row maternity hospital. The plates were chipped, the mugs were stained, but the place was clean in the corners and the pattern on the Formica worktops had been worn away with endless scrubbing and bleaching. Paddy liked the warm room, liked it that they used butter instead of margarine, and that the eggs were freshly made to order. The large window onto the street was always steamed over, reducing the outside world to passing ghosts. Paddy had chosen poached eggs on toast because it was a bit like the Mayo Clinic Diet: eggs was eggs after all.

She took the clippings envelope out of her pocket and slipped two fingers in, pulling out the folded, yellowing newspapers to read while she ate. The articles hadn’t been opened for years and had dried around one another in a tidy little package. She flattened them carefully and flicked through, finding an interview with Tracy Dempsie from the time just after Thomas was found dead but before Alfred was accused. Tracy said that whoever did this to her boy should be hanged and it was a shame that they weren’t hanging people anymore because that’s what she’d like to see. Even in sanitized quotes she sounded a bit nuts.

Another story made it clear, through aspersion and i

As she reread the text of the long articles, she was struck by how beautifully written they were. The language was so crisp that wherever her eye landed it skidded effortlessly to the end of the paragraph. She looked for the byline and found that they were all written by Peter McIltchie. She was staggered: she had never known Dr. Pete to produce anything like usable copy. He wasn’t even trusted to churn out holiday cover for the Honest Man column, a despised weekly opinion piece cynically shaped to chime with the readership’s most ill-informed prejudices. Being saddled with the column was more than a sign that a journalist’s star was sinking, it was the professional equivalent of a tolling bell.

Paddy carefully dried the grease off her fingers with a paper napkin before folding up the clippings along their well-established creases, setting them on top of one another in chronological order, and slipping them carefully back into the stiff brown envelope. She finished off her last bite of buttery toast and stood up to put on her coat.

Terry Hewitt was standing in front of her, wearing his black leather with the red shoulders. If Sean had been drawn with a ruler, Terry was a sketch, all crumpled shirt and uneven skin. His fingertips were balanced nervously on the back of a chair. He looked away and wrinkled his forehead, as if they were at the end of the conversation instead of the begi

“What are you doing here?”

“Having my lunch.” She was about to extrapolate into a joke or a gibe about how fat she was but stopped herself, remembering his calling her a fat lassie in the Press Bar. She picked up her bag and pulled on her coat. “I’ll leave you my table.”

She turned to go, but Terry reached across and tugged at her sleeve. “Wait, Meehan.” He blanched, embarrassed at the intimacy of using her name. “I want to talk to you.”

Paddy bristled. “What about?”

He smiled at her, his lips retracting across his teeth again. She liked that. It made him look so hesitant. “Baby Brian. I heard you talking to Farquarson.”