Field of Blood

Outside the café the harsh light was bright. The lunchtime buses rattled past, full of mums with young kids and students from the poly. Paddy looked up the quiet road and back at the café. It was in a siding to a main road, and it didn’t have a hanging sign. It was well hidden from passersby. She only knew about it because of the time Caroline was in Rotten Row having Baby Con.

“How did you find me up here?” she asked.

“You come here a lot, don’t you? I’ve seen you.”

The words hung between them, as shocking as an inadvertent kiss on the lips, and Terry seemed suddenly flustered.

He punched her arm. “See you later, then,” he said, and spun around, heading down the hill like an angry speed walker.

TWENTY-FIVE . DR. PETE’S CONDITION

I

The sun forgot to rise on Thursday. Outside the newsroom windows the city was stuck in perpetual twilight, the sky darkened by a bank of thick black cloud. Every light in the newsroom blazed bright. It was two in the afternoon, but it felt like a busy midnight shift, as if some great catastrophe had occurred in the dead of night, causing them all to be called back in to draw up a fresh edition.

Paddy was looking for Dr. Pete to ask him about Thomas Dempsie. She had been all over the building, buzzing about on errands, excelling herself by doing three canteen runs in fifteen minutes. Keck had warned her to slow down. Pete was nowhere, and the pack of early-shift workers were lawless without him, laughing at underlings and drinking at their desks in full view of Father Richards and the editors. It was bad form for them to make their indolence so blatant: it would make it harder for Richards to take their side when the inevitable fresh dispute came up.

She was loitering on the back stairs, reading a page proof about a house fire at a party in Deptford, when she ran into Dub.

“If you’re still looking for Dr. Pete, I was down for Kevin Hatcher’s medicine. He’s sitting in the Press Bar alone. Called in sick, apparently.”

“Called in sick but he’s sitting in the bar?”

“Yup.”

“That’s a bit cheeky, isn’t it?”

“Oh, yeah.”

She found Keck hanging around the sports desk and asked if she could kick off early because she’d stayed late on Monday. He told her to go, pleased to get rid of her: she was working so hard she was showing himself and Dub in a bad light.

The Press Bar smelled like a hangover. The sound of McGrade cleaning up the glasses after lunch echoed mournfully around the empty room. Dr. Pete was sitting alone at the usual morning-boys table near the back with a crisp whisky and two half-pints of bitter lined up in front of him. A read newspaper sat on the seat next to him, thumbed into a messy pillow. On his table a paper mat ta

He saw Paddy coming towards the table and sat up, dropping his eyes to the jigsaw, expecting her to give him a message. You’re on a warning, maybe, or Never darken the newsroom door again.

Paddy stood at the side of the table, taking cover behind a chair. “Hello.”

Pete looked up and frowned, dropping his bushy eyebrows to shade his eyes. “What do you want?”

“Um, I wanted to ask you about something.”

“Spit it out and then piss off.”

It was not going to be a Love Is… moment, she just knew it. “I wanted to ask you about the Thomas Dempsie murder case. I read some clippings of the articles you wrote about it.”

Pete looked up at her, and something, possibly a warm thing, flashed at the back of his misery-scarred eyes. He turned the whisky glass in front of him with a slow hand and lifted it, throwing the whisky to the back of his throat and swallowing. He didn’t even give the customary little gasp afterwards; he might have been drinking tea. Ru

“Sit, then.”

Paddy did as she was told but kept her chair away from the dirty table, pulling the edges of her duffel coat around her lap. Still spi

“Hide your distaste, woman. You’ll have to sit at dirty tables with drunk old men if you want to work in papers.”

“I’m scared.”

Pete reeled his head in surprise. “Why?”

She wasn’t sure how to say it. “You’re a bit brutal sometimes.”

“Only with an audience.” He looked at her for a moment and went back to spi

“Yeah, that’s the trouble with working here. Everyone’s a cynic.”

His eyes softened. “We’re all heartbroken idealists. That’s what no one gets about journalists: only true romantics get jaded. What do you want to know about Dempsie?”

She bent over her knees towards him. “Do you remember the case?”

Pete nodded slowly.

“Baby Brian was taken on Thomas Dempsie’s a

“I know that,” said Pete quietly.

It wasn’t the reaction she was expecting. “The boys were about the same age. Plus Thomas was found in Barnhill, half a mile from where the arrested boys live.”

Pete sighed heavily and sat back in his chair. “Look,” he said seriously, “I’m not sitting here with you ten feet away and not even a drink in your hand. What will you have?”

“I don’t really drink.”

Pete looked skeptical. He raised a finger at McGrade, dropping the tip to point at Paddy. McGrade brought over a half-pint of sweet Heineken, a beer mat to sit it on, and a stale cloth to wipe the table with. She had to shift her chair around the table to get away from the smell, coincidentally moving closer to Pete. He nodded approvingly and gestured to her drink. She took a sip and found it tasted nicer than she expected, like ginger beer but more refreshing. Pete looked at how much she had taken and nodded approvingly when he saw it was a quarter gone.

Paddy leaned across the table. “Doesn’t that seem strange to you that there are so many similarities between Baby Brian and Dempsie?”

He shrugged carelessly. “You see everything at least twice if you stay in this game long enough. It all comes around again. Same things again and again. It doesn’t mean they’re related to each other.”

“It’s too much of a coincidence.”

Pete picked at a string of tobacco that had stuck to his lip. “Every year, usually just before Christmas, a woman in Glasgow is stabbed to death by her man.”

“That’s not that unusual,” said Paddy.

“With a bit of broken window. They fight, a window gets broken, and he stabs her with a bit of the glass. Every single year it happens in the same way. It doesn’t make sense that it happens then, but it does. Every year. It’s a cycle. It’s inevitable. You see patterns when you work for long enough. In the end, nothing’s new.”

“I’d like to know what happened back then.”

Pete moved the empty whisky glass to the side, pulling the first beer glass to him. “Dempsie was a big story. The coverage was huge. The Moors Murders were relatively fresh in people’s minds, and the child was so very young, sweet- good pictures, ye know?”

“How come you got all the interviews with Tracy Dempsie? Were you assigned them?”

“No, I doorstepped her. I found out the address and waited outside, in the rain, for three hours until she let me in.” He raised an eyebrow. “I really cared in those days. That surprises you, doesn’t it?”

It didn’t, but Paddy nodded to be polite. “Was Alfred there when you interviewed her?”

“Yeah, he was there. I saw him with his other kid, the older one.”