Field of Blood

As soon as it began, the identity parade seemed strange. Meehan had participated in enough lineups to know that it wasn’t being held in the lineup room. Instead they were gathered in the CID muster room, the place where the officers assembled before a shift. It was a big square room with windows on the far wall and two doors, one on the left, one on the right, both leading into separate changing rooms. Four other men of Meehan’s age and build milled around, glancing at their neighbor’s shoes, each wondering if he did really look like that. They were only there for the couple of bob- good money for half an hour’s work.

Meehan felt calm. The lassies would pick him out, he knew they would. He’d got out of the car and they’d each seen him straight on. For once in his life he was glad of the acne scarring on his cheeks, knowing that it made him distinctive enough to remember, even through a haze of drink and in a bad light.

They heard people gathering behind one of the doors, and the two attendant police officers shuffled the ID men into a line, letting Meehan take whichever place he wanted. He stood closest to the door so that they would come to him first. When they had all settled into place the officer knocked on the door and opened it.

Irene Burns came into the room accompanied by a copper and a lawyer in a cheap suit. The moment her eyes fell on Meehan it was obvious she remembered. She didn’t even look at the others in the line, just raised her finger, hardly five feet away, pointing directly at his nose. What small vestige of religious feeling Meehan had left in his heart prompted him to thank someone somewhere. The officers led her off to the far changing room, and Meehan noticed that she had a thick ladder up the back of her calf and had scuffed her heel. She was still a child herself.

Isobel came next, looking very young and rather prim. Her hair was a neat little dome, and she had a hairband in it with a bow at the side. Again, she recognized him immediately, hardly glancing at the others. She hung around nervously by the far wall as if she wanted to run back into the changing room.

Meehan spoke to her. “It’s all right, pet, don’t worry about it. Go ahead.”

Isobel gave a little sigh of relief and pointed at him. “It’s him,” she said.

Meehan smiled at her and got a smile back. Isobel patted her hair coyly, as if he’d complimented her. He found himself smiling after her, watching her generous arse as she disappeared off into the far changing room.

Three other witnesses came through. He would learn later that each of them had seen the men leaving the Ross house in the morning. Not one of them picked Meehan out. One of them was certain it was number four; another couldn’t say; the other felt it might be number three.

The men in the lineup knew that the final witness was the big one, the victim himself, and they watched the door next to Meehan expectantly, anticipating the end of the chore and the two bob they had been promised. It was the far door that opened, the door all the other witnesses had left by. The lineup men snickered at the obvious ploy: the girls could easily have told Mr. Ross where the mark was standing, but Meehan felt quite confident. The girls had picked him out. He had his alibi.

Rheumy-eyed Mr. Ross, frail as a baby bird, had a big black bruise covering one side of his face and a brawny female nurse supporting his arm. The detective sergeant led the old man along the line, straight to Meehan. He ordered Meehan to read a line written on a scrap of paper.

Meehan was puzzled. He should have been told beforehand if he was to say anything. They were breaching protocol to eliminate him, he felt sure. He repeated the line flatly.

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

The old man’s knees buckled. “My God, my God,” shouted Mr. Ross, falling back into the arms of his nurse. “That’s the voice. I know it, I know it.”

III

The temperature had dipped again and Paddy could hardly feel the tip of her nose. She rubbed it with her gloved hand, trying to encourage the blood back into it, and turned the corner to the given address. She sighed up at the red sandstone. It was a neat front-door flat in a three-up tenement on the Southside, in a more than decent neighborhood. A passing soft rain had darkened the stone to patches of black, every window was clean, every sill in good order. The close passage through to the back was tiled in green and cream. Across the tidy square of front garden Mrs. Simnel’s front door screamed good order. Pale yellow storm doors were folded back, revealing a perfectly polished brass letter box and matching knocker sitting over a pristine doormat. Paddy had been hoping for somewhere a bit less respectable and solid.

As she approached the door she could hear a distant radio through the etched glass, tuned to an easy-listening station. The doorbell rang out in two complementary tones and a woman’s shape shimmered into view. Paddy huddled in her duffel coat and watched as the shadow woman patted her hair and pulled a pair of rubber gloves off her hands before opening the door.

A small puff of domestic perfection wafted out at Paddy standing on the cold doorstep. A saccharine version of “Fly Me to the Moon” was playing in the kitchen. The hall smelled of crumbled biscuits and warm tea.

Mrs. Simnel wore flat brown shoes and a cream skirt and blouse. Her hair was pulled gently up into a graying French roll. Paddy explained that she was researching a story about the Baby Brian Boys and had been given her name by one of the officers at the station. Mrs. Simnel looked surprised and smiled kindly.

“But what age are you, for goodness’ sake? Are you at college?”

Paddy supposed that she was, yes, studying for A levels too, if that was what Mrs. Simnel wanted.

“Good for you,” said Mrs. Simnel. “It’s so important to get an education.”

“It is.” Her accent was softening the way it sometimes did when she spoke to Farquarson. “Terribly, terribly important.”

“And here you are out on a cold night, working away.”

Paddy smiled bravely, touching her cold nose again, hunching her shoulders. She could tell that Mrs. Simnel still wasn’t quite sure of her: she held firmly on to the door handle, creating a barrier between her warm house and Paddy on the outside.

“Did you have far to come?”

“Not really.” Paddy leaned in confidingly. “Actually, my daddy dropped me off on the corner.”

“I see.” Mrs. Simnel’s eyes widened, delighted. “I see. Well, come in and warm yourself up. Let’s get you a cup of tea.”

With the door shut behind her Paddy breathed in the warmth and comfort of the generous hall. The ceiling was high, with delicate plaster leaves trailing around the cornice. Mrs. Simnel took her duffel and hung it by the label on a coatrack behind the door. On the floor beneath the coats sat two pairs of well-worn Wellingtons and a shooting stick, as if the green fields of Perthshire were just beyond the front door instead of the Southside streets of Scotland’s largest city. Paddy wanted to live here, to be from here, to be surrounded by helping hands who would encourage her ambitions instead of being afraid of them.

“Now, let’s have a cup of tea and see what we can do for your college project.”

It was the biggest kitchen Paddy had ever been in. Her entire family could have gathered by the sink and still have left room for a car.

Mrs. Simnel had been polishing a strap of ornamental horse brasses when Paddy knocked on the door, and now she picked up the newspaper with the blackened cloth and ornaments and simply moved it out of the way of the tea and biscuits. Fading sunlight filtered in through the window, absorbed by thriving plants on the sill, glinting off the ceramic tiles on the floor. Mrs. Simnel served up tea and biscuits on genteel flowery crockery. She didn’t use mugs either, but cups and matching saucers. The china cup was so light that even full of tea it could be lifted with a gentle pinch of thumb and forefinger.