Field of Blood

“Okay,” he muttered. “Come through to an interview room.”

McGovern followed Patterson out from behind the desk, stepping down so that they were on her level, and showed her to a double doorway at the side. Patterson pinched her upper arm firmly, as if she needed coaxing. Terry tried to follow, but McGovern put a firm hand on his chest.

“We’re not going to be long.”

Terry looked at Paddy protectively. “I’d like to stay with her.”

Patterson pursed his lips. “No,” he said firmly.

McGovern’s eyes shone triumphantly, pleased at the petty point, and Paddy took it as a bad sign.

Beyond the doors the broad corridor was paneled in the same dark wood veneer as the waiting room. The turquoise floor was stained with a yellow streak down the center. Paddy could smell tea and toast from not far away. The Sunday shift seemed like a mellow call, but it wasn’t translating into any benign feeling towards her. As they walked along the corridor in front of her, the two burly policemen’s shoulders were almost touching. Neither of them wanted to look at her.

Twenty yards down the corridor Patterson knocked briskly on a door, paused, and opened it, peering in to see if the room was empty. He flicked a finger at her. “In.”

Paddy stepped into the room, not at all certain they weren’t going to shut the door and walk away. She heard a voice in the corridor calling Patterson, a low voice asking something.

“I’ve just got someone in, sir.” Patterson’s voice sounded higher than when he spoke to her. “About Heather Allen.”

The white-haired man who had vied with McGuigan for the attention of the newsroom looked in through the door. He was wearing weekend clothes, navy slacks and a gray sweater, as stiff and formal as a uniform.

“Hello,” she said.

He looked at her duffel coat suspiciously and addressed Patterson. “Don’t take too long. I’ve got work for you.”

Patterson nodded, enjoying the implied slight to Paddy. He followed her into the room and took a seat at the table without offering her one. She sat down anyway. McGovern sat down opposite her and lit a cigarette.

“Tell me,” he said, suppressing a smile, “why do you call yourself Paddy Meehan?”

Patterson smirked next to him.

“It’s my name.”

“No, it isn’t,” said McGovern. “Your name’s Patricia Meehan. You chose to call yourself Paddy Meehan.”

She had always known her name would excite comment, that it gave her away as a Pape and marked her out at work, but she hadn’t anticipated it being regarded as a reproach by the police. The two men looked at her, enjoying her discomfort.

“I’ve always been called that. Is that why you don’t like me? Because my name’s Paddy Meehan?”

It was a mistake. She’d left herself wide open; they could fill in any number of insults now: We don’t like you because you’re fat, we don’t like you because you’re ugly. McGovern and Patterson didn’t even bother filling in the caption. They sniggered at her mistake, McGovern turning it into a laugh as he thought of a quip, Patterson losing interest, taking a deep breath, and scratching at the corner of his mouth with his fingernail.

“I’ve come here to tell you something important,” she said quietly.

Patterson nodded at the table. “Fire away, Scoop.”

McGovern tittered.

She didn’t know where to start, so she took it chronologically. She told them about the grocery van and the ice-cream van’s stops and about the smelly towel on the floor of the van and Heather’s hair and the man trying to grab her ear and sitting outside her work. She listened to herself talk and realized that it all sounded meaningless and circumstantial. McGovern asked her if the towel was still in the van, and she had to admit that she had held on to it and then lost it in the street somewhere. He picked up his cigarettes from the table, slipped the lighter into the packet, and put them in his pocket, getting ready to leave. She began to speak faster, leaving out the fact that she had given Heather’s name to several people. It was when she said the name Henry Naismith that she saw a flicker of something approaching interest.

Patterson looked at her. “Naismith?”

“He’s the man who runs the grocery van. He was Tracy Dempsie’s first husband. He could have killed Thomas and then Baby Brian.”

“He didn’t kill Baby Brian. Your cousin killed him.”

“He’s not my cousin.”

“Naismith didn’t kill Thomas Dempsie,” said Patterson certainly.

“How can you know that for sure?”

“He had an alibi. He was in the cells when that boy was killed.”

He caught Paddy’s eye, and a hot flush was just discernible on his cheeks. He had the details of the case to hand in the same way that she had old Paddy Meehan’s.

“And how would you know that?” she said quietly.

McGovern piped up to defend his friend, adding it as a throwaway fact, thinking nothing of it. “Turns out his old man worked that case.”

“The Thomas Dempsie case?”

McGovern nodded i

Patterson colored a little and nodded at the table, pressing his lips tight together and raising his eyebrows. “Naismith was in the cells the night the boy was killed.”

“He’d been arrested?”

“It was just an affray. He was a senior in a gang back then, caused a lot of damage. He was broken up when that kid died. He got religion just after it, went through a big conversion.”

“He’s got a history of violence?”

“He was a street fighter at the tail end of the sixties, but he’s a nice old guy now, he wouldn’t hurt anyone.”

“Well, he tried to hurt me.”

Patterson shook his head. “Look, we know Naismith didn’t kill anyone.”

“But Alfred Dempsie did?”

It was only an implied slight, but when she saw the reaction she wouldn’t have wanted to slag off Patterson’s dad overtly. He narrowed his mean little eyes and the red flush on his face deepened.

“You don’t know anything about that,” he said.

“I know enough.”

McGovern was watching them, a small, vacant smile on his beautiful face, not quite knowing what was going on. Patterson slid his hands back off the table, slapped it once, and clicked his tongue on the roof of his mouth.

“So, you think Heather Allen was in the van, but you took the evidence out and lost it in the road. And now you’re sure it’s got something to do with Thomas Dempsie? What are you going to do about it?”

He looked at her intently, his eyes flicking angrily across her face. He thought she was going to write an article exposing his dad for setting up Alfred Dempsie. He must have pored over the details of the case over the years and known his dad had set Dempsie up. She could see the shame burning bright behind his eyes. She was flattered and pleased that he didn’t know she was just a copyboy.

“I don’t know what I’m going to do yet.”

Suddenly Patterson was on his feet. He jerked the door open as he pulled her coat off the back of the chair and shoved it into her arms.

“Look,” she said, trying one last time. “I could have imagined the hair and him going for me, I know that, but he was waiting outside my work when I went back there last night. How would he know where I worked?”

Patterson pulled her into the corridor by the arm. “Unfortunately we can’t arrest people for parking outside your work. This thing with you and Naismith’s just a misunderstanding. Maybe you left something in his cab and he wants to return it to you or something.”

“Yeah. That’s bound to be why he’s got Heather Allen’s hair in his van, isn’t it?”

Leaving McGovern behind, Patterson led Paddy through the door to the waiting room, acting as if she had hurt his feelings. Still holding on to her arm, he pulled her across the floor, depositing her arm into the tender care of Terry.

“Don’t worry,” he told Terry. “The man in question is known to us. We’ll be having a word, telling him to lay off and stay away from her and the paper.”