Field of Blood

“Hey! Talk to me, not him.”

Patterson turned, his face a mask of disgust. “You shouldn’t be getting into vans with men you don’t know. Old guys like Naismith are prone to get the wrong idea, and you’d have no one to blame but yourself if he did.”

He turned and walked away. The desk sergeant raised an amused eyebrow.

Terry looked at her. “I’m guessing it didn’t go that well.”

“You’d be guessing right.”

Outside the station they climbed into the car and sat staring out the windscreen for a moment, Paddy stu

“The red-faced guy there?” she said finally. “His dad investigated Thomas Dempsie. There’s no way the police will ever open that case again.”

“What if we approach Farquarson-”

“Terry,” she said, turning to him. “Listen to me. We’re nothing. McGuigan and Farquarson won’t print an article denouncing the Strathclyde police force on our say-so. “

“They won’t publish, will they?”

“They won’t publish a speculative story. We’d need definite proof. And in the meantime no one’s the slightest bit interested in searching Naismith’s van. Those wee boys are going to get the blame.”

“We can’t let this happen.”

“I know.” She looked out the window, following the path of a crisp packet across the windy road. “I know.”

III

It was always quiet on the editorial floor, but the absence of doors opening or movement through the corridors lent the air a peculiar weight. Paddy kept close to the wall, staying away from the windows as she crept along to the last door before the back stairs. Her fingers were touching the door handle before it occurred to her that the toilets might even be locked over the weekend.

The handle turned, she felt a gentle click, and the door to the ladies’ opened. With a last glance into the corridor, she stepped in. Whether she was smelling or remembering it she couldn’t quite tell, but the tang of Heather’s Anaïs Anaïs perfume caught her throat, and she had to press her eyes shut and take a deep breath before making herself move on.

The cleaners had been. The sink had been wiped down, the used towels emptied from the wire-mesh bin, and the sanitary towel bin, its top still crumpled from Heather’s weight, had been moved back into the corner of the far cubicle. Paddy bent down and ran her finger over the hollow. Naismith was going to walk, and Callum Ogilvy and the other child would lose their lives because the cleaners had been. She turned to go, catching sight of herself in the full-length mirror by the door. Her chin sloped straight into her chest. She was putting on weight. She spun away from the mirror, and her gaze landed on the floor at the back of the toilet, a stray glint causing her to stop dead. She smiled. That cleaner was a lazy cow. She had mopped the floor without sweeping it first, pushing the debris against the wall under the low cistern, convinced no one would look there between one shift and the next.

Paddy bent down a little and smiled. She could see the threads, dulled with dust particles clinging to them, but they were there: a little golden bundle of Heather Allen’s hair.

IV

Terry sat on his bed, head bent over the phone book, ru

“There’s a few in Baillieston,” he said. “Three in Cumbernauld.”

“Must be a family.”

“Must be.” His eyes followed his fingers to the bottom corner of the list, and then he turned the page. “Here, H. Naismith.”

Paddy stepped quickly towards him. “Is there one there?”

“Yeah, H. Naismith, Dykemuir Street.”

She remembered the address from the mass card they had sent after Callum Ogilvy’s father died.

“That’s Callum Ogilvy’s street,” she said. “Naismith lives in bloody Barnhill.”

V

Of all the houses in the street it was the most unremarkable. Naismith’s house was modest and tidy, the curtains hung neatly. The short front garden had been paved over with red slabs that had sunk irregularly into the sand beneath, their edges sticking up and down. An empty hanging plant basket at the side of the front door swung with a mild metronomic regularity in the evening wind. The grocery van was parked proudly outside.

Twenty yards away across the road, in the incline of the hill, sat the Ogilvy house. Looking out the passenger window as they passed, Paddy could see where weeds and weather were eating through the brick in the garden wall, chewing into the FILTH OUT slogan, the weight of soil from the garden forcing the bricks to buckle out onto the pavement.

Barnhill was not the preferred residence of motorists. Terry had parked near the Ogilvys’, but his white Volkswagen was still the only car in the dark street apart from Naismith’s grocery van. They were acutely conspicuous.

“Shit. We might as well have phoned ahead to tell him we were coming.”

“I know,” said Terry, peering through the windscreen into the deserted street. He started the engine again and pulled the car out into the road, pulling off quickly as though they were going somewhere.

“What about here?” said Paddy as they passed an empty pub car park two streets away.

Terry shook his head. “That’s not safer. There’re more witnesses here.”

They passed by, and Paddy saw in the window the backs of a man and a woman sitting close in the warm amber light, their heads inclined together. They drove on, following a broad road out towards the Springburn bypass. A stretch of waste ground next to the road was dark with nothing nearby but an abandoned, boarded-up tenement building and a pavement ru

“No, too obvious.”

He sped up, heading farther away again.

“But Terry, the farther we go from the van the farther we’ve got to walk back to it. We’re more likely to be seen.”

“Ah, you’re right.” He slowed over to the side of the road and swung the car through a sharp circle. “Let’s just do it.”

He drove down Callum Ogilvy’s road, parked the car twenty feet behind the van, and turned off the engine. He zipped up his leather jacket, tugging the toggle at the end twice, making sure it was up properly. Paddy watched him. Terry was sweating with nerves. They had agreed beforehand that this would be his job, knowing that if Naismith saw Paddy he’d go for her, but Terry was very jittery. She didn’t know if he would be able to pull it off.

“Are we sure about this?” he said, talking quickly, as if he was afraid to breathe out.

“I am. Are you?”

He nodded, looking anxiously out the window. “He was in the cells when Thomas Dempsie was killed, though.”

“He could easily have taken him earlier and hidden him. Tracy Dempsie would hardly be the most reliable person to get times from. Dr. Pete said she changed the times back and forth when they interviewed her.”

“Right.” He nodded out the window again. “You’re sure, then?”

“Terry, look where he lives: he knows Callum Ogilvy, Thomas Dempsie was his ex-wife’s wean by her new man, and his rounds are in Townhead. He must have passed Baby Brian every day. He fits in with all of it perfectly.”