The Field of Blood (13 page)

The last thing James Griffiths saw was a gun barrel sliding through the letter box towards him and a tiny puff of smoke and flame. As the bullet flew towards him, his brain sent out a signal to smile. The impulse didn’t have time to reach the muscles of his face before the bullet pierced his heart.

Meehan was in the van, being driven back to his remand cell in Barlinnie Prison. His shin had stopped bleeding but it still throbbed, drawing his mind back to the mob outside the court. He thought of James Griffiths fondly, hoping he wouldn’t be too annoyed that he had given the police his home address, that he would understand how desperate he had felt. Griffiths hated the police; he wouldn’t like them knowing where he stayed, but it was just a rented gaff. He could move. Meehan would offer him the deposit for a new place.

The detective chief inspector waited until the van was on the main road to Glasgow and an officer was on either side of Meehan, ready to grab him if he went nuts. He told him that Griffiths was dead, that he had committed suicide after a long shootout with many dead. When they searched Griffiths’s dead body they found paper in his car coat pocket that matched a sample taken from Abraham Ross’s safe.

The officers on either side of Meehan watched for a reaction, ready to jump up and give him a doing if he lashed out. Meehan had to be told three times that his friend was dead. Completely. Not sick, not winged. Dead. He sat back, pressing his head against the wall of the van. The plant of the paper from the safe would convict him, Meehan knew it. It was the Secret Service. They were setting him up because of Russia.

He waited until they got back to Barlinnie and he was put in a holding cell, one of a row of cupboard rooms at the drop-off yard with their names chalked onto the door. Naked and ready for the search, Meehan turned his back to the Judas window and sobbed with panic.

That same sunny morning lingered in Rutherglen while small girls and boys gathered excitedly in the courtyard of St. Columbkill’s RC Chapel. The class had been given lessons on confession for weeks beforehand. Despite having the theological basis explained to them over and over, in detail and by analogy, only the already very damaged children could properly grasp the concept of sin. All the confession meant to young Paddy Meehan was washing her soul so that she could make her first communion and wear a big white dress with flowers embroidered on the hem and a blue velvet cape. Paddy got her photo taken in Mary Ann’s cape when it had been her turn. Even the three Protestant Beattie girls next door got their photo taken in the cape and veil, though they asked the Meehans not to show their mum, because she was in the Orange Lodge and marched against Popery in the summer when the weather was nice.

The boys from her class knelt in front of her in the warm, dusky chapel. They giggled and nudged one another in the pew, growing increasingly bold until spindly Miss Stenhouse walked silently out of the dark side chapel and glared at them, picking one out for a silent finger-point. The boys slid apart in the pew, only seven and still biddable with a look.

The confessional was dark and fusty, like the inside of a cupboard. Behind the trellis window she could see the brand-new parish priest, an old man with hair up his nose whom no one was allowed to laugh at because he was a priest. He was staring at his knees. He waited for a moment before prompting her to begin.

Paddy said her lines, repeating them singsong-style, hearing the rest of the class chant along with her in her head.

“Forgive me, father, for I have sinned. This is my first confession and I have committed the sin of being disrespectful to my mother and father. I stole sweets from my sister and I lied about it and my brother Martin got the blame—”

“And did you own up then?”

Paddy looked up.

“When your brother was blamed for your theft, did you own up then?”

Paddy hadn’t been told about the priest speaking. It was throwing her off. “No.”

He exhaled a whistle through his hairy nose and shook his head. “Well, that’s very bad. You must try to be honest.”

Paddy thought she was honest, but a priest was saying she wasn’t, and priests knew everything. She was afraid to tell him more.

“Are you sorry for what you did?”

“Yes, Father.” Martin always blamed her when he did things. He always did.

“And what other sins have you committed?”

Paddy took a deep breath. She’d peed up a close once and hit a dog on the nose for snarling. She couldn’t tell him those things, they were even worse than blaming Martin. She took a breath and abandoned herself to the terrible sin of not making a good confession. “I can’t think of any others.”

He nodded heavily. “Very well.” He muttered absolution, gave her a penance of five Hail Marys and two Our Fathers, and dismissed her.

Kneeling in the front row of the chapel, Paddy looked at the child next to her. The girl was counting off three fingers as her lips moved through the prayers. Paddy owed God seven fingers. It seemed to her infinitely, grotesquely unjust. Ostentatiously holding up three fingers, Paddy looked around at the moving lips and closed eyes of the other children and smiled sweetly to herself as she began to mutter quickly: One potato, two potato, three potato, four …

After the confession, just before tea, Paddy stood in the front room of their house, swaying to a song on the wireless. Her two brothers were fighting on the settee, while Rory, their ginger dog, tried to join in, his hard pinkie sticking out under his tummy.

The news came on the wireless, and the very first story made them all listen. The north of Glasgow had come to a standstill when a man went around shooting at people. The boys stopped wrestling and listened. Rory’s pinkie retracted. The man had killed two policemen and injured four passersby. The police had shot him dead, and Paddy Meehan had been charged with murder.

The boys sat up and looked at their little sister, mouths dropping open, eyes wide with wonder.

Outside St. Columbkill’s girls were showing off their white dresses, the boys just pleased to be together and outside. Paddy knew she would die. Her mother had dressed her carefully in Mary Ann’s white dress. She had white gloves, made of a material so fine that the seams on the fingers were visible from the outside. On her feet she wore lace-trimmed ankle socks and white sandals that she would grow into. Her soul was too dirty for communion: some splinter of her was a murderer.

She once saw her father, Con, pick up a frying pan of smoking oil and run a tap into it. The water exploded, carrying particles of scalding oil through the air. Con still had red speckles on his neck. This is how it would be when she took communion in her mouth, Paddy knew it: cold water into hot oil.

Mass was conducted by her hairy-nosed confessor. He spoke throughout in the priestly four-step, a punctuation-free method of delivery that bleached all interest and meaning from his words:

And now we see

That God so loved

The world that he

Gave his only begotten

Son for our sins

Suddenly Miss Stenhouse was in the aisle, conducting the children with her fingers, bringing a boy and a girl out of each side to walk up to the altar rail and kneel down. Paddy followed the finger, clip-clopping up to the rail in her white sandals, and knelt on the velvet cushion.

Father Brogan approached, flanked by the altar boys. She was glad he would be there. She hoped he’d get scars on his neck. An altar boy held a silver plate under her chin.

“Body of Christ.”

She amen’d, shut her eyes tight, squeezing a panicked tear from her left eye, and opened her mouth to receive the Holy Eucharist. It melted quickly in her hot mouth. The priest moved off but Paddy stayed on her knees, eyes shut. Miss Stenhouse had to tap her on the shoulder to get her to move.

She crossed herself and went back to kneel in her pew. She grinned at the girl next to her. They giggled high and fast for no particular reason, pushing a prayer book back and forth along the seat while the priest gave the adults communion.

Outside, Paddy had her photo taken many times. Mary Ann got a shot of her cape and then their mother took them to the Cross Café for a double nugget ice cream.

And Jesus didn’t do anything. Paddy watched for him at school and at mass. She waited for their dog to die or her parents to fall ill. She waited for weeks.

It was after tea on a particularly bad-tempered day. Paddy and her sisters were hanging listlessly around their living room, climbing over furniture, being mean to one another because they were trapped indoors, frustrated by heavy rain. Their mother was busy in the kitchen and the radiogram was tuned to a local station, turned up loud to drown out the noise of the bickering children. It was the first item on the Scottish news. Paddy Meehan had been convicted of murdering Rachel Ross. He had been sent to live in a prison for the rest of his life.

Mary Ann looked at Paddy. “What have you done?”

Caroline nodded. “You killed a lady.”

Paddy tipped her head back and screamed at the ceiling.

When Con Meehan arrived home after work, he sat down in the big chair and pulled his sobbing youngest daughter onto his knee, holding the newspaper open and making sure she was nice and comfy so he could read to her. He read the description of the court, the who-said-what, the technical things she couldn’t possibly understand, rolling through it in a boring voice to calm her. Mr. Paddy Meehan had given a speech in the court, he said. He had stood up and talked to them after they found him guilty. “I am innocent of this crime, and so is Jim Griffiths. You have made a terrible mistake,” he had said.

Paddy sniffed and wiped her nose dry with the back of her hand. “Is it right, Daddy? Did they make a mistake?”

Con shrugged. “Might be, Sunshine. We all make mistakes. And Mr. Meehan is a Catholic as well.”

“Are the people who put him in prison Orange men?”

“They might be.”

She thought about it for a moment. “But he didn’t do anything wrong.”

Con paused. “The prisons are full of innocent men. Mr. Meehan’ll have to stay there until they admit it.”

Paddy considered it briefly and began to scream again.

“Oof, for petesake.” Con stood up, letting her slide messily off his knee to the floor. “Trisha,” he shouted, climbing over her and heading for the kitchen. “Trisha, come and do something with her.”

While he was out of the room Mary Ann snuck over to Paddy, who was screaming on the floor. She stroked her hair clumsily. “Don’t cry, Baddy,” she said guiltily, using Paddy’s baby name. “Don’t, Baddy-baby, don’t cry.”

But Paddy couldn’t stop crying. She cried so much that she threw up her macaroni and cheese.

The ongoing drama of Meehan’s imprisonment unfolded slowly as Paddy grew up. She read and reread every article and interview, watched the Panorama documentary twice, and visited the sites of the case: the high courts in Edinburgh and Ayr and the bungalow in Blackburn Place where Rachel Ross was murdered. She read Chapman Pincher’s account of Meehan’s trip to East Germany and planned to travel behind the Iron Curtain herself one day to see if she could find corroborating evidence that he had ever been there. The British government said he was a fantasist and had been in an English prison the whole time.

Paddy didn’t stop believing in Jesus, but she didn’t trust him. Unable to conceive of a world without a central story, she substituted Meehan’s, forming it in her mind, replaying his passion and sentence, tracing the buildup to his conviction, trying to shoehorn sense into the mess of his life. Meehan became a noble hero to her, maligned and defamed in a thousand different ways. She drew huge life lessons from the myth and emulated qualities she projected onto him: stoic loyalty, righteousness, dignity, and perseverance. He was released because of the work of a campaigning journalist, so she became a journalist. She gave talks about the case at school and changed her status from pleasant fat girl to intellectual heavyweight.

It was always the myth that fascinated her, never the real Meehan. The real Meehan was morally awkward, compromised by a life of petty burglary, a sour temper, and a bad complexion. Now he was back living in Glasgow, hanging around bars in the city center, spilling his story to anyone who would listen. Several journalists had offered to introduce her, but she didn’t want to meet him. She had to face the uncomfortable truth that Meehan wasn’t a nice man and he wasn’t trying to help anyone but himself.

1981

Every light in the Wilcox house was on and all the curtains sat open, spilling light out into the dark street. Paddy stood on the opposite pavement, her breath crystallizing into speech bubbles, wondering why she had come. She wasn’t a journalist, she didn’t have a legitimate reason for being there. She was just a stupid fat girl who was afraid to go home and face her mother.

The house was a gray rectangle with a big window on the ground floor and a brown front door. In front sat a little rug of muddy garden, tufts of grass left in the corners where Brian’s shoes hadn’t worn it away. Surrounding the garden was a fence of three metal ribbons, painted green and chipped. Wee Brian could just have climbed through the bars and wandered off to the busy motorway access road nearby. Anyone might have picked him up.

Paddy had been to the swing park, and it confirmed everything she thought she’d noticed a couple of nights ago. It was tucked well into the middle of the housing scheme, and Callum couldn’t have found it accidentally. Even if he had he wouldn’t have wanted to play there: it was a kiddie swing park with few attractions for older boys.

She thought of home, and a ball of acid flowered in her stomach. She sagged against the streetlight. If she’d had any money she would have gone to the pictures for the night.

Across the road she saw a flicker in the window. Gina Wilcox was standing in the corner of her living room. She was looking at her hands, and Paddy saw that she was holding a cloth, kneading it. She looked like an ordinary slim young woman cleaning her house, but even from a hundred yards across the road Paddy could see that the woman’s eyes were as red as a summer sunset.