The Field of Blood (24 page)

It was the bareness of the statement that shocked Paddy, and suddenly she could see it, Heather’s body lying on the floor of the toilets in editorial, a halo of jammy mess, her blond hair spread out like the rays of the sun and a shuffled confusion of skin and bone in the middle.

McGovern handed her a paper hankie. She struggled to speak.

“Is there a chance it might not be her?”

“We think it is.” Patterson leaned in, watching her face. She couldn’t help but feel he was punishing her for asking him questions. “We need you to be as honest as possible. You may know something important. Being honest might help us catch whoever did this.”

Paddy blew her nose and nodded.

“Did Heather have a boyfriend?”

Paddy shook her head. “She doesn’t have one.”

“Are you sure? Couldn’t she have had a secret boyfriend that she didn’t tell you about?”

“I think she’d have told me. She got pretty jealous when I talked about my fiancé.”

She looked up at McGovern and he smiled inappropriately.

“So you think she’d have told you if she was having an affair with anyone working here?”

Paddy snorted. “No way. She wouldn’t go out with anyone here, she was too career conscious.”

“What difference would that make?”

“She’d have been labeled a tart. She just wouldn’t do it.”

“What if it gave her an advantage at work?”

Paddy wavered. “Well, she was very ambitious.”

“She was very good-looking,” said McGovern. “It can’t have been easy for you: two girls working in an office, one of them—” He caught Patterson’s eye and broke off.

“When one of them’s beautiful and I’m a right dog?”

“I didn’t say that.”

She could have slapped his perfect face into yesterday. “It’s what you meant.”

She talked fast and loud to hide her hurt pride. “To be honest, it’s easier working here if you’re not that good-looking. With Heather they were always making sexy jokes about her and then hating her for not fancying them back.”

“Did it bother her?”

“It must have. She wanted to be a journalist, not a bunny girl. But she played on it. She’d have used anything to get ahead. Even her looks.”

Paddy glanced at McGovern, leveling the accusation at him as well. He smiled enchantingly, oblivious to the implied insult. He really was gorgeous. It was a shame Heather wasn’t here, she thought before she caught herself. She was sure they’d have fancied each other.

“Were you jealous of Heather?” Patterson asked carefully.

She didn’t want to answer. It pained her to admit it and made her look small, but they had said it might help if she was honest. “Yes, I was.”

Had Patterson had any manners he would have left it there, but he didn’t. He kept asking for more details. What aspects of Heather’s life was she jealous of? How jealous? Did she hate her, would she say that? Well, if not hate, then dislike? Was that why she attacked her in the toilet? Paddy tried to answer as honestly as possible, every time. She didn’t know what was relevant but gradually came to realize that while the state of her friendship with Heather might be, asking her what she currently weighed wasn’t. She resisted, and he insisted. Just answer the questions, Miss Meehan, he said seriously, we’ll decide what’s relevant. McGovern wasn’t as fly. She saw him grinning a couple of times, leaning back in his chair so that she wouldn’t see. Patterson was humiliating her deliberately, punishing her for having the cheek to suggest she knew something about Brian Wilcox.

By the end of the interview Paddy felt belittled and stupid, and suddenly knew things about herself that she wasn’t nearly ready to face. She was fiercely competitive and had always wanted to go to university herself. She had catalogued and coveted every one of Heather’s advantages, envied her clothes and figure, but believed that she was smarter— that’s where she was the winner. Paddy had always hoped she was gracious in her limitations and could enjoy other girls being thin and good-looking, but she discovered in front of two strange policemen that she wasn’t. She was a mean-spirited wee shite and she’d privately hoped some awful catastrophe would befall Heather.

Changing the subject, Patterson told her that Heather seemed to have taken her mother’s car in the middle of the night and parked outside Central station. Why would she go into town alone on a Friday night? Did she have any contacts she’d meet regularly? Could she have been investigating anything? Had Heather ever taken her to the Pancake Place at night? Paddy shook her head. Heather wouldn’t go to the Pancake Place at her own instigation. There were two all-night cafés in Glasgow: the Pancake Place was one, but the other one, Change at Jamaica, had a baby grand piano and a jazz set at weekends. It occurred to Paddy that if Heather had chosen a midnight venue, she would have gone there. She would have gone to the Pancake Place only if someone invited her there.

They finally let her go, holding open the door and telling her to come back and see them if she remembered anything or heard anything she thought was relevant. They still wouldn’t catch her eye. She sloped off, feeling exposed and foolish.

She took the back stairs but hesitated on the first step. She couldn’t face the newsroom yet. She headed downstairs to get a breath of air. One flight down she found Dr. Pete. He was damp and shivering with pain, clinging to the railing. He glanced at her feet.

“Don’t tell anyone,” he whispered.

“D’you want a hand to get down?”

He nodded, rolling his shoulder back stiffly. Paddy took his left elbow and led him down to the ground floor. He was shuffling like an old man, every muscle in his body taut and rigid. Every few steps a tiny inadvertent groan was carried on his breath. When they were facing the outside door he shook off her hand, took a deep breath, and straightened himself up, standing tall. He set his face to a blank sneer.

“Tell no one.”

As Paddy watched him push the bar on the door and walk out into the street, she knew that he would never have let her see him that vulnerable if he thought her significant in any way.

Two hours later half of the newsroom had been questioned. They all went to the door when their names were called, walking out cocky and coming back sheepish. The men had been told more details of Heather’s death than Paddy, and word burned its way around the newsroom: Heather’s head had been beaten in with a block of concrete or a metal thing, and she’d been dead when she was dumped in the river. No one, not even the morning boys, had managed to come up with a joke about it yet. A two-hour joke lag was as reverent as a full day’s silent mourning at the News. Half of them didn’t believe it was her. The other half thought a boyfriend had done it.

The newsroom was so disrupted by Heather’s death that Paddy still hadn’t managed to go for lunch and there was only an hour and a half left on her shift. Keck sat next to her on the bench, touching its surface near her leg by way of symbolic physical contact. “It’s been a shock. Why don’t you skip your break and just go home?”

“No, I want to stay on. Everyone’ll be working late tonight. I want to stay on.” She needed to stay on. She didn’t feel clean enough to go home.

Finally sent on her lunch break, Paddy left the building and found herself heading for the river. She hadn’t eaten anything, so she stopped in a newsagent’s and bought a packet of cheese-and-onion crisps for savory and a chocolate bar with nuts and raisins for sweet, together with a packet of ten Embassy Regal.

It was good hiding weather. A bitter, heavy drizzle fell from a gray sky, and she pulled up her duffel coat hood, wrapping the coarse material tight around her chest. She ate the crisps and chocolate as she walked, dodging the heavy-eyed lunch-hour drunks, marooned until the pubs opened again at five, who busied themselves by begging for loose change to piss away on drink. Paddy found a stretch of railing out of the way of pedestrians and turned her face to the water.

As she watched the rain needle the slow river, she smoked and had no trouble inhaling. She hadn’t known how much she’d resented Heather or how ugly she’d felt next to her. With all her defenses down, Paddy could see that she wasn’t a nice girl at all. Maybe Sean and her family were right: she was nasty and mean and fat and stupid. She was an arsehole.

She hung over the steel railings, smoking and watching the thick, gray water, self-pitying tears sliding down her face, and wished that Sean were there to hold her head against his chest and stop her seeing.

HEATHER’S LEAD

Paddy stood looking into the mouth of the postbox, the soft rain pattering on her hood as midmorning commuters brushed past her on their way to work. Her Valentine card to Sean had dropped like a lead weight into the black void, and now she didn’t know if she had done the right thing. He’d get it before the actual day; she’d posted it too early. If only the card hadn’t been quite as soppy. She was afraid the stench of desperation would stick to it and he’d guess how much she needed to see him. She wouldn’t be able to take in what had happened to Heather until she told him, until he was there to hold her hand and make it okay.

She was still worrying about the card when she got into the office. Her back shift started at ten, during the slump before the morning editorial meeting, and the newsroom wasn’t busy. Keck waved her over to the bench and told her excitedly that the police were looking for her again. They had been pissing everyone around all morning, pulling staff down to the interview rooms for three-minute questionings, checking people’s work times with the employment records. They interrupted someone on a difficult-to-get line from Poland, insisting that he come downstairs with them. Farquarson was livid about it. He was heard shouting down the phone to McGuigan, telling him he wanted the police put out of the building.

“I said I’d send you down right away,” said Keck, watching her approach Farquarson’s door. “You’ve to go right now.”

Paddy nodded at him as she knocked on the glass. “In a minute.”

Farquarson called out permission to come in.

“Can I talk to you for a minute?”

“Literally a minute?”

“Yeah.”

“Okay.” He put down the sheet of paper he was reading. “Start now.”

She leaned on his desk, bending her fingers back and rocking to and fro as she spoke. “I’ve got an idea that there’s another story hiding inside the Baby Brian one because the case is very similar to another case that happened to another child who lived in Townhead, on the same estate actually, but it was eight years ago and I went to Steps on the train and it doesn’t make sense for the boys to take a train past Barnhill to hide the baby when Barnhill’s full of disused buildings and waste ground.” She looked up. “What do you think?”

Farquarson was looking past her to the door.

“Liddel phoned Poland and he’s giving his copy to the editor now. D’you want to give it tops?”

Terry Hewitt was standing behind her, taking all of Farquarson’s attention. He smiled straight at Paddy, making her drop her eyes and turn briskly away.

“We’ll see what he’s got first,” said Farquarson. “But, aye, bring it in before the meeting starts.”

Hewitt withdrew, leaving Paddy standing, forgetting what she’d said and what she hadn’t said.

Farquarson looked up at her. “I’m sick of this. Everyone’s been in here with a different idea for a Baby Brian story.” He picked his teeth and stared at the wall for a moment. “Okay. No one’s mentioned this previous case. Find out more about it, write it up, and maybe we can run it for contrast or something during the trial.”

It was all Paddy could do not to skip the two flights down to the police on editorial.

The corridor was overheated, the air thick with fibers and dust from the rarely used lush carpet. Paddy could hear low voices through the door. She waited in the corridor, looking out the window. The police cars were gone from the street. Scottish Daily News delivery vans were backed up nose to tail like a troop of elephants, waiting for bales of the final edition. The drivers were gathered in an empty van near the front, keeping out of the way of the rain, laughing and smoking together.

Remembering the look in Terry Hewitt’s eye, she found herself salivating. She corrected herself: he wasn’t better-looking than Sean. He might be more attractive, but he wasn’t better-looking. She had chosen the wrong Valentine’s card for Sean. It was padded blue silk and said “I love you” inside; bought it on a whim that morning. Open, bare-faced emotion was out of character, but it was how she really felt about him. He wasn’t returning her calls as it was. She should have matched his coolness and kept her dignity. She hoped he didn’t show it to Mimi.

Voices approached her through one of the closed doors, and she turned to see it open. A bald policeman was accompanying one of the women from personnel, crying behind her thick-lensed glasses, her faraway eyes pinpricks of red regret. The officer patted her elbow and muttered empty words of comfort.

“I don’t want tae—” She broke off, kneading a cotton hankie into a flat plane and blowing her nose into it.

The impatient officer pushed the crying woman by the upper arm out into the corridor, swinging her around the corner towards the lifts. The woman turned and crossed the doorway, still sniffling and covering her mouth with her handkerchief as she made her way towards the back stairs. He watched her double back and looked puzzled.

“We’re not allowed to use the lifts,” explained Paddy.

He shook his head, looking at her for the first time. “Who are you?”

“Paddy Meehan.” She felt as if she’d done something wrong but couldn’t think what it might be. “You were asking for me upstairs? I just got in.”

He didn’t look pleased to see her and glanced back at someone sitting at the table. It was Patterson, the squat-faced bully from yesterday. Patterson looked a little flushed when he saw it was her.

“Got any more brilliant ideas for us?”

“I’ll go away if you want.”

The bald officer stepped aside to let her in, glancing behind her into the corridor to make sure there wasn’t a queue forming.

The policemen had clearly been there all morning: four big white tea mugs from the canteen were drained and drip-stained, red-and-gold wrappers from caramel log biscuits were folded into interesting shapes on one side of the table, rolled up into tight little balls on the other.