The Field of Blood

Copyright © 2005 by Denise Mina

This book just couldn’t have happened without the efforts and insights of Selina Walker, and I cannot thank her enough for her patience and sharp eye. Katrina Whone, Rachel Calder, and Reagan Arthur also gave me great direction nearer the end.

Many people have helped with my research. Thanks and lunches are due to Stephen McGinty, Linda Watson-Brown, and Val McDermid, who gave me invaluable insights into the workings of a busy newsroom in the early eighties. Also to Kester Aspden for materials kindly given for no return.

Inspiration for the story was provided by the brilliant Dr. Clare McDermid’s work into the social construction of child offenders, most of which had to be cut out but will doubtless appear in another project at a later date.

Thanks also to Gerry Considine, who did his usual and gave me legal advice. Or did he this time? I can’t remember. Maybe it was Philip Considine or John Considine who gave me legal advice. If so, it’ll all be wrong because they’re not lawyers. Maybe it was Auntie Betty Considine. Is there a new European convention concerning wee cups of tea and fruit loaf?

Most of all, my undying gratitude to Steve, Monica, and Edith for their support during the scariest of wonderful times.

For Fergus.

Fight on, baby.

Judas … purchased a field with the reward of iniquity… .

And it was known unto all the dwellers at Jerusalem …

that [the] field is called … the field of blood.

ACTS 1: 16-19 (King James Version)

1981

They were still traveling, into the dark. They had been traveling for a long time, and in Brian’s mind every inch of every step took him away from his mother, and She was all he wanted in the world.

He couldn’t cry. They hurt him when he cried. He thought of Her, the softness of her breast, her fingers with the rings, how the world was warmer when she was there, and he struggled for breath, his bottom lip bumping noisily against his teeth. James, the boy sitting by his side, slapped him hard on the ear.

Surprised at the sharpness of the pain, Brian squealed and his mouth fell open. Callum, the boy on his other side, laughed at him.

“Don’t be a crybaby,” said James.

“Yeah,” said Callum. “Don’t fucking cry.”

They laughed together, leaving him out. Brian didn’t cry. Brian thought about his tummy insides hurting and his sore foot, but he didn’t cry. It was only when he thought about her that he cried; just when he remembered not being here, then he cried. Tears raced down his cheeks, but he breathed in, managing to keep quiet.

“You’re a big baby,” said James loudly.

“Aye,” said Callum, showing his teeth, his eyes shiny. “You’re a fucking big cunt baby.”

The boys got excited, saying “cunt baby” over and over. Brian didn’t like that word. He didn’t know what it meant, but the sounds were jaggy. Certain he was going to sob and be hit, he covered his face with his spread-out hands and held his breath until his ears popped.

He couldn’t hear the boys now. With them out of his thoughts he could remember her hands washing him, scooping soothing warm water that smelled of softness over him, picking him up to carry him, even though he was bigger, feeding him with bread dipped in hot mince gravy, with chips, with sweets from the ice-cream van. She tucked him into bed and left the hall light on and the door open and came to look at him throughout the night so he wouldn’t ever be alone. She was with him, always around a corner, in another room.

They were leaving the light. There were no houses outside, just dark and mud. The door opened and James pushed Brian into the black void, toppling him over so he tumbled out and down, landing on his side. He tried to stand up but his ankle wouldn’t work. Inside his Welly boot his foot was big, the rough cloth lining pressing against his skin. He fell over onto his shoulder and into the dark, outside the yellow fan of light at the door.

It was darker than he had ever seen, black like gravy, like smoke from toast, like bitter medicine for a cold. The ground was frozen into hard lumps. He heard wind and moving things, running things coming towards him, creeping things. A surge of panic gripped his chest as he used his good foot and both hands to drag himself back into the smudge of light from the van.

He saw the boys’ shoes and felt sudden relief that he was not alone. They put their arms through his on either side and lifted him, trying to balance him on his feet, but he toppled to one side, grabbing at the frozen earth, struggling to keep his face near the light at least. The boys lifted him again, and again he fell.

Brian couldn’t walk, his big foot wouldn’t work, so the boys, huffing and puffing, dragged him backwards, over the edge of the world and down a steep hill. It was windy and dark, so dark at the bottom that Brian clung to James, holding tight onto the sleeve of his anorak, afraid that they would leave him. He couldn’t stop himself and he began to cry, sounding loud because there was no telly and no wireless, nothing to cover his noise like there had been in the stranger’s house. James moved around in front of him, standing with his feet apart and raising his hands. Callum pulled at James and said, No, no, over here, by the track.

They dragged him farther down the hill until there wasn’t a hill anymore, and then they left him to stand alone. He fell forwards, banging his front teeth on metal; one of them broke and hot water came all over his chin. His crying seemed very loud now, and he sputtered through the warm liquid, breathing it in and coughing through his sobs. James stood in front of him again, planting his feet and reaching down, putting his hands on Brian’s neck. Brian felt himself lifted up until he was looking into James’s wild animal eyes.

Brian heard his own noise stop, heard small animals scamper for cover on the far bank, heard the brittle wind ruffle his hair. And then he saw black.

James strangled him and then Callum hit his head with rocks. The baby’s head was all mess. They looked at it, afraid and not wanting to, but drawn to the sight. They hadn’t expected the baby just to stop moving or to do a smelly diarrhea, he hadn’t told them that would happen. They hadn’t expected him to stop being annoying so suddenly, hadn’t expected him to completely stop being anything. The baby’s foot was facing all wrong. His eyes were open, popping out as if he couldn’t stop looking. Callum wanted to cry, but James punched his arm.

“We … ,” said Callum, staring at the messy baby, looking sick. “We …” He forgot the rest of it. He ran up the steep hill and disappeared over the bank.

James was left alone. It had blood all over its chin and down its front like a bib. The blood was warm when he had his hands in it, when he had his hands around the baby’s neck. He imagined the baby standing up with its messy head and black chin, swelling up to the Incredible Hulk and beating him up in slow motion.

He tilted his head and looked at it. He smiled at it. He poked it with his foot, and it couldn’t even try to get away from him. He didn’t feel scared being here with the broken baby. He felt other things, but he didn’t know what they were called. He crouched down.

He could do anything to it. Anything he wanted.

If there was any other angle to the Brian Wilcox story, none of the staff of the Scottish Daily News could find it. They had interviewed the missing child’s family and neighbors, retraced all possible routes, commissioned aerial photographs of the area. They had written features about children who had run away in the past, printed countless column inches on the future of missing children, and the little bastard still hadn’t turned up.

Paddy Meehan was standing at the Press Bar when she overheard Dr. Pete telling a crowd of drunks that he’d strangle the three-year-old himself if it would bring an end to the story. The men around him laughed and slowed and laughed again in a ragged wave. Dr. Pete sat still among them, looking even more desiccated than usual, his features organized into a smile around his heartbroken eyes. She watched his reflection in the mirror behind the bar. His bushy eyebrows billowed out from a face scarred by a decade-long hangover. He lifted his glass to his mouth, eyes shut, feeling for the rim with the gray tip of his tongue. Rumor had it that he was a bigamist.

Paddy didn’t like the men or want to keep their company, but she did want to have a place among them, to be a journalist instead of a gofer. She would have felt like an interloper in the bar if she hadn’t been on News business, here to get the picture editor’s tankard filled. In front of her, McGrade, the bar manager, was flushing the leads to the taps, taking an age to draw the beer through spluttering pipes. Pints of syrupy white froth were lined up along the bar.

The Press Bar was painted a pragmatic tobacco
spilled beer yellow, furnished with small chairs and mean little tables covered with ashtrays and beer mats. Screwed tight to the walls were archive pictures of news sellers and pressmen holding up significant copies of the Chicago Tribune and New York Times: VE-day, Pearl Harbor, Kennedy’s death. The photos were from another time, another place, and largely irrelevant to Glasgow, but they represented a plea for loyalty to the bar’s principal clientele and the justification for its special license. It was one of the few pubs in Glasgow that didn’t shut at two thirty in the afternoon, but the bar was too far from the city center to attract passing customers, too close to the city to be anyone’s local, and relied on the News for all its trade. An adjoining wall divided the two establishments, and the absence of an internal entrance was often bemoaned, especially in the winter.p>

It was the only occupied table in the bar. The men sipped their elevenses under a slick of blue smoke. They were the early shift, men of indiscriminate age, all drunks and renegades who couldn’t be sacked because of their length of service. They did the bare minimum of work and did it quickly before hurrying off to the pub or the house or the desk where the next party was being held.

Today the head of the union, Father Richards, was penned protectively in at the center of the crowd, looking tired, being cheered along by them. Richards was rarely among the drunks. He was a good father to the chapel and had negotiated longer breaks and the right to smoke anywhere in the building, even in the print room. Beer fat around the middle, he had the prison pallor of a man who worked indoors all day every day. Usually he wore aviator glasses with a thick steel frame, but they were missing today, replaced by a long diagonal cut under his eye, perfectly tracing the line of the absent lens. Someone had punched him in the specs.

The laughter died down and the boys sat back. Paddy could feel them casting their attention around the room, looking for something, anything, to ridicule. She was usually immune because of her age and miserable position, but when drink was thrown into the mix they could turn on anyone. She braced herself, twisting her cheap diamond-chip engagement ring around her finger, willing the barman to finish with the beer pipes and serve her. Three seconds shrieked by. She could feel a preemptive blush starting on her neck. Her ring finger was getting sore.

One of the drinkers at the table broke the silence. “Fuck the Pope.”

The men laughed, watching a fragile Richards reach unsmiling for his drink. As his pint glass docked at his mouth a broad grin burst on his face and he poured the golden beer in, letting little rivulets tumble down his jowls. The men whooped.

Out of a reflexive sense of loyalty, Paddy disapproved of Richards’s saying nothing. Only ten years ago job adverts routinely carried codicils saying Catholics need not apply. Housing and schools were segregated, and Catholics wouldn’t feel safe to walk along certain streets in Glasgow. But here was Richards, sitting at a table of Protestants, siding with them against his own.

“I don’t care about the Pope,” shouted Richards. “I don’t care. He’s no friend of the workingman.”

Dr. Pete waited until the audience had calmed down. “We have nothing to lose but our rosaries.”

They laughed again.

Richards shrugged, showing he didn’t mind. Not one bit. Meant nothing to him. He took another drink and, sensing her disapproval, glanced at Paddy’s feet, drawing the gaze of the men to her, giving them her scent.

“You,” he said. “You a Pape or a Marxist?”

“Leave her alone,” said Dr. Pete.

But Richards pressed the point. “Pape or Marxist?”

They knew from her name that she was Catholic. She even looked bog Irish, with black hair and skin the color of a paper moon. She didn’t want to talk about it, but Richards pressed her.

“Are you religious, Meehan?”

The men were looking at their drinks, uncomfortable but not prepared to stand between them. It was between two Papes, it wasn’t their business. Paddy felt she’d better speak or they’d smell the fear.

“How does my conscience come to be your business?” Her voice was higher than she meant it to be.