by Denise Mina
II
It was a disgusting cover page. The main story was a picture of Baby Brian under the mawkish headline AGONY OF OUR BRIAN, four words that managed to imply not only that the child had suffered terribly but that he had, shortly beforehand, become the property of the Scottish Daily News. It had been written during a late editorial meeting as a compromise, a blind guess at what the public wanted to hear by senior editors so jaded they couldn’t recall the taste or flavour of genuine sentiment. A pall of sticky shame hung over the news room, implicating everyone, pricking journalists’ tempers so that they picked on the juniors, shouted at copyboys and complained about everything. Two hours into the shift, one half of the staff were pissed and the other half were downstairs in the Press Bar working at it.
Heather appeared at the news-room doors. Paddy could tell that she had dressed carefully to give herself confidence: her hair was very big, extra back-combed, and she was wearing a red double-breasted blazer, like a junior executive.
Keck, to the left of Paddy on the bench, nudged her.
‘Check out that tart,’ he said. ‘She’s gagging for it.’ Dub sighed heavily on Paddy’s other side, muttered that Keck was a crippled-dick wanker, and went back to his reading.
A light hush fell over the news room. Paddy looked up and realized that half of the news desk and all of the sports desk were watching her, amused and waiting for a reaction. A sports boy stood up and held his nose, announcing loudly into his fist, ‘And in the red corner …’ Everyone laughed. Heather smiled graciously, dipping her head down and taking it all in good part. Paddy, raw and guileless, stared at her feet miserably until Keck nudged her. ‘Smile. Act like you don’t care.’
‘To hell with them,’ said Paddy, too loud, alienating anyone who had taken her side. ‘I’m not in the least bit bothered what those stupid old bastards think.’
III
She usually left the building for her lunch, preferring to wander around the town rather than sit in the canteen fending off suggestive conversations that were kindly meant but creeped her out. Today she was angry and fit for any one of them. She took her lunch alone, sitting at a small table tucked at the side of the busy canteen, sipping milky coffee and eating a squashed-fly slice in three inches of custard for a wee treat. She covered the table top with copies of the Daily News, the Record and the Evening Times, reading and rereading the Baby Brian stories, carefully teasing out the facts from the treacle.
The coverage was the same from paper to paper, with some phrases consistent from story to story, so she knew they had been lifted directly from the police’s press statement. The two arrested boys were playing truant from school that day and had walked to Townhead from their homes in Barnhill. Every single story mentioned the fact that the children were alone, that there were no adults with them at any point. They were so adamant about the detail that Paddy guessed that all the journalists must have pressed the question at the police briefing. The boys had taken Brian from his garden to Queen Street station, less than half a mile downhill into the town. They took the train to Steps, a country station twelve minutes away. When they arrived at Steps they walked up the long ramp to the quiet country road, crossed it, led the child through a break in the fence, down to the tracks, and killed him there.
Paddy found it hard to understand why the boys had gone all the way to Steps. The whole of Barnhill was rich in abandoned yards and empty tracts of land that wee wild kids from the area knew better than anyone else. She remembered looking out at the landscape through the beaded window of the bus, on the way back to the Southside with the Ogilvy mourners. They had passed St Rollox, a dying train coach engineering works with innumerable crumbling outbuildings. She had seen fields of blackened, twisted metal, abandoned railway lines and another yard of what looked like rows of ingredients set out in good order: huge containers of sun-yellow sand, stacks of timber and coils of wire as tall as a man. Small boys would know a hundred hiding places for a guilty secret.
Aware of a shadow at the side of the table she looked up and found the chief reporter, JT, hovering near her. He smiled modestly, self-consciously, as if thinking of himself as seen by her and, oddly, supposing himself admired. He couldn’t have thought himself attractive: he had a round face that fell into his neck and a nose covered in prominent blackheads. Paddy was suddenly conscious of a thin rim of custard at one side of her mouth. ‘Mind if I sit?’
She gathered up all the newspapers, arranging them into a tidy pile, and JT sat down, putting a mug of tea on the table together with a plate of chips zigzagged with ketchup, a bacon roll perched on top.
‘Thanks so much.’ He smiled again, taking off his suede jacket and throwing it onto the window sill with what he imagined was panache. ‘How are you, Patricia? Are you all right?’
He couldn’t have heard anyone say her name. He must have seen it written down. She smiled but didn’t answer.
‘When I first came here copyboys wouldn’t have been allowed to eat in the canteen with journalists.’ A smile twitched at one corner of his mouth. ‘I was a copyboy once, at the Lanarkshire Gazette. Can ye believe that?’ He left a space for her to respond, so she did.
‘Can I believe that a man as important as you was ever a copyboy or that Lanarkshire had its own gazette?’
He ignored her, continuing with the conversation he wanted them to be having. ‘In those days a copyboy sitting in the canteen would have been as welcome as a fart in a space suit.’ He smiled and looked away, leaving a pause for her laughter. She didn’t fill it. The crack was a Billy Connolly joke, circa 1975. JT was trying to sound like him, all drawly delivery and camp surprise. Since Connolly’s rise to stardom a lot of dull Glaswegian men had started monkeying his delivery without having the material. He had made an urban hero of the pub bore.
It seemed it was Paddy’s turn to speak again. ‘’S that right?’
‘Aye, aye, that’s right, Patricia. Are you all right?’ She nodded.
He dropped the Connollyesque bonhomie and spoke in a careful, tiptoey tone, the sort of voice an adult would use to lie to a child. ‘Really? Well, why are you sitting here?’ He gestured to the throbbing mass of the canteen. ‘Alone.’
‘I got sent on first lunch.’
‘Are you sure you’re all right?’
‘Uh huh.’
JT dropped his voice to a whisper. ‘The past few days must have been awful for you.’
Paddy looked at him for a minute, letting her eyes have the run of his face. If George McVie had been sitting there doing the act he did on Mr Taylor she’d have opened up a little at least before remembering to be cautious. She had admired JT but only by reputation and results. Close up he was a weasel. She suddenly understood why the other journalists hated him so blatantly.
He leaned over the table, waiting for an answer. ‘Yeah, well, you know …’
He looked at her empty cup. ‘D’you want another coffee? I’m going to have one. Have one, on me.’ He stood up and turned away, waving over at Kathy serving behind the now quiet counter. He raised an imperious finger. ‘Two coffees over here.’ He turned back to Paddy, smiling and muttering confidingly, ‘Let’s see if we get them.’
Behind him, Kathy whispered to her boss, Scary Mary, who looked angrily over at JT and shouted, ‘Self-service.’ She held up a small card from next to the till and shook it at him. ‘Self-service!’
JT didn’t hear her. ‘So, Patricia—’
‘Look, everyone calls me Paddy.’
‘I see. Well, Paddy, I heard that you’re related to one of the boys who did this.’ He tapped the word ‘evil’ on the stack of papers and shook his head. ‘Dreadful, dreadful.’ Paddy hummed in agreement.
JT tipped his head to the side. ‘Are you close to him?’ ‘No,’ she said, hoping he’d be disappointed. ‘He’s my fiancé’s wee cousin. I’ve only met him once and that was at his father’s funeral.’
‘What’s your fiancé called?’
She had the presence of mind to lie. ‘Michael Connelly.’ She could almost hear his brain making the scratchy sound of graphite on paper.
He nodded. ‘What would make someone do that to a child?’ He left the question hanging in the air.
‘Well, the boys are only ten or eleven years old themselves.’
JT shook his head. ‘These were hardly children. Sure, we all did stupid things when we were kids, but did you ever lure a toddler away and kill him for fun?’
Paddy looked at him coldly. He had adopted without question the lazy, pat explanation.
‘No,’ said JT, oblivious to the waves of hate coming from his audience of one. ‘That’s right. Neither did I.’
‘They’re children,’ said Paddy.
JT shook his head. ‘These boys aren’t children. The age of legal responsibility is eight in Scotland. They’ll be tried as adults.’
‘They don’t stop being children just because it doesn’t suit us any more. They’re ten and eleven. They are children.’
‘If they’re children, why were they so sneaky about it? They hid all the way on the train to Steps. No-one saw them.’
Surprised, she half laughed. ‘No-one saw them?’ He was disconcerted. ‘The police are still appealing for witnesses. It was in the evening. It’s quiet then.’
‘How does anyone know they took the train, if they weren’t seen?’
‘They had tickets on them.’
‘I bet they don’t find any witnesses that can put them on that train.’
‘Oh, they will. They’ll find a witness whether anyone saw them or not. They always do in missing-kid cases. Women, always women, see kids everywhere. I don’t know if it’s for attention or what, but some woman’ll say she’s seen everything.’ He looked at her, his breath drawn, on the verge of drawing a conclusion about the stupidity of women. He stopped himself.
Scary Mary was at the side of the table, holding the sign from the till, waiting for JT to look up. ‘Self-service canteen,’ she said again, furiously shaking the small card in his face. ‘The clue’s in the fucking name.’ She sucked her teeth noisily and moved off.
A silence fell over their end of the room, everyone smirking, enjoying JT’s humiliation. JT glared at Paddy. ‘I think those boys are innocent,’ she said unreasonably. JT coughed indignantly. ‘Of course they’re not, ya mug. They had the child’s blood all over their clothes. Of course it was them.’ He looked her up and down, then, sensing that he had lost her, softened his approach. ‘How are your family coping?’
Paddy picked up her coffee cup and held it to her mouth. ‘’S hard,’ she said, taking a sip to cover her mouth. ‘Michael’s very upset.’
‘You know,’ he said, dropping his voice, ‘even as an employee of the News, we could pay you for information.’ She drank the dregs of her coffee, narrowing her eyes. ‘We could go as far as three hundred for your story and name.’
With three hundred quid Paddy could move out of her parents’ house. With three hundred quid she could enrol for night classes, do exams, get into university and come back and eat them all.
JT’s eyes brightened when she lowered the cup from her mouth. He tilted his head to the side as if she had been talking and he was waiting for her to continue.
‘D’you know what?’ She carefully sat the cup in the saucer.
‘What’s that?’ JT tilted his head the other way, all plastic sympathy.
‘I’m late. I’d better get back or I’ll get my arse felt.’ She gathered her papers and worked her way out of the seat, standing on tiptoes to get past the back of his chair. JT was the best they had but Paddy knew she could do better than that. She could take his job in a few years.
IV
The clippings library was a corridor-shaped room blocked off by a counter four feet inside the door.
The librarians were strict enforcers of demarcation, guarding their tasks and spaces as ferociously as bloodsodden border lands. No-one who was not a librarian was permitted behind the counter. They were not allowed to lean their hands over the counter or even to shout down into the library space. Paddy suspected that they were so defensive because their job was easy and involved nothing more than cutting out paper with blunt scissors and filing. Beyond the counter, running along a fifty-foot wall, was a grey metal filing system containing clippings from all the past editions of the Daily News. The clippings were arranged alphabetically by subject and stored in cylindrical drums like metal Rolodexes. Against the other long wall was a large darkwood table. All three of the librarians were sitting at it doing the cuttings, subject by subject, of every article in the paper that day. Part of the copy-boys’ responsibilities was to bring a bale of each new edition down to them.
Helen, the head librarian, dressed smartly in twin sets, tweed skirts and shoes with a token heel. She wore her brown hair pinned up at the back, lacquered solid so that the individual hairs were hardly discernible to the naked eye. Although she was graceful and well dressed, Paddy thought Helen Stutter was a torn-faced bitch obsessed with the hierarchy of the paper who treated anyone beneath the level of editor with bald contempt. The management loved her and genuinely couldn’t understand why no-one else did. Paddy dearly hoped that Helen was still working there if she ever got promoted.
Helen glanced over the top of her reading glasses towards the counter, seeing that someone was there but that it was no-one important. She ignored Paddy, casually twisting the red plastic beads on her glasses chain. Paddy drummed her fingers, not loudly or for attention, just because she was tense and about to tell a lie.
Helen looked up again, sucked in her cheeks and raised an eyebrow before dropping her eyes to the paper.
‘I’m here for Mr Farquarson. I need a set of clippings for him.’
Helen looked up for a third time and chewed her cheek for a moment before pushing the chair back violently and coming to the counter. She pulled out one of the small grey forms and put it on the counter top, staring Paddy out as she reached underneath for a pen. Paddy didn’t want a form that could be referred to later if she got into trouble.
‘Search word “Townhead”,’ she said quickly. ‘Full time search.’
Helen sucked her front teeth, sighed and put the form away grudgingly, as if Paddy had insisted that she get it out in the first place. She turned and walked over to the grey steel wall and thumb-punched some letters into the key pad. The heavy drum wound itself up and turned. It ground to a stop and Helen glanced back at Paddy for one last cheeky prevarication before opening the post-box flap, reaching in, flicking through a number of files and pulling out a brown envelope. As she ambled back to the counter Paddy could see that the envelope was full.
Helen leaned into Paddy’s face. ‘Straight back,’ she said, slapping the envelope on the counter.
Paddy picked it up and left, stopping on the stairs to tuck it into the waist band of her skirt on her way to the newsroom toilets, hoping Heather was hiding in a different toilet altogether.
V
She pulled out the chunk of clippings, unfolding the papers on her knees. There were a lot of them. She put half back and balanced the envelope on the toilet-paper holder. The cuttings on her knee were pristine and crisp, folded around one another like dead leaves. Paddy took the time to prise them apart gently, carefully flattening the legs and arms.
Flicking through them randomly, she saw stories about accidental deaths, about the library being knocked down to make room for the motorway, about a street robbery and a scout troop winning a prize for raising money. There were optimistic proclamations from city councillors about the new scheme and reports of a bit of gang trouble in the sixties.
She folded the clippings back together, swapping them for the second
batch still in the envelope.
A building in the Rotten Row collapsed while occupied, sliding down the steep hill like a knob of butter in a hot pan. Two injured but no-one killed.
The rubbish build-up was averted during the bin-men strike because the maternity hospital had an incinerator.
A three-year-old local boy, Thomas Dempsie of Kennedy Road, had been abducted from outside his home and found murdered. The child’s father, Alfred Dempsie, had been charged with his murder but pleaded not guilty at the trial. In a clipping dated five years later Alfred was reported to have hanged himself in Barlinnie Prison. The paper had republished a grainy picture of his wife at young Thomas’s funeral. Tracy Dempsie had dark hair pulled up tight in a high ponytail. She looked as lost and dazed as Gina Wilcox. Paddy made some notes on the back of a receipt and returned the clippings to the envelope as tidily as she could, following the original creases. She checked the date at the top. Thomas had gone missing eight years ago to the day of Brian’s disappearance. Thomas was the same age as Baby Brian and from the same area yet no-one seemed to have noticed the parallels. The cases could have been completely different for any number of reasons, but it seemed strange that she had never even heard of Thomas Dempsie before. Downstairs in the library, Helen was sitting at the desk, glancing through a late edition. Paddy stood there for a full minute and although Helen tightened her forehead she refused to look at her. Finally, Paddy put the envelope on the counter and shoved it forward so that it was hanging over the far edge.
‘Don’t leave them there.’ Helen stood up casually, coming over as slowly as she could. ‘If they went missing you’d be made to pay for them. I doubt you make enough in three months to pay for these.’
Paddy smiled innocently. ‘Follow-up: Dempsie, Thomas, and “murder”.’
Helen looked over her glasses and sighed heavily. Paddy really hoped she was still there if she ever got a promotion. She’d remember what she was like and pull her up about it.
She had been sitting on the bench for ten minutes before it occurred to her that no-one was laughing at her any more. Someone in features called her over using her name, not just calling her boy. Someone else picked her over Keck from the bench, something that never happened because Keck could find everything and everyone at all times. A sports-desk journalist even looked her in the eye and asked if she, Meehan, would get him a coffee. It was worrying.
