Hunched against the falling snow, Paddy walked carefully up the quiet road to her family house, passing the garage, swinging open the garden gate, and stumbling over the brick the Beatties from next door kept the garage keys under. The freestanding garage was built on the Meehan side of the fence, but the Beatties had somehow annexed it over the years, using it to store unused furniture and boxes full of toys and mementos. Con Meehan had never agreed to let them have it but pretended he had to avoid an argument. Con’s horror of confrontation had shaped his life more than his choice of wife, more than the city or times he lived in, more than his job at the British Rail engineering works. It was why he had been passed over for promotion all his life, why he never got on in the unions despite being an articulate and politically sincere man, and why he had never once, not even in his heart, questioned the teachings of the church.
Paddy took out her keys and opened the door to the home smell of wet coats and warm mince. She dipped her finger into the holy water font inside the door and crossed herself before sitting on the bottom stair, unlacing her boots, and peeling off her thick tights. She hung them over the banister and tripped through to the living room.
Con was lying on his side on the settee, watching the news, his hands tucked between his knees, still bleary after a pre-tea nap. “Hello, hello. How’s you?”
“Aye, Dad.” Paddy paused and touched his hair with her fingertips. Demonstrations of affection made her father uncomfortable, but she couldn’t always stop herself. “Good day.”
“Good girl.” He pointed at Mrs. Thatcher on the telly. “This balloon’s up to no good.”
“She’s a creep.”
Paddy paused to watch for a moment as the local news came on. The top item was a report about Baby Brian’s body being found. The footage showed a short green bank of land with a tiny square white tent erected on it and a lot of uniformed policemen standing around looking serious.
Paddy opened the door to the small kitchen. Her mum turned and smiled politely. “Thank God you’re home safe,” she said formally, indicating company.
Sean was sitting at the table eating an enormous plate of black minced beef and nylon-orange turnip. Amazed at himself, he pointed at the plate with his knife. “This is my second tea tonight.”
“He’s been waiting for nearly an hour,” said Trisha indignantly. Trisha believed that women should wait for men and never the other way around, which was part of the reason Caroline had settled for such a lazy husband. Paddy sat down at the table as her mother spooned white cauliflower soup speckled with black pepper into a bowl and set it down in front of her. “If this weather keeps up, all the works’ll be off and I’ll be tripping over the lot of you for the next couple of days.”
Paddy commiserated but knew her mother’s lifelong dream was to have five housebound children with voracious appetites. “I’ll be going into work anyway.”
Sean reached for a slice of buttered bread from the plate in the middle of the table, stretching his legs as he did so, wrapping his ankles around Paddy’s. She felt a pang of guilt when she saw the grapefruit in a red net bag sitting on the windowsill. She decided just this once to enjoy her food. She could start again tomorrow.
Trisha assembled a dinner of mince, mashed potatoes, and turnip and put the plate by Paddy’s elbow as she finished off her soup. “Take a bit of bread.” She nodded at the plate of buttered half slices on the table. “Ye need to build up your strength after being out in that.”
“I’m hardly going to fade away, am I?” said Paddy, glancing at Sean.
Trisha looked at Sean. “Oof, you’re not going to start all that rubbish about being fat again, are you?”
“Mum,” said Paddy, talking to Sean again, “I am fat. I just am.”
“Paddy,” said Trisha firmly, “that’s puppy fat. It’ll disappear in a couple of years and you’ll be as slim as the rest of them.” She turned away quickly, as if she didn’t believe it either.
Sean dipped his bread in the gravy on his plate and looked confused when he noticed Paddy scowling at him. He could have stood up for her at least, she thought.
II
Inside the back door Trisha was cleaning the dishes and putting the kitchen to bed for the night. None of the Meehan family smoked, so Paddy and Sean had to stand on the back garden step for Sean to have a cigarette.
They were wrapped up well in scarves and woolly hats, standing shoulder to shoulder under the sheltering lip above the kitchen door, watching the blizzard through half-closed eyes. It was starting to lie. A delicate net of white flakes covered the black ground. Giant flakes hurtled sideways and up, floating into Paddy’s mouth and nose, getting stuck on the underside of her eyelashes, and melting into her eyes. Sean lit his cigarette inside his jacket, pinching the filter between his thumb and forefinger, keeping the cigarette safely cupped in the cage of his hand.
“Sean, I need to tell you something.”
Sean stared at her, the tenderness in his eyes rapidly cooling into fear. “What?”
She considered backing out.
“What?” he insisted.
She took a deep breath. “I saw a photo of the wee boys who killed Brian Wilcox. I think one of them’s Callum Ogilvy.”
He stared at her and blinked. “Get tae hell.”
“It was him. I looked and looked at it. It had his wee teeth and his hair. It’s him.”
“But the Ogilvys live in Barnhill. Those boys were from Townhead.”
“No, the baby was from Townhead.”
Puzzled and anxious, Sean searched her face for signs that she was making some sort of bizarre joke. He looked away and took a deep draw on his cigarette.
“A mob formed outside the station where they were being held, so they moved them. I saw a photo taken through the window of a police van.”
He wiped his face with a big hand, rubbing it hard across his eyes, trying to wake himself up. “How good a picture could it have been?”
“It was good enough.” She tried to take his hand, watching him calculate the possibilities.
“That’s stupid.” He pulled his hand away. “We’d have heard. They’d have phoned us, wouldn’t they?”
“I don’t know. Would they?”
His voice dropped to a hoarse whisper.
“Did they kill that baby?”
Paddy felt she’d said enough. “I don’t know exactly, I just know they’re in custody.”
“So it might be nothing?”
She lied to make it easy on herself. “Might be nothing at all.” She pressed his hand again.
Satisfied that he had made her back down, he flicked the ash from his cigarette into the pristine white snow. “Who did you give me a dizzy for last night?”
She was surprised at his hurt tone and touched his elbow. “Ah, no, Sean, I didn’t blow you out, I didn’t. I couldn’t go to the pictures because of work. I got a chance to do something.”
“So, you just stayed at work alone, did you?”
“Actually, I went out in the calls car.” She thought back over Mr. Taylor’s living room and the moment in the alley when she waved to the policeman in the bright kitchen window.
“Yeah, see?” said Sean, suddenly caustic. “I wouldn’t actually know what a calls car is because I don’t work there.”
“It’s just a car that drives around and goes to the police stations and the hospitals to pick up stories. It’s got a radio in it.” He didn’t seem very interested, so she tried be more specific. “We went to a gang fight where this guy had jumped out of a window and before that to a house where this guy killed himself to upset his girlfriend. Can ye imagine that?” He didn’t answer. “The story was in the paper today, just a few lines, but being there… it was…” She wanted to say fascinating, that it was exhilarating, that she could do that every night for the rest of her life, but she curbed it. “Interesting.”