The Hanging Shed

by Gordon, Ferris,

  He was shaking his head, holding his face in his hands. ‘It’s going to sound stupid.’ His eyes looked hunted. He flung up his hands. ‘I don’t know, Dougie! I just don’t know! I don’t know how they got there, and that’s the truth!’

  ‘What do you remember? I mean what was the last thing you recall before…’

  ‘Before they found me there? And took me away? Took me here?’

  I nodded.

  ‘Look, I’d better tell you a wee bit about the last few months. How I ran into Fiona again.’

  This is what he told me. These are the notes I took, good ex-copper and budding crime reporter that I was.

  FIVE

  Hugh Donovan kept his hat on and his collar up in all weathers. Even in pubs; no, especially in pubs. He didn’t want to put off his fellow drinkers. It was a habit he’d started the day he left the hospital at East Grinstead and took the train north. Donovan was terrified. He’d spent nearly two years cloistered in Professor Archie McIndoe’s revolutionary burns unit. Nineteen operations on his hands and face and he still looked like something stitched together by a one-handed seamstress. This wasn’t to malign McIndoe’s now legendary skills. It was a recognition of the starting point.

  Hugh should have got off at Kilmarnock but he took one look at the familiar smoke-black sandstone of the station and kept going, kept right on the extra twenty minutes to Glasgow. No one was expecting him in Kilmarnock. His father was dead and his mother had stopped visiting East Grinstead months ago, too stressing, all those poor boys wi’ ruined faces. She’d gone a bit doolally lately, Hugh had thought. He had five older siblings but they’d scattered to the winds in search of work or husbands.

  He’d turned south as he came out of the St Enoch’s and walked over Jamaica Bridge spanning the Clyde. Hugh knew little of Glasgow, but enough to know that the Gorbals was an area where a man could lose himself and not stand out too much among the other ill-favoured folk crowded into the four-storey tenement blocks. It had always been Hugh’s experience that the people at the bottom of the heap were the most forgiving and accepting.

  He found digs in Florence Street; a one-room single-end next to the room and kitchen of a family of five, four kids and a widow whose wage-earner had died in a shipyard accident. The ‘houses’ shared a toilet on the outside landing on the second floor of the sandstone tenement.

  Hugh checked into the local post office and began collecting his army pension. He found Doyle’s pub on his second day and it became, through convenience and its anonymous cubbyholes, his evening haunt. Sometimes his lunchtime haunt too. He had no further thought to his future than to lie low, not bother anyone, see how it went, maybe get a wee job. The wee job that turned up became the heart of all Hugh’s future problems.

  Hugh could ignore the looks. He could hide in quiet corners. He might have been happy enough to drift through his days like a wraith. But the physical pain was often beyond bearing. As the flesh had healed – haphazardly and multi-hued – the nerve ends too came back to life, back to haunt him. Instead of being cauterised by the ravening flames, his nervous system kept telling his brain to move away from the terrible heat. Kept sending waves of invisible fire over his face and limbs.

  It had been expected and McIndoe had lined him up with a letter to take to the Glasgow Royal Infirmary to ensure that Donovan would have a steady supply of painkillers. But bureaucracy had stood in the way. The National Health Service existed only in newspaper reports forecasting the effect of the Beveridge proposals. If they were to be believed, in another couple of years Hugh would receive all the pain relief he needed from a free, national medical system. It seemed unlikely. And as of today he lacked a local sponsor to have him taken on the books of the dispensary. But an ex-army doctor took pity on him and agreed to give him morphine injections once a week on a Monday. Tuesdays were bliss for Hugh. Wednesdays were bearable. All the other days were nightmares waiting for Monday to come round.

  He added Scotch. It brought temporary oblivion, but soon the sawing at his frayed and burnt nerve ends cut through and jolted him awake to a pain-filled hangover. Sometimes his moans woke the folk in the next flat and they banged on his wall till he quietened.

  So the man he met in Doyle’s one night was as much a saviour as Christ himself. He sold dirty brown lumps of chemicals that you heated till liquid and then injected into a vein. The relief was instant. Like a balm administered by God himself. Stronger than the hospital version, it helped Hugh bridge the gap from Wednesday to the following Monday. Indeed, for an hour or two Hugh Donovan was transported, beyond pain, into a land of utter bliss. It was unsurprising that he began taking it daily. Unsurprising that his entire paltry war pension went on the heroin salve. Inevitable that the daily fix wasn’t enough. His body demanded more than he could afford. His saviour helpfully explained a solution. Hugh began to sell the stuff and take his commission in kind.

  ‘You became a junkie? And you sold the stuff! For Christ’s sake, Shug!’

  He gazed at me with his tortured eyes. ‘I saw your limp. Wounded?’

  I nodded. ‘Sicily. It’s fine mostly. Just when I get tired.’

  ‘Did they give you morphine?’

  I remembered with all the warmth of a love affair, the blissful floating feeling of the first shot from the medic as they hauled me into the ambulance. I scarcely felt the bumping and crashing as we swayed down the pitted roads. There were many more injections, each taking me off into a wonderland of sweet comfort and happiness. It took a while to do without it.

  ‘Sorry, Hugh. It’s just… Selling the stuff?’

  He shrugged. ‘I thought I’d go mad with the pain.’

  ‘What about the boy then? What about Fiona?’

  It was pure chance. He glimpsed her coming out of the Co-op in Cumberland Street. It was her familiar walk that caught his eye. But she had a child by her side, a lad of maybe six or seven. Celtic-dark like his mother. A sweet wee face too. He pulled back into a shop doorway as she went past. He heard her tell the boy to pick up his feet, and he knew her voice. As unobtrusively as he could, he followed her along the cobbled streets to a close in Kidston Street which ran at 90 degrees to his own Florence Street. He watched her vanish inside and wondered what her husband was like. He wondered if I had kept in touch.

  He took to hovering between Cumberland Street and Kidston Street. Over the coming weeks he must have seen her four or five times, usually with the boy, never with a man. Once he followed them to the benches under the trees in Hutcheson Square. He sat on the other side and pretended to read a newspaper. But his talent as a scout was soon laid bare. He’d waited till she walked round a corner before crossing over and peeking round it. She was waiting for him, two yards away.

  ‘Mister, Ah don’t know who you are but if you don’t stop following me ah’m getting the polis.’

  Hugh slumped against the wall. ‘Sorry, missus. Sorry. I thought you were someone I knew.’

  ‘Oh aye, and who would that be?’ She folded her arms.

  Hugh turned and made to walk away. But she took two steps and grabbed his arm. He turned and faced her and said, ‘Fiona MacAuslan.’

  Her hand flew to her mouth. ‘That was my maiden name. How did you ken? Who are you, mister?’ He lifted his head a little. She could see his eyes under the hat. ‘Oh dear God, is that you, Hugh Donovan? Is that you?’

  ‘Aye, Fiona. Sorry to have frightened you. Ah’ll no bother you again. Sorry.’

  ‘You’ll do nae such thing, Hugh Donovan.’ She reached out and held his elbow again, stopped his retreat. Tears were already running down her face. ‘You’ll take some tea.’

  They met once or twice a week after that. Fiona’s husband had died in the push through the Ardennes. She got a small war widow’s pension. She lived near her mother and had a parttime job at Miss Cranston’s tearoom in Buchanan Street. Her mother picked up the boy, Rory, after school. At first Hugh’s face made the boy hide behind his mother’s skirts, but soon, with the capacity
all children have for absorbing change, Rory accepted him and ignored his blistered skin. Hugh taught the boy card games and made him giggle. Hugh clung to these moments like a rope in a gale. It helped him reduce the intake of heroin, even lessened the amount he would push. Until the world crashed around him.

  She was in the street calling Rory’s name when he turned the corner. She was wild with fear, storming this way and that. There was already talk of this being the third or fourth child that had gone missing. The neighbours were out and soon there were little groups of women combing the closes and the washing-filled greens round the back. Rory had been out playing. His pals said a man with a hat and a coat had called him over. Rory had taken his hand and walked off. They hadn’t seen his face. Could have been anyone. Could have been him, they said, pointing at Hugh in his buttoned-up coat and hat. Fiona looked at him in a funny way for a second and then went back to her raging worry.

  The police came and took notes and tried to calm the now hysterical Fiona. Her panic was infecting the whole neighbourhood. The press was ramping it up too. Headlines about the ‘Gorbals Ghoul’ were selling newspapers like the announcement of D-Day. A day passed, then another, then nearly a week had gone by and there was no sign of the boy or of the two others. The police interviewed everyone, including Hugh, in the first couple of days. They spent longer with him than anyone. He didn’t have much of an alibi for his time. How could he? They searched his room; it didn’t take them long. They found nothing.

  Until the morning they burst down his door and found Hugh Donovan unconscious from a drug overdose. He was still dressed but his clothes were caked with coal dust. Under the sink was a bucket full of evidence. They dragged him from his bed and gave him a good kicking to wake him up. They called him an animal, a child molester, a murdering bastard who would rot in hell. They handcuffed him and dragged him out of the flat on to the landing. As an afterthought they read him his rights and arrested him for the kidnap and murder of Rory Hutchinson, and the kidnap and disappearance of four other missing boys.

  SIX

  I looked at Hugh with a mix of despair and disgust. I couldn’t comment on the four missing boys. But all the evidence in the world pointed to him having abused and killed Rory in a drug frenzy. What other conclusion could a jury come to?

  The rational part of me wanted to ask where had he kept the lad while the coppers were searching his tiny room the first time? Didn’t the neighbours hear something? But surely to God Hugh had never been a homo? Far less fancied wee boys? Was it some stupid revenge on Fiona for having married someone else and had a child by him? But rationality was crowded from my mind with the image of that poor raped child. He must have read my face.

  ‘I never touched him, Dougie. On Fiona’s life. I’m no’ that kind of a guy. You ken me.’

  I nodded. I thought I had known him. Like a brother. Then he stole my girl and smashed the trust. If he was capable of that, he was capable of becoming a drug addict, pusher and murderer, in my admittedly prejudiced book of crimes against Douglas Brodie.

  ‘What do you remember? Of the day before? Up to the time you were picked up.’

  ‘Nothing much. I did my usual. I needed a fix and went to one of the pubs I use. It was the Mally Arms near Gorbals Cross. I got enough for me and a bit to sell later, maybe six hits in all.’ He could see what I was thinking. ‘But, Dougie, I wouldnae take the lot at once. I never do. Just enough to keep me going. Enough to keep me sane.’ His poor face was twisted now with the pains racking him. It would be part burning nerves and part withdrawal pains. I stood up. He needed help.

  ‘You need a doctor.’

  ‘No! They’ll just knock me oot! That’s what they do. He gi’es me too much. To stop me screaming. To stop me upsetting the screws. For the last couple of days, waiting for you, I’ve refused to take their jab. So I could talk. Explain to you. Bastard said: Good, I should suffer in hell for what I did. But I never touched him, Dougie!’ His face ran with tears.

  I studied his poor hands for a while. I didn’t get it.

  ‘So why are you telling me this, Hugh? What’s the point?’

  ‘I wanted someone to believe. Someone to know I didnae do it. Just someone. After I’m dead. Ma life’s shite, Dougie. But I don’t want everyone to think this.’

  The silence hung between us at the thought of what was to happen a month from now.

  ‘But me?’ I asked. ‘We were hardly best pals, at the end there.’

  ‘I know. And that’s the other thing. We used to be the best. I was a stupid prick, Dougie. I couldnae help myself over Fiona, that’s the truth. But I should have. She was yours.’

  I’d waited a long time to hear his apology, but it hardly registered now. He had nothing I wanted, nothing I could envy.

  ‘That’s by with,’ I said, waving my hand – and almost believing it.

  ‘You’re the only pal that mattered, Dougie. An’ I fucked it up. I didnae want you to hear about me and just write me off. I wanted you to know. To believe.’

  ‘I’m not into belief any more, Hugh. I’ve given up all that stuff.’

  For a moment there was something of the old Hugh flitting across his eyes and mouth. ‘Ya Proddy sod! I always said it wasnae a real religion.’

  I smiled and shrugged. ‘I gave him enough chances to prove himself. But there’s just too much… too much shit, Hugh.’

  ‘You should have been brought up a good Catholic. You don’t get a choice about believing.’

  ‘Even now?’

  ‘Even now. There’s a priest that comes by. From my chapel. Actually it’s a help.’

  ‘Maybe I was with the polis too long. No belief without proof.’

  ‘OK wi’ me, old pal. Besides…’

  ‘What?’

  ‘You wi’ your fancy university education and being a big man in the polis. I need a Sherlock on the case. I thought maybe you’d have some ideas.’

  I shook my head. ‘We don’t have much time.’

  ‘ We? I sure don’t.’

  I looked long and hard into those blue eyes and wondered if I had enough magnanimity in me to spend precious time on a hopeless quest on behalf of a man I’d come to hate. ‘Why should I?’ I meant, why should I do it for you. He saw my thoughts.

  ‘Don’t do it for me, Douglas Brodie. Nor for Rory, even. Though that’s plenty. A maniac like that will do it again. Another wee boy…’

  I left Hugh nodding away and wringing his hands. He’d put a load on my back and I was minded to fling it off. If no one else was asking the hard questions, why should I? I had a life to lead and it wasn’t here, chasing ghosts. I felt soiled with travelling and with exposure to new horror. I’d had my share. I walked away from the prison, walked until I came to the first tram lines. I boarded a majestic ‘Coronation’ climbed upstairs and pulled out a much-needed cigarette. By the time I was coming into the city centre the air was thick and blue with the other smokers, mainly older men on their way back from picking up their pensions. I dragged deeply on my fag wondering where the hell to begin if I took it on. But mainly wondering why I should bother with such a hopeless case. Why I should care. I looked out the window and saw a pair of wee boys playing marbles in the dust. Their grey shirt-tails hung out and their feet were bare and filthy.

  Pals for life, Dougie? Pals for life, Shug.

  SEVEN

  By the time the train reached Kilmarnock it was smirring, that fine West of Scotland rain that doesn’t seem much at the time, but soaks you as thoroughly as falling in a river. I pulled my mackintosh out of my case and put it on. The road up to Bonnyton was achingly familiar but it looked more rundown, the sandstone blacker. Maybe it was the rain. I felt the now familiar black mood descend and I fought to banish it. I didn’t want to spoil my homecoming. But as I took the hill my stride grew shorter, my gait slower, as though the rain was lead. I paused under the railway bridge and smoked a fag until I got hold of myself.

  It was a bleak return. I was in civvies this time, the
kilt handed back last October together with the major’s crowns. It would have been nice to have had just one last saunter down the High Street in full dress uniform in my acting rank before they bumped me back to captain on demob. Sporting the medal ribbons of the Africa Star, the Italy Star and the France and Germany Star; like the awards at primary school for spelling, writing and sums. To have dropped casually into the Wheatsheaf, and bought a round or two for my old mates, and let them mock me gently: ‘I hope the guy was deid when you stole his uniform, Brodie.’ Or: ‘I didnae think the Catering Corps gave oot medals.’ And so on, and so on, but seeing in their eyes just a hint of the envy or admiration that they’d rather die before admitting.

  It wouldn’t have the same impact to roll up in my demob outfit and explain exactly what a freelance journalist did for a living. They’d call me the ‘paperboy’ or ask why I couldn’t get a full-time job. They’d mock me all the harder when I said I specialised in crime reporting, and that there was more to it than sitting in the Old Bailey fleshing out lurid stories of straying spouses being caught in flagrante delicto. The phrase always made me smile: while the crime was blazing. It conjured images of wild passion and pounding bed springs. The truth was usually duller; it was generally a set-up in an accommodating hotel to get the divorce. The ‘lovers’ would be found in their underwear waiting for the photographer to show up. At which point they’d grapple a bit on the bed and look as enamoured with each other as two strangers could in front of a grinning audience.

  Then there was the limp from the shrapnel I took in Sicily in ’43 after chasing Rommel up the North African coast. The leg wounds earned me two pleasant months in a hospital in Alexandria and a ticket to officer training back in Blighty. When I kept up the exercises the limp didn’t show. But since I got back to London last autumn, I’d let things slide. If I wasn’t exploding at the bureaucracy involved in getting my hands on my Army pension or a nice bit of bacon, I was sunk in gloom feeling sorry for myself. I’d meet a girl in a pub and we’d get on great until I went into one of my fugues and spoil it all. My local quack said I should buck up and prescribed iron tonic. He said it was normal, that London was full of men like me. Which would explain the punch-ups I got into in the bars I frequented.