The Hanging Shed

by Gordon, Ferris,

  By the time they’d found the body, half of Glasgow was out looking for the weans, Rory included. The other half was stuck at home, guarding their terrified kids from the ‘Gorbals Ghoul’, as he’d now been christened by the Gazette. The pressure was on Muncie and his boys to deliver, and into their laps fell the poor racked body of Hugh Donovan. Within hours Muncie was crowing – in sombre and portentous tones, of course – about the remarkable detective hunt that had led to their apprehension of a suspect. It made it sound as if there’d been a mass clear-out of dead wood among the ranks of Glasgow sleuths and the repopulation by honours graduates of the Sexton Blake academy. Which frankly was a pile of horse manure.

  The ‘suspect’ was held initially at Cumberland Street; then he was transferred to Tobago Street so that the lead team could get the kudos. But the gang of howling vigilantes outside the jail – women in curlers and aprons carrying noosed lengths of rope from their washing lines – forced them to transfer Hugh to Barlinnie ‘for his own protection’. En route, his van was pelted with rotten food and cobbles, and by clever accident a cameraman from the Daily Record managed to catch a photo of Hugh’s melted face to nicely underscore everyman’s image of an ogre.

  Before being driven off to the Bar-L, they’d given Hugh one outing. Muncie proudly announced that they’d taken the suspect back to the scene of the crime and that significant new evidence had come to light as a result of yet more fine police work. Was this what Sam had said about Hugh having ‘knowledge of the crime scene’?

  The trial itself had the same mob baying outside for justice, by which they meant a good hanging. There was no mitigation for his war exploits. No balancing of the scales with recognition of what he’d given for his country. Inside, the Procurator Fiscal constructed a Clyde-built case from the piles of evidence available to him. The wonder of it was that the jury took three days to come up with their verdict, and then chose to give a majority decision that would take Hugh to the scaffold. The defence counsel, Advocate Samantha Campbell, scored two clever goals.

  First she tore apart the evidence given by two of the detectives. Detective Sergeant Bill Kerr swore on oath that Donovan had made his confession before being taken to the crime scene. Detective Constable Davy White said he’d first mentioned the seven stab wounds and the naked body at the coal cellar. He claimed that Donovan had then, through feelings of remorse, made his confession when he’d returned to the cells. Sam had got the pair of them so tongue-tied that they’d been shouting at each other at the end of it. I wondered what their notebooks said?

  The second and crucial way in which Sam undermined the prosecution was in the sequence of events and the handling of the bloody evidence. The scientist from Glasgow Forensic Medicine Laboratory told the court that the body of the child had been dumped in the coal cellar two to three days after he’d been killed. This was apparent from the lack of blood in the cellar and the state of decomposition.

  Under interrogation, the policeman – a local bobby called Robertson – who’d made the initial search of Hugh’s flat the day after the boy had disappeared swore that he’d searched the tiny space from top to bottom, including under the sink. He claimed to have seen no sign of any blood-soaked material in a bucket, far less the boy himself. So where had the boy been held?

  Within twenty-four hours of the boy’s body being found, so was the bucket, brimming with murder weapon, bloodstained clothes from the boy and Hugh, and Hugh’s fingerprints. Sam rightly asked why would a murderer keep the boy a prisoner for a few days in some as yet undiscovered location, then kill him, dump the body somewhere else and then cart all the evidence back to his flat? Why wouldn’t he have left the evidence in this mysterious other location? Why hadn’t the police searched for it? And if he was responsible for the other missing children, where had he kept them? Why provide this evidence? Naturally the prosecution couldn’t bring charges for the abduction and murder of the first four boys. No bodies had turned up. But they certainly sprayed round the innuendo like muck on a farmer’s field.

  Sam used it as a lever. This time she had Muncie himself in the stand. He’d started off in his usual preening way to show how clever he and his team had been and ended up apoplectic in the dock shouting that there was no other location. He as good as accused the poor plod who’d made the first search of being incompetent and had failed to spot the boy who’d no doubt been trussed up and gagged in a cupboard or under the bed. The judge had to admonish Muncie from shouting at the defence lawyer and calling her a silver-tongued mischief-maker who was twisting the words of an honest policeman.

  Sam Campbell had made her point. It was just about conceivable that Hugh Donovan had been set up. That the murderer had inserted the evidence in his flat to incriminate him. She made a brave attempt to explain away Hugh’s shirt with the bloodstains as having been stolen from the washing line in the back green. She also got the fifteen members of the jury thinking about the state of Hugh’s hands. She made him show them to the court. I could picture the revulsion all round the room as he stuck out his burnt claws. She asked him to clench his hands and he couldn’t. She asked him if he had any fingerprints left after his heroic exploits in Bomber Command. He said he had some on his right hand but grasping a knife with one hand was impossible. She spent some time reminding the jury how he’d earned his dreadful wounds in the tail turret of his RAF bomber.

  He couldn’t recall a thing about the night before he was arrested, except he’d taken some of his ‘painkillers’, maybe too much. And that in that state it was perfectly possible for someone to have entered his flat and planted the evidence.

  It was a brave try, Sam, I thought. But the prosecution kept pounding away at the piles of evidence and the confession. Hugh never quite managed to retract his confession, just told the court that he’d said anything to be left alone. When they introduced the forensic discovery that the boy’s body bore traces of heroin, it should have been a unanimous verdict of guilty. Sam’s closing speech about this heroic warrior who’d given his all for his country must have been a cracker to leave enough doubt in a few minds. She was even getting to me. The circumstances of finding the body and then – conveniently – the evidence, were simply too pat to be true. They searched the tiny single-end once and found nothing. They searched again and found a bucket load of incrimination. Why would Hugh do that? Why would he drag the body to the coal cellar? The lack of blood round the body made it as clear as daylight that the slaughter had taken place elsewhere. It stank of a frame-up. But by whom? And why? Why would anyone have it in for a poor wee junkie like Hugh? I’d seen his hands; it seemed implausible that he could have wielded a knife far less left prints all over it.

  But if Hugh didn’t do it, then, obviously enough, someone else did. It gave me a toehold. If there was another killer he kept the boy somewhere other than Hugh’s flat or the coal cellar and probably killed him there. Find the location; find the killer. He had to be someone who knew Hugh, knew his habits – especially his heroin one – and was local. He – and I suppose it was a he – must have been able to identify Hugh’s shirt on the washing line, steal it and cover it in the blood of the child. But wasn’t that stretching things too far? A premeditated act of murder and incrimination? Could I conceive of a person who was so demented yet so calculating that he knew he was going to murder the boy and that before he slaughtered him he would have to pinch a shirt to catch the blood? It couldn’t have been an afterthought to acquire Hugh’s shirt; the blood would have congealed and dried within hours, and how would the killer have known he’d find just the perfect piece of incriminating evidence? Name tag and all? Maybe there were two killers? Or they had had some helpful assistance in planting the evidence from our guardians of the peace themselves…

  Which gave me my next stop.

  SIXTEEN

  ‘Where to, friend?’ asked the taxi driver.

  ‘Do you know Tobago Street police station?’

  It caused a big sigh from the front seat. ‘Intimatel
y. Ah’ve bailed ma faither-in-law out o’ there on many’s the occasion. Drunken aul’ sod…’

  He gave me his troubles for the next ten minutes of our journey. I contributed with a random few tsks and ayes out of politeness. But my attention was on the fair city streets that I’d pounded in my good black uniform a lifetime ago. I rolled down my window to sample the air and take in the smells and sounds.

  There was nothing like the damage done to London. It was a struggle for German bombers to reach this far, and none of their daunting V1s or V2s made it beyond North London. Yet they had tried their damnedest to hit the shipbuilding capacity and ammunition production of the Clyde, and some stray bomb loads had straddled the residential areas in central Glasgow. The place that really took a pasting was the town of Clydebank. Back in March 1940, the Luftwaffe had filled their fuel tanks to the brim and swarmed across the North Sea. I might even have heard the murderous drone of their massing bombers while I lay in a French field as part of the ill fated British Expeditionary Force. The bombers made it to Glasgow but missed the yards and instead razed an entire community. Only a handful of houses out of 12,000 were left unscathed. Hundreds of innocent folk – weans and women mainly – were blown to bits or crushed in the rubble of their homes. I wish I could say me and my mates in the 51st Highland Division took it out on the German army in return. But it didn’t quite turn out that way. Not then. Not for that incarnation of the 51st.

  I wrenched my thoughts back to the present. Outside the window of my taxi time had stood still. There were still groups of capped men huddling on street corners puffing on fags, waiting for something to come up at the yards. These were the unskilled, the casuals, the soldiers back from the war with no job and dwindling hope. It had the ominous tang of the thirties again, the years of the Depression and the Hunger Marches. Where were the laurel leaves and the spoils of victory?

  The pawnshops with their three brass balls were doing a steady trade. The old gaffers handed over their wife’s wedding ring on the Wednesday to tide them over till pay day on Friday, then they liberated the abused gold bands on the Saturday. Weekend wives, these long-suffering women, some still wrapped in their plaids, oblivious to fashion as much as to the lengthening and warming days. Some of the younger women – Highland lassies mainly – had babies tucked inside their tartan rugs, tight-swaddled like papooses with only fat red faces on show.

  Suddenly, out of a close, a squadron of kids with skint knees and holed vests shot into the street. Their leader ran with the balance of a Scotland winger taking on the English defence at Hampden. His right arm was outstretched and holding an iron bar which drove a black metal hoop. This gird and cleek was a top-notch affair. I’d made my own out of an old pram wheel with the spokes and tyre removed for the cleek. And for a gird, we used sticks torn from trees to propel the hoop along. This boy’s must have been made at the yards; it was a blacksmith’s job to fashion the ring of iron and fix one end of the gird to it with another smaller hoop. The best thing was the satisfying ear-splitting noise as the cleek clattered along the cobbles with a gang of shrieking tearaways whooping after it and demanding a ‘shot’. I watched the yelling pack disappear down another close and wished I was running with them, starting again. But that’s the kind of thinking that tortured me through the winter in London. Round and round. Replaying pivotal points in my life and taking a different path. Seeing where I’d end up. Almost anywhere better than the poky wee flat in a bombed out city of strangers, with only my old pal Johnnie Walker to keep me company.

  We juddered to a halt outside Tobago Street jail. It hadn’t changed either. A squat rectangle of grey sandstone, built by the Victorians, manned by the Visigoths.

  ‘You’re no’ the polis, are you?’ He was regretting his intimacies.

  ‘Sorry? No. Used to be. Not now.’

  I paid him and got out. The sun warmed the street, and I was taken back ten years to my first day here in ’33. Fresh from training, my new uniform smelling of warm serge. I’d checked my tie, made sure my cap sat square on my head and marched towards the big wooden door.

  Now, I straightened my jacket, adjusted my trilby and walked quickly over the road and in through the doors. The clocks had stopped inside as well as out. Same solid desk and grille, same copper behind it writing in the charge book. He raised his eyes briefly then dropped them back to his work. But then the eyes came back up slowly and he scoured my face.

  ‘Well, fuck me, if it isnae Detective Sergeant Douglas Brodie Esquire.’

  ‘You’re not my type, Alec. And it’s just Brodie now. How are you getting on?’

  Well, I could see. The three stripes on his arm looked white and new. He’d probably made it in the past couple of years. He’d arrived a new recruit, raw-jawed and gangly in early ’39, about six months before I resigned and joined up. He’d elected to stay on and see the war out on Tobago Street. It had clearly been the right thing for him. Might have been the right thing for me too. I’d probably be a detective inspector by now.

  We threw a few clumsy catch-up questions to each other, neither listening to the answer, then Alec Jamieson, Sergeant Alec Jamieson, flushed and said, ‘You’re here about Donovan, the bloke who killed those wee boys?’

  ‘He was only convicted for one murder, Alec. Anyway, you got the message?’

  ‘Aye, we got the message. They’re waiting for you roon’ the back.’

  Alec lifted the heavy wood barrier and let me through. He told a young constable hovering in the background to man the desk. We walked along the lino floor, my boots squeaking just as they used to as we headed to the offices round the back. Sunlight puddled the floor and climbed the walls where photos hung of former DCIs; a rogues’ gallery if ever there was one. We stopped outside the office of the DCI himself and I looked quizzically at Alec Jamieson. He looked embarrassed and opened the door. The room seemed to have its own cloud system. It’s amazing how much smoke three men can generate.

  I’d asked Sam to get her secretary to fix a meeting with Detective Sergeant Bill Kerr and his sidekick Detective Constable Davy White. They were the pair of local cops who’d done the grunt work on the case and who’d been put through the mill by Samantha Campbell. I didn’t know either of them and assumed they’d been posted to Tobago Street after I’d left. I guessed the two nervous-looking blokes in civvies standing either side of the desk were the happy pair. But sitting between them, hands clasped and propping his chin above his desk, was Detective Chief Inspector Willie Silver himself. In front of him a well-filled ashtray held a smouldering cigarette.

  I’d known of Silver around Glasgow pre-war. He’d held various positions in nicks across the city, always managing to move on just before his drink problem got him thrown out. He was either a very talented detective or drank with the right folk to have survived this long, far less thrived. But he looked very sober indeed as he stared at me across his office. His eyes were close together above a large broken-veined nose. He raised his bottom lip and sucked at the ends of a smoke-stained moustache.

  ‘You wanted a wee chat, Brodie?’ he asked. His voice was deep and slow, like an undertaker trying to be sympathetic over an open coffin. I stepped forward into the room and took my hat off. Not deference, heat; the radiators were belting it out.

  ‘It’s the Donovan case. I’m an old friend of his. I’m helping Advocate Campbell with her appeal.’

  ‘She needs it. We didnae find her that appealing, did we, boys?’

  The two twitchy men twisted their faces in sycophantic grins.

  ‘Yer right there, sir,’ said the fat one to my left. I assumed this was Kerr. The senior one always speaks first. White, on my right, sniggered into his hand and took another drag on his fag.

  ‘Sit down, Brodie. Sit down.’ He pointed at the wooden chair in front of his desk. I parked myself in it and found it was a couple of inches shorter than Silver’s. He looked down at me and smiled, or rather he turned the corners of his mouth up. The rest of his face said, I hate your guts,
boy. He introduced his minions. I’d guessed right about which was which.

  ‘You know me, Brodie? From the old days, eh? I heard you were a good copper. Could have gone far. Why didn’t you?’

  ‘King and Country and all that.’ I bit off the ‘sir’ that came so treacherously to my tongue.

  ‘That’s not what I heard. I heard you didn’t like our style, how we did business round here. I heard you were a bleeding heart, Brodie.’

  ‘Let’s say I preferred to look for evidence, not plant it.’

  The smirks and smiles left their faces. Silver’s close-set eyes bulged.

  ‘So, they were right. Is that what you’re up to now, Brodie? That’s what your girlfriend tried to imply, and now you’re coming it too?’

  ‘All I’m trying to do is get at the truth. I’m sure that’s what you’re after as well… Chief Inspector.’

  He sighed. ‘Truth, is it? Is that what they taught you at Glasgow University, then? Fair turns a man’s head, all that learning. Let me tell you what truth is, boy. Truth is here.’ He pointed at his chest. ‘I know the truth when I see it. I saw the truth in Donovan’s eyes. He told me truly that he killed that wean. That’s the truth the jury heard. And that truth will leave him swinging on a rope.’ His lads either side were nodding their toadying heads off by this time.

  ‘If we’re all so keen on the truth, why did your pals here give different stories at the trial?’

  Kerr and White glanced at each other and then looked poisonously at me.

  DS Kerr jumped in. ‘It was just a misunderstanding, so it was. That clever lassie was trying to trip us up. We didnae get a chance to explain it right.’