The Hanging Shed

by Gordon, Ferris,

  ‘Oh aye. But he was coming off that muck. It didnae really affect him. No’ like when he used to be fu’, for example. He just went calm and easy after he’d taken some stuff.’

  ‘So there was no time you were worried about leaving Rory with…’

  ‘With a junkie? Is that what you mean? No. It wisnae like that. Never.’

  ‘Fiona, did you ever know who gave him the stuff? Who was the dealer?’

  ‘Oh aye. Everybody kent that.’

  I knew the answer of course.

  ‘Gerrit Slattery.’

  *

  I left the tenement and began walking back to Sam’s place. I left behind a great big pile of ‘if only’s’. But that way madness lies. Once we take certain turnings, once we make certain choices, there’s no way back to a time or a place or a person. We start down diverging paths and become changed in the process. Distance lends objectivity, but distorts perception. And then it’s gone. No turning back. The seventeen-year-old part of me would never be over the young Fiona. But the woman of thirty-four held no answer for me.

  But would anyone? I know I wasn’t alone in this sense of dislocation. The war had ripped a great big hole in the continuity of all our lives. We look back with incomprehension at the time before. Like England viewed from France. Men were coming home to strangers, frightening children they’d never met. Five years of fighting alters a man’s perspective, hardens him or turns him to mush. Coming back to wives and lovers, how would they explain the night terrors and the daytime despair? How could they talk about it? The vocabulary was different and there were no translators. I was glad not to have anyone to burden.

  Was I therefore being unfair to Fiona? Unfair to us? There had barely been a glimpse of the girl I knew, but in her way she’d been through worse wars than many’s the squaddie. Who was I to judge anyone who could still function, still hold her head up, living in a slum, with all that she’d loved torn or distorted? We owed each other some kindness for what we’d been. Maybe once all this had passed I’d take her out for fancy cakes and hot scones on her day off at Miss Cranston’s.

  The other revelation was that all roads led to the Slatterys. But how the hell was I to get at them? I could just walk up to their big house at Bearsden and beat the door down, but I assumed they’d have boiling oil perched on the battlements to fend off intruders. Or even if they let me in, they were hardly likely to open up their black hearts to me and confess their sins. They knew they’d get no absolution from me.

  I could do my pub crawl again and wait till I ran into the pair of blackguards that had thrown me to the fishes. That was certainly tempting. I had a score or two to settle. And with Samantha Campbell’s gun in my pocket, the sides were more evenly balanced. However, apart from the personal satisfaction of breaking the bastards’ heads open, it wouldn’t provide me with evidence of a stitch-up for Hugh’s appeal.

  ‘Can we use it?’ I asked a disconcerted Sam later.

  ‘Being the father neither proves nor disproves Hugh’s guilt. But if I’d known that the boy was his during the trial, I could have used it. Now, even if they believed her statement, it doesn’t basically alter the case against him.’

  ‘Surely they’d believe Fiona? Why on earth would she make that up?’

  ‘But why bring it up now?’

  ‘To save the father of her son from a hanging!’

  ‘It’s not a proof of anything.’

  ‘Don’t be so… so lawyerly! Wouldn’t they consider it impossible that a father could do that to his own son?’

  Sam shook her head resignedly. ‘You’ve led a sheltered life, Douglas Brodie, if you think it’s too far-fetched for a father to abuse his child. The cases I’ve seen…’

  In truth, I knew it too. As a copper I heard whispers in the street about certain families. You tried not to believe it. But in these overcrowded stinking dens, where three generations lived piled on top of each other, things happened that would turn your stomach. With his wife always pregnant, a goatish father with a drink in him is too easily distracted by a promising daughter. They operated like primitive tribes on the very fringe of civilisation, amoral and driven by bestial yearnings. No one wanted to believe it, and there was a silent conspiracy to keep it hushed up, as though the shame on our fair city was too much to contemplate.

  But sometimes the cases were so bad they seeped into court. There the tragedies were brought steaming to the surface by a distraught daughter or a tortured son. They found it no use to cite scripture; the stories of Lot and his daughters, or Abraham and his wife-sister Sarah offered no precedent in the eyes of the Kirk or the Law. The red-eyed abusers were given hard labour by the courts and rougher justice by their fellow inmates. Even criminals had standards.

  I mulled over what the appeal court judges would make of the revelation about Hugh and Rory. If Sam was representative of the sceptical judicial mind, they would have seen and heard everything in their time and wouldn’t be seduced by emotional appeals. I’d seen judges in action. They dealt with interpreting the law. It was nothing to do with justice, a term only lay folk believed in, like kids and the tooth fairy. My meeting with Fiona had edged me closer to being convinced of Hugh’s innocence, but the appeal court hadn’t danced all night with her at the Attic.

  TWENTY-EIGHT

  I watched Defence Counsel Samantha Campbell turn in on herself, give up the Scotch and work on the appeal till her eyes grew red-rimmed and dark-lined. I went with her on two visits to Barlinnie and sat beside her as she ran through her approach with Hugh. Hugh himself seemed past caring, or maybe it was the medication. Though he came to life when I told him about the Arran trips and my unintended dip.

  ‘Christ, Dougie! You have to stop! I don’t want you killed to save my neck. It’s no’ worth it.’

  ‘It’s no longer just about your neck, old pal. This is personal. Someone’s out to kill me and I’ve got some payback for them when I catch them up.’ I rubbed my livid cheek scar for emphasis.

  ‘What about Father Cassidy?’ asked Sam.

  He shook his head. ‘I don’t believe it. I just don’t believe it. He was always that good to me.’

  She went on: ‘That night, the night before they found all the evidence at your flat? Do you remember him helping you to bed? Do you recall anyone helping you home?’

  He rubbed his tortured face. ‘I don’t remember. I just don’t remember a thing. It’s a’ a blur.’

  I waited till he settled. ‘I saw Fiona, Hugh.’

  His head shot up. ‘Oh aye. How’s she keeping?’

  ‘Not bad. She was asking for you.’

  ‘She doesnae come to see me. I told her no’ to. It’s no’ fair.’

  I gave it a beat. ‘I saw Rory’s photo.’

  He sprang to his feet. ‘That’s no’ for the trial! I won’t have it, you hear? She shouldnae have told you.’

  The warder came over and made him sit. He started rubbing his hands together and twisting the fingers as if trying to screw them off.

  ‘Hugh, listen to me. It could help you, man!’

  ‘It’ll no’! It’ll just hurt her. I don’t want her being dragged into court. Her name in a’ the papers again. Ye hear me?’

  Sam and I looked at each other. She shrugged. ‘We hear you, Hugh. We won’t pursue this line in court.’

  I took another line. ‘She said your contact, the man with the drugs, was Gerrit Slattery and his pals. Is that right?’

  He just nodded.

  ‘How do I find him?’

  ‘He finds you, Dougie. He finds you.’

  ‘Look, that’s not good enough. This is important. He must have some hangouts?’

  Hugh looked at me speculatively. ‘You’ll no be stopped, will you? Just as bull-heided as ever.’

  I said nothing.

  ‘There’s a bar in the West End. Where they hang oot. The Tappit Hen. But, Dougie, it’s a thieves’ kitchen. Even the polis won’t go in. It’s no’ the sort of place that you can just casually wand
er into and ask for a wee chat with the local razor king, you know. At least no’ without getting a hatchet in the head.’

  ‘I like pubs with character.’

  ‘Talk sense, Dougie. They’ll murder you.’

  ‘They think they already did.’

  Hugh looked at me as if I was daft.

  *

  It was daft. But the events of the last few days hadn’t left me feeling too rational. I was being treated like a puppet. I don’t respond well to other folk yanking my strings, especially vermin. It’s a failing of mine, but not something I’m working on.

  I slipped the big Webley inside my borrowed jacket. I left Sam to her pile of papers on the dining-room table and headed out into the warm Saturday night. I got off the tram at the Byers Road and walked down a couple of side streets, noting the alleyways all round me. I found the pub. It was seven o’clock and the Tappit Hen was already buzzing. I could see the silhouettes chatting and laughing through the stained-glass windows of this poor man’s cathedral.

  I was very conscious of my outfit; a tweed suit would stand out like a tart in a convent in this neck of the woods. But its soft shape and hidden pocket disguised the line of the revolver. I had topped the ensemble with her dad’s flat cap, having removed the beautifully constructed fly from its brim. I was a gamekeeper hunting poachers in their own back yard. If the Slattery clan was behind all this, then I should just walk in and shoot them like rats. Six bullets; six bad guys the world would never miss. I turned down my anger to a simmer, pulled the cap over my eyes, shoved the door open and entered the warm fug.

  Instantly I felt eyes on me. Conversation paused and mates nudged each other at tables filled with glasses. I walked stiffly straight towards the bar. The barman looked me up and down, his mouth twisted in a grin.

  ‘Ah think you’ve got your dates wrong, pal. The fancy dress do’s the morn’s night.’

  It brought a gale of laughter from the lads at the bar.

  I laughed myself. ‘Ah well, seeing I’m here, I’ll have a half and a half.’

  I felt the conversation pick up the normal rhythms again, and supped at my beer as I recce’d the room. I was standing at the apex of the horseshoe bar. To my right were tables with men playing cards and talking their heads off. Fringe men, not inner core, just voyeurs of the lowlife. I’d give them something to watch.

  To my left was the real action. There were two tables with men huddled over them, one with three at it, the other four. From under the brim of my cap I studied the four-man table: Fergie and his sailor pal made two, and his backstabbing buddy, whose throat I staved in, made three. The fourth man was new to me but of the same stamp. Three of them were tucking into pints of ale. The one with the throat problem was sucking at his through a straw. The centre of the table was filled with empty bottles and a smouldering ashtray.

  At the other table were three men, two of them clearly older than their entourage at the other. These three had marked out their territory with pints of black stout. The oldest was a man in his mid fifties I’d say, thin grey hair and the bland, sandy features resulting from the generations of intercourse between the West of Scotland and Northern Ireland. Like mixing children’s coloured clay; after a while it just went grey. Dermot Slattery, I presumed.

  A younger version sat beside him, unmistakably of the same stock but with a little more hair and a ginger ’tache that he kept stroking. As if it were alive. Gerrit Slattery. Though it was too far to confirm the hare lip, the description fitted the man who’d been seen going into Hugh’s old house by his new neighbour. Doubtless on a tidy-up operation, making sure there was no evidence. The third man had his back to me but wore his dark hair long and curly. By the width of his neck and the set of his shoulders he wasn’t a man to tangle with in a fair fight.

  I sunk my large Scotch and felt the fire eat all the way down my throat. I slipped my hand into the inside jacket pocket. The butt of the gun felt reassuringly cool and hard. I clicked the safety off.

  I motioned to the barman. ‘Have you got Jameson’s?’ He nodded at the bottle behind the bar. I placed two half crowns on the top. ‘Two doubles, and send them over to the Slattery table. Keep the change.’

  He involuntarily looked over to the table with three men at it. ‘Who will I say?’

  ‘Just say the ferryman.’

  He looked doubtful, but took the money and filled the glasses. He lifted the bar up at the side and walked over. He placed the two glasses in front of the two brothers and indicated where they’d come from. As their heads came up to inspect me, I was already walking round to them, smiling, with my hands in my trouser pockets. As casual as you like.

  ‘Evening, boys, mind if I join you?’ I stood above the table next to the curly-haired bruiser and faced the bog Irishmen. Curly, the bruiser, was quick to his feet, but ginger moustache signalled him to sit. He did so reluctantly. His face showed disappointment through the old scars and broken bones of the lifetime bodyguard. Ginger lifted his glass, sniffed it and sunk it in a oner. I now noticed that the moustache was trying to cover the harelip.

  ‘Cheers, and who the fuck are you?’ he said.

  The older Slattery said nothing, did nothing, took one look at the whiskey and then gazed at me through hard eyes. He waited. The other table had gone quiet and their heads had turned. Comprehension slid across Fergie’s face like a slow car crash. He shot to his feet, spilling his beer. He stuck his finger out at me.

  ‘Jesus fuck! It’s Brodie! You’re fucking drowned, ya’ bastard!’

  This set off Curly again and he was back on his feet, with fists clenched. He wasn’t sure what was happening but he thought he was going to enjoy it. The rest of the pub had gone quiet and expectant. The old man spoke quietly out of the corner of his mouth.

  ‘Tell them to sit down and shut up, Gerrit.’ His voice still carried the thick nasal tones of his youth.

  Gerrit Slattery gave a signal. Curly moved back to the bar and leaned against it within jumping distance of me. Fergie and his pals at the other table lowered themselves into their seats. Fergie kept wiping his mouth with the back of his hand, wondering how I’d been reincarnated as a ghillie. Dermot Slattery looked me up and down.

  ‘Sit down, Brodie.’

  I pulled a chair slightly back from the table so that I had free movement of legs and gun hand. I sat.

  ‘You’re quite the swimmer then, Brodie,’ said Dermot, his bitter little eyes carrying a glint of hard humour.

  ‘And how would you know about my swimming talents, Slattery?’

  ‘Cut through the shite, Brodie. What do you want?’

  ‘Fergie’s balls on a plate.’

  Dermot Slattery sized me up and down. Without turning his head, ‘Ye hear that, Fergie? Should I let him have a go?’

  I half expected Fergie to beat his chest or pound the sawdust with his hoof. Near enough. He was back out of his chair and poking his finger at me again.

  ‘Just let him try, Dermot! Any time!’ To prove how tough he was he stuck his hand inside his jacket and pulled out his sharpened chain. ‘I’ll mark the other side of his heid and see how he goes without his fockin’ ears!’

  ‘I’ve told you about your language,’ Dermot said softly. Fergie sat back and glowered at me, playing with his chain and waiting to be slipped from his leash.

  Slattery turned back to me. ‘If you can take him, you can have him. Now what do you really want, Brodie?’

  I gazed at him and his brother who was fingering his ginger lip. ‘Mrs Reid and her weans. And don’t insult my intelligence by asking: Who?’

  He cocked his head to one side. ‘You’ve a rare nerve, Brodie, I’ll give you that. And say we knew who this lassie was, and indeed where she was, why would we hand her over to you?’

  ‘Does the car registration SD 319 mean anything to you? On a black Austin 10? It should. You own it. And I have witnesses that will testify that two of your muscle-brains here abducted her and took to Arran four months ago. Last Sunday the
y came for her again. Turn her and her kids over to me or I turn the details over to the police.’

  Dermot Slattery studied me for a bit, then he looked at his brother. Then he turned back to me and began to laugh, a slow cackling laugh that cut through the pub noise. It started them all off. They hadn’t heard anything as funny since Chamberlain’s ‘peace in our time’ speech. Curly at the bar was doubled up with mirth.

  I got to my feet, pulled out the gun, cocked it and shot Curly in the foot.

  TWENTY-NINE

  For a long second, the only noise seemed to be the echoing crash of the gun. It was a relief to find the ten-year-old shells still worked. Then Curly began screaming.

  ‘He shot me! He fucking shot me!’ he advised us all, superfluously.

  He fell over clutching his foot, squealing like a kid. At the two tables, every man jack of them was on his feet. Chairs crashed to the ground, pint mugs went flying, and the whole pack reared back a couple of feet from this madman in tweed. Before any of them decided to play the hero and rush me, I aimed my gun directly at Dermot Slattery’s head.

  ‘Shut up!’ I shouted. Peace fell on the pub except for Curly’s whimpers.

  ‘Shut up, for Christ’s sake,’ said Gerrit, his pale face now blotched red with what I hoped was fear. Curly stifled his moans and lay breathing heavily with blood staining his shoe and leaking into the sawdust. There was a two-inch hole in the wood floor where his foot had been, so it must have hurt.

  I heard a movement from the other side of the bar and saw the swing door open and some of the hangers-on flee into the night. It wouldn’t be long before they summoned the coppers. I had to move fast while I still held the initiative provided by a smoking gun. I stepped forward quickly and jammed the barrel into Dermot’s gut. At last I got a different look in his sardonic eyes. Fear and uncertainty.

  ‘Turn round. Fast!’ I shouted at him.

  He turned to face his gang and I rammed my fingers down the neck of his soft-necked shirt so that I was throttling him with his buttoned collar and tie. I had a good grip of him with my left hand. I rammed the gun barrel into the side of his head.