The Hanging Shed

by Gordon, Ferris,

  ‘Aye, fine. You?’ I asked.

  His eyes stopped and focused, sort of. ‘You polis?’

  What was it about my personal aroma? ‘Not now. Used to be.’

  He looked triumphant. ‘I kent you were polis, sort of. You’re no’ from roon here.’

  ‘Kilmarnock. But I live in London now. Just visiting a pal.’

  ‘Oh aye. Need anything while you’re here? A wee set-you-up for your holidays?’

  ‘What’ve you got?’

  He sat down opposite me and lit a fag. ‘Whit do you need?’

  ‘The same stuff as Hugh Donovan.’

  His smile dissolved and his eyes started their St Vitus’s dance again. ‘Who the fuck are you, pal? You are the fucking polis, are ye no?’

  ‘What would the polis want with you? Donovan’s for hanging. They got what they wanted. I was just reading in here’ – I tapped the paper, certain that my new friend hadn’t been – ‘that he liked a wee hit now and again. It didn’t take too long to work out where he might be getting it. So I thought I’d try out a couple of places round here. Seems I got lucky.’

  ‘Maybe you are. Maybe you’re not.’ Suspicion had set his body jangling like a plucked harp. He looked round and signalled to his buddy to come over.

  His pal was older and steadier. His left ear had a lobe missing and the scar ran on to his cheek. He sat down and inspected me. ‘What’s going on?’

  ‘This yin’s playing smart, so he is. He’s no’ from around here. Wants the same as Hugh Donovan, so he says.’

  ‘Does he now. Would that be your face melted or your neck stretched?’

  ‘That’s a good yin, Fergie.’

  ‘Shut up.’ Fergie kept his eyes on mine and waited for my reaction.

  ‘I was thinking more of some pain relief,’ I said rubbing my leg. ‘Shrapnel.’

  ‘We can make it hurt even more, if you’re pissin’ us around.’

  ‘Look, if you don’t want the business, forget it. You came to me.’ I studiously picked up my paper and pretended to read. I heard the snick just before I could move. The blade of a flick-knife sliced up through the paper and left it hanging in my hands in two bits.

  THIRTEEN

  ‘You’re not a reader then,’ I said.

  ‘What do you want? Specifically,’ asked Fergie.

  ‘The hard stuff, the Big H. What’s your price?’

  ‘Introductory price is a quid a shot.’

  ‘Quality?’

  ‘The best.’

  ‘How do I know?’

  ‘You don’t. Until you try it.’

  ‘Fair enough. One hit.’ I began to dig into my pocket.

  ‘Not here. In there.’ He jerked his head towards the toilet. He got up and walked towards it expecting me to follow. His crosseyed pal sat grinning at me.

  ‘You don’t get twa invites,’ he said.

  I got up and walked after him, rolling up my sliced newspaper as I went. I pulled the door and went in. There was a second door in front of me.

  ‘In here,’ the voice called.

  I pushed through the second door into a white tiled room with a trough running at an angle along two of the walls and into a gutter. The stink of urine stung my nostrils. Fergie was waiting, back to the far wall, hands in his pocket. Behind me I heard the first door open again. I tightened my tube of paper between both hands and moved further into the fetid room. As the second door began to open Fergie made his move. He drew his right hand out of his pocket. It held a black stub. He pressed the side. It snicked open. The knife gleamed bright and sharp in the dull air.

  Fergie’s eyes slid off me to the man behind me. I turned in time to see his pal raise a clasp razor and make his strike. I swung my rolled-up paper in a fast uppercut. Roll a newspaper tight and, point first, you have a tube as strong as iron. It took him right in the windpipe. His eyes bulged and he made a strangled gasp. The razor fell from his hand. He was dropping to his knees, gurgling, as I swung back to Fergie. The shock was clearing from Fergie’s face and contorting into anger.

  ‘Ya fucker ye!’ His arm sliced through the air at my head. I flung my left forearm up against his. I got lucky. Sort of. I hit his wrist. The knife popped from his numbed hand, glanced off my forehead and clattered to the tiles. I followed through with my trusty tube. It caught him on the side of the head, just by the ear. He tumbled against the wall and fell to his knees. I knew it wasn’t a killer blow. So I stepped forward and kicked him in the belly as hard as I could. He doubled up on the piss-wet floor, floundering and sucking for air. I drew back my foot to kick his head in then stopped.

  ‘Who do you work for?’ I changed my aim and kicked him in the kidneys. He jerked and writhed.

  ‘I said, who’s your boss? The next one’s your ugly face!’

  He waved at me, gasping. ‘You’re. Fucking. Dead. Pal. You. Know. That.’

  I stood back. I stamped on the hand that was wandering towards the knife. He squealed. I kicked the knife away.

  ‘Tell me who your boss is.’

  His face was engorged with rage and pain. ‘You’ll find oot soon enough, ya bastard!’ I raised my foot so he could see the row of good metal tacks.

  ‘Slattery. Dermot Slattery. That’s who! Ask anybody around here. You’ll soon ken who you’ve messed wi’.’

  A name. A name I recognised from before the war. One of the top gangs in Glasgow. Let’s see where it took me. I dropped my now bent newspaper and inspected the other man. He was choking to death. I leaned over him and ripped his collar and tie open. I pulled his head back to clear his broken air passage. It might do for a while. Something wet was dribbling into my left eye. I touched my head and found blood seeping down my face. I stuck my hankie on it.

  ‘Call an ambulance for him, Fergie. And tell Slattery I’d like a chat. Tell him I’m an old friend of Hugh Donovan. The name’s Brodie.’

  I swung out of the doors and into the pub. There were expectant faces. Their stares changed to puzzlement and then turned away as I walked through them. A few began to head towards the exits. So did I. Outside I got my bearings and began to walk towards the address Samantha Campbell had given me. It was north of the Clyde, in the smart West End. A world away from the Gorbals slums.

  It was ten o’clock when I found myself outside a terraced three-storey Georgian house in the commanding heights of Kelvingrove Park. A fine pile for a lawyer. I’m not the jealous type. But I imagine that the rise of Sam’s family to this magnificence was a shorter journey than mine from Kilmarnock’s tenements to… well, where, exactly? A rented flat in London? I bet she never needed a bursary to get to her academy far less another one to go to university. I bet she slotted in as nice as ninepence to the social whirl at Glasgow. Born hearing the right accents. Growing up seeing the right manners. Wearing the right clothes. No, I wasn’t jealous. Not much.

  What I was, was exhausted from the climb up the slopes. My head hurt and the pie and beer were sitting uncomfortably together. There was one faint light in a second-floor window. I climbed the three steps and used the big brass knocker. There was nothing for a long moment and then the door swung open. She inspected me for a second before standing aside.

  ‘You look like you need a drink, Brodie.’

  FOURTEEN

  We sat on facing leather armchairs in a room filled with books. If ever I came into money, I’d have a house with a library. I’d sit there in my smoking jacket, with a good whisky in my hand, reading my way through the lot, starting from the top left.

  She’d stoked up the fire and a warm glow dappled the room. Lumps of the real thing filled the scuttle. She must bribe her coalman. The book she’d been reading lay face down on a small table beside her. Rider Haggard, Ayesha. Her specs lay on top of it. I held a cold cloth against the cut in my head. The bleeding had stopped and the swelling was going down. In my right hand I fingered a heavy cut-crystal glass of good Scotch. My stomach felt easier. The pie and beer mix had succumbed to superior force. I’d just fin
ished my story, and she’d just taken a big gulp of her own whisky. I like a girl who likes fine Scotch and takes it with water, not ginger.

  ‘Good God, Brodie! Do you know who Dermot Slattery is?’

  ‘In my day, before the war, he ran one of the biggest gangs. But I’ve lost touch.’

  ‘Well, while you were off fighting for King and Country, Slattery was consolidating his grip on the underworld. The man’s a total maniac. But an efficient maniac. He runs a razor gang that controls every dirty racket south of the Clyde. They’ve tried to pin murder charges on him three times to my knowledge.’

  ‘I remember one of those trials. He had a good lawyer.’ I didn’t mean it as barbed as it sounded, but she handled it well.

  ‘An advocate’s job is to defend. We don’t judge. He had the best. Laurence Dowdall, QC. I’ve seen him in action. If Adam had had Dowdall on his side, he’d still be in the Garden of Eden.’

  ‘Better than you?’

  She looked at me askance. ‘You don’t think a woman can do this job, do you, Brodie?’

  I weighed my answer. ‘Sam, it’s not your sex. It’s your experience. How many murder cases have you defended?’

  She took another slug of Scotch. ‘This was my first as lead, all right? But I’ve acted as junior advocate on plenty of others. And just to remind you, I turned an absolute certain guilty verdict into a majority!’

  ‘How did you get the case?’

  She inspected her glass, surprised that it was empty. ‘That’s a better question. I just got the call from the Faculty of Advocates in Edinburgh.’

  ‘Why you, do you know?’

  Her fine jaw jutted forward. ‘I guess my time had come.’

  ‘Do you really believe that?’

  She got up like a Jack-in-the-box. She walked to a table where a decanter sat, and poured herself another whisky. She added the same again of water. She brought the decanter over and splashed some into my glass. She walked over to the fire and stood arms crossed round her slim torso looking into the red embers.

  ‘Do you know what I really think, Brodie? I think they chose me because they expected me to fail.’ Her voice was weary and a little blurred.

  I kept pushing. ‘When did you think this? Before the trial? After? Why did you take it on?’

  She turned, her face flushed and glowing. ‘Because I needed to show them! Why do you think! And, by Christ, I nearly did!’

  Breakfast was toast and milky tea taken in a rush. Sam looked strained in the morning light, her hair damp from the bath I’d heard her run at 6.30 a.m.

  ‘Remind me to have more water with my Scotch, will you, Brodie? Or maybe just the water.’

  ‘Head?’

  ‘Eyes. Right between them.’ She shook her sleek head, pushed on her specs and became the plain lawyer again. ‘What now?’ she asked, picking up an ancient leather briefcase and heading for the door.

  ‘I’m going to read the papers.’

  She looked quizzical.

  ‘Down at the library. I’m going to soak up the atmosphere of the trial. See who was saying what. You get a different perspective from the pages of the fourth estate.’

  She nodded. ‘Makes sense. Kind of. Then what?’

  ‘Then I’m going to look up some old pals. Could you get your helpful secretary to make an appointment this afternoon?’ I gave her two names.

  She wrote them down and glanced at her watch. ‘Let’s meet at my office at end of day. See what you’ve got. I need something. Anything!’

  God Bless Andrew Carnegie. The man was mad for libraries, and Scotland – his birthplace – benefited enormously from his largesse. They say it was conscience money for the way he treated his workers in his American steel company. But he gave wee boys and girls like me a lust for knowledge beyond the bare bones of classroom teaching. His millions helped feed a hunger for the written word in Scotland that turned us from a nation of hard-working peasants and fishermen into an industrial force that helped shape the world. Or it did before the Depression.

  The library I knew best, apart from the university one, was at Townhead, a half hour’s walk into and across the city centre on this blue-sky morning. By the time I was on my approach to the fine red sandstone pile I’d warmed myself up nicely and eased arm muscles stiff from my altercation in Doyle’s.

  I fondly inspected the building. There seemed to be no bomb damage, and the two statues stood proudly in their niches along the line of the parapet. Stepping inside to the solid carpentry and shining counter was like coming home.

  I told the librarian I was researching a book about the trial and wanted access to the newspapers for the period of the trial and one month either side. So from November 1945 through to today, 4 April 1946.

  He gazed at me over his half specs. ‘Do you know how many newspapers we take each week, sir?’

  I shook my head.

  ‘Fifty-five. Do you want them all?’

  ‘Let’s start with the Glasgow Herald and the Scotsman.’ For the facts. ‘And the Daily Record and Glasgow Gazette.’ For the gossip.

  I found a seat in the Reading Room under the great arched ceiling. Light streamed in from the roof-lights and boxed my wooden desk in sunlight. It raised nostalgia for university days, before the bloody war, before… before this nightmare. In front of me would be a pile of French or German literature. Everything from Hugo to Euken, Dumas to Kafka, not newspapers with hysterical tales of child molestation and murder. I should have gone into teaching as ordained by my school rector and university tutors. There was even the offer of an assistant lecturer’s position at the university. But the devil in me baulked at continuing a life buried in books. I’d grown up during the Great War, seen my father come back with medals, sergeant’s stripes and a cough. Our tenement square was full of miners and miners’ sons who braved death every day. My notion of what made a man was laid down early. It didn’t involve conjugating irregular French verbs. I was twenty one, robed and capped with learning, but untested.

  Percy Sillitoe was recruiting men to enforce civilised behaviour on Glasgow’s mean streets whether the mean citizens wanted it or not. I had a thirst for engaging with the real world for a few years before sinking back into the sweet embrace of intellectual argument and sentence parsing. I hadn’t counted on a second world war breaking out. I had no idea just how much I would be tested.

  A trolley arrived and the library assistant began piling the big heavy binders on my desk. I lined all four up in front of me. I planned to do a daily skim of each to get the different textures of the day. I opened up each folder at Thursday 1 November 1945 and plunged in.

  FIFTEEN

  At first there was little but post-war news, stories of ration-book counterfeiting and troops still coming home from the fronts all over the world. Then came a snippet about a child missing in the Gallowgate and a big search, but nothing hinting about the horrors to come. The Gazette made the only connection with three earlier reported missing kids in Bridgeton and Hutchesontown but consigned it to the back pages. I wondered if my fellow journalists thought there was no mileage in slum kids vanishing, as though family disasters happened too often to be newsworthy.

  Then midway through November came a report of Rory’s disappearance and suddenly other papers noticed. But it had taken five to go missing for them to see a pattern emerging. It was hard to say which came first, the newspaper speculation or the mob hysteria that was growing in the gossiping alleyways of the East End and the Gorbals. When Rory was found, and the details of his broken and naked body were disclosed, all hell broke loose. It was on the front pages under banner headlines. The police were under fire and were coming up with a stream of plodding platitudes that fooled no one.

  When Hugh Donovan was arrested, the dam broke properly. The police were crowing and the papers were baying for blood.

  A more moderate tone crept in as the trial started. They had no choice; Scotland’s courts were jealous of their ability to host a fair trial. Any intemperate specul
ation that affected the possible outcome would have brought down the wrath of the judiciary. Mind, it didn’t stop a good editor from fuelling the flames with innuendo and comments prefixed with that get-out-of-jail word, ‘alleged’. And of course they were allowed to report the day’s proceedings during the trial.

  My head was buzzing and my eyes aching as I sat down in the tea shop in Sauchiehall Street for lunch. I sipped at my cup and chomped into a cheese sandwich. Beside me were my notes. I had four pages distilling six months of reporters’ stories, some of which were models of objectivity; many simply echoed the lynch mob in shrill prose.

  One thing was clear: Rory’s abduction tapped into a ground-level panic in Glasgow about a monster who was snatching children. Rory’s disappearance was the final spark that lit the tinderbox. Fiona Hutchinson turned her frenzied search into a front page rallying point. The sudden newspaper pressure on the police to find the boys ratcheted up fears in every household across the city. It could be their wee Archie next. From a brief mention the day after the boy went missing to banner headlines took only ten days. I kept hoping to find a photo of Fiona, but perhaps the papers had been warned off about prejudicing the case. A pity. If she’d kept her looks, her tear-stained face would have sold extra editions by the cartful.

  Within the week the stumbling desk sergeant filling the role of police spokesman had been replaced by Detective Chief Superintendent George Muncie himself. Muncie had never knowingly stepped into the shadows when there was a glimmer of limelight left to capture his hawk-nosed profile. The words ‘major man-hunt’ and ‘no stone left unturned’ poured from his fleshy lips in an endless stream of pompous cliches. I never understood why reporters loved him. Maybe they were just taking the piss.

  By one of those quirks of divine comedy the hunt was being led by detectives from Eastern Division, my old nick at Tobago Street. It was on their patch the first two kids had gone missing, and they were just the other side of the Clyde from the Gorbals where Rory had been abducted. They were working closely – they said – with the Cumberland Street police, but that probably meant both teams slagging each other off for failing to make headway and being ready to nab the glory if one did. It also gave the newshounds access to two teams of coppers who’d say anything to make it look like progress to cover their own backsides.