The Hanging Shed

by Gordon, Ferris,

  I looked at my watch. It seemed to be living up to its claim of being waterproof up to a depth of twenty feet. Though if it hadn’t I wasn’t in much of a position to complain about it to the manufacturer. It was already five thirty and would be dark by eight. After that? Could I go on floating till morning? At what stage would I just say sod it, and let it all go? They say drowning is easy, just fill your lungs with water and relax. But I reasoned that if evolution had removed our gills in favour of nostrils, it wouldn’t be that comfortable to go into instant reverse.

  Suddenly my already damaged head took another belt. I sank and spluttered around to see what had hit me. It was a crate, a packing crate, half submerged. It said ‘Tea’ on the side. Thank you, Lipton’s. I swam to it and clung on to it. The tea chest immediately sank. I let go and it bobbed up. I felt round it. It was open on one side. I turned it and emptied it as best I could and then upended it trying to capture as much air inside as possible. On my third try it bobbed with about-one third of its bulk out of the water. Gingerly I got my arms over it and my upper body part on it. It was precarious but it held me. Only my hips and legs dangled in the water. I’d seen an odd shark hanging bleeding at Ayr fishing harbour before but couldn’t recall if they were the type that had a penchant for hairy legs. But in such ignorance there is hope.

  I’d been in the water an hour, and from my wobbly perch there was no doubt: I was being pulled parallel along the coast and towards the south. For a while, Holy Island off Lamlash had been my nearest chunk of dry land but I was being dragged away from it into the widening bay where the last Ice Age had taken a bite out of Ayrshire. For a time I felt I was being pushed towards the coast and my hopes rose. But then the capricious tide seemed to grip again and I lost way. Another hour later, as darkness softened the seascape, I was numb and frozen, and certain I couldn’t hang on till morning. It wasn’t how I expected to die. I’d been attacked by tanks in the desert and blown up in Italy, and shot at all across northern France to the Rhine. But here I was, about to drown a couple of miles off the beach I used to build sand castles on. It was almost as though I’d been living on borrowed time and the big guy who kept count had finally noticed. All those months after demob when I wished I was dead came sharply into focus. I suddenly realised I very much wanted to live. Too late. I should have spent the rest of my savings on drink and wild women.

  The sun finally set way to the west but, funnily, it hadn’t gone completely dark. A northern light imbued the great plain of water with a sullen glow. A half-moon rose and added to the sheen on the wave tops. That’s when I saw the distant lights.

  TWENTY-TWO

  At first I thought it was simply town lights, from Troon or Ayr or maybe Girvan by now, but then I realised they were closer and bobbing about. Maybe a mile away, though it was hard to gauge. But there was no doubt what they were: I could make out four or five craft with lights on their masts, swinging and dipping in the swell. They had sails up and were heading – well, I couldn’t tell where yet. Night fishermen. I even heard a distant voice calling and getting a laugh in response.

  I shouted. Or tried to. It came out like a bark. I swallowed and tried to get more saliva down my throat, and gave it another go. I kept it simple.

  ‘Help!’

  I shouted until my throat, roughened by the salt water, began to close up. I stopped and listened. Nothing. I now thought I could see them moving. Away. It was hard to tell in the shimmering gloaming.

  The trouble was I was too low in the water, except when I bobbed up on the crest of swell. I needed to be standing on this crate, like an evangelist at Speaker’s Corner. I let myself sink back a little into the water then with my hands on the side on the box I shot myself up on to it, as though I was getting out of a swimming pool. I felt it begin to capsize but I kept going anyway and managed to get a knee up. With a last despairing surge I got to my feet, feeling the crate tip and sink beneath me. As I began to fall into the water, I cupped my hands to my mouth and bellowed, ‘Heeeelp! Help! Help!’ before I tumbled into the sea.

  I nearly didn’t have the strength to surface again. I just let myself float up. The crate seemed to have sunk completely. I looked around and saw it just below the surface but swamped by waves. I doggy-paddled to it and grasped its rough squareness. I didn’t have the energy to right it and get an air bubble into it. I just lay there wallowing. Until I heard, from a long way off but clear enough:

  ‘Hello!’

  Their paraffin lamps triangulated on me, and their rough hands dragged me into a small fishing boat. I lay shivering and gasping in the bottom like one of their herrings. They plied me with questions and – wonder of wonders – hot tea from a flask.

  They were from the tiny fishing village of Dunure, five miles south of Ayr. They interrupted their work to land me in their high-walled harbour. They were all for phoning the Ayr Constabulary in a state of righteous anger at what had been done to me. But all I wanted was a few pennies and a phone box. They left me to it and reset their trim sails and steered back out of the harbour to plunder the waiting shoals.

  I stood shivering in a borrowed plaid as the operator connected me. When I heard her voice I slammed the money in.

  ‘Sam, it’s me, Brodie. Sorry to-’

  ‘Oh thank God! Where are you? What happened?’

  I was touched at the concern in her voice. Apart from my mother, no one much bothers if I live or die. In fact, lately, rather more seem to want me dead.

  ‘I’m in Dunure, down past Ayr and I’m in a bit of bother.’ I gave her a short sketch of why I was standing semi-naked and dripping in a phone booth at nearly midnight. She told me to wait.

  It was nearly two o’clock in the morning and I was sitting on the harbour wall, gazing out on the silver lit sea. My thoughts kept turning to what I was going to do to Fergie and his pal when I caught up with them. I’d seen men live for hours in excruciating pain from a bayonet in the guts. Everything about this wretched business was making me seethe. I’d been hauled away from a new life in London on a hopeless mission. I’d been duped by a duplicitous priest. And two low-life scum had tried to dispose of me like fish bait.

  I suddenly stopped the self pity. What about Sam? What had they planned for her? I wasn’t a praying man these days, but I was fervent in my hope that she was well on her way and that she’d checked the brakes on her car.

  I lit another fag. As well as the plaid – which I had promised to drop off at the harbourmaster’s office – the fishermen had left me some fish-paste sandwiches and a pack of Woodbine.

  I was steadily working my way though the last of the ciggies when I heard the sound of a big car coming down the hill to the village. The headlights flashed on and off as it swung round the curves and finally blazed down the little street that bordered the quay. I stumbled towards it in my bare feet, like a refugee from the Highland Clearances.

  She was standing waiting for me with the rear doors open. As I got close I could see it was a Riley, a Kestrel Sprite by the looks of the big headlamps and the three panels of glass down the side. A nice twin-cam 1.5-litre engine and wire-spoke wheels. Was there no end to the surprises from Miss Samantha Campbell?

  ‘God, Sam, you’re a sight for sore eyes.’

  ‘I can’t say the same for you, Highland Laddie. Look at your poor wee face.’ Her eyes were full and she only just stopped herself touching my torn cheek and chin. I hate women weeping over me. It usually means I’m in deeper trouble than I think.

  ‘I can assure you it wasn’t the fishes.’

  She turned and dug into the back seat. ‘Here, try these. My dad’s.’

  She held out a pair of Harris Tweed trousers and a thick cotton shirt. I slid my now shaking legs in and found the slacks were an inch or so too long and too wide at the waist. But a pair of braces did the trick and this beggar wasn’t feeling choosy. The shirt went on and with it, some real warmth. She dipped back into the car and held out a pair of shoes and a fancy pair of argyle socks.

&
nbsp; The socks were luxury and the shoes – solid, well worn and polished so much they shone in the moonlight like fish scales – were only a size too big. Tightened laces soon did the trick, and I stood there, a new man, comprehensively baptised and reborn. Hallelujah. She’d watched as I went through my transformation. She sized me up and nodded.

  She started up the Riley. The neat but powerful engine thrummed comfortingly in the night. As we drove, I worked backwards with my story. I told her about the ferry incident, then my meeting with Mrs Reid. I watched her jaw muscles work in anger and then open in incredulity.

  ‘Father Cassidy! She must be wrong. She’s confused. It’s not possible!’

  ‘Aye, maybe. But how do you explain my burial at sea?’

  ‘How do you mean?’

  ‘Who except you and Cassidy knew where I was going? And I assume you’re on my side?’

  She was silent for a while then she hit the wheel. ‘This can’t be right. It’s just too stupid for words.’

  I let her concentrate on a negotiating a tight bend near Greenock. In the moonlight, the big cranes stalked the landscape down to the Clyde. I made a mental note to look up Firth of Clyde currents and tides when I was next in a library. Then I turned to her. She was staring intently ahead, every so often pushing her glasses more firmly up her nose. A good profile, but too many worry lines.

  ‘Unless I was being followed, only you, Father O’Brien and Father Patrick Cassidy knew where I was going. O’Brien seems an unlikely mastermind and has no obvious motive. And I’m as certain as I can be that I wasn’t followed. I’m trained to spot them, especially a couple of ogres from Dermot Slattery’s gang.’

  ‘Are you really saying that Father Cassidy set you up, was in league with Slattery, and…’ She stumbled for words.

  ‘And arranged to have me killed. It looks like it.’

  ‘But why would Cassidy give us the contact in Arran? Why make it easy for you?’

  ‘I wasn’t supposed to meet Mrs Reid.’

  ‘Oh… You were supposed to catch the morning ferry not the night before.’

  ‘And Fergie and his pal would have thrown me to the fishes on the way out. They couldn’t change their plans in time.’

  ‘But I knew where you were going. Even if you’d… disappeared. I would have been able to follow things up. Wouldn’t I?’

  ‘If they’d let you.’

  Her jaw tightened again. We sped on in silence.

  ‘You realise what this would mean for our appeal?’

  ‘If we can make it stick. Mrs Reid is scared to death of something or someone. I think they’ve threatened her kids. They may even have them now. That’s why I don’t want to get the police involved just yet.’

  ‘How do we prove it, then?’

  ‘Let’s drop in on the good Father when the sun’s up, and see how many “Hail Marys” he’s doing for having me murdered. I don’t know how they do their sums, but I reckon he should be on his knees till Christmas.’

  We garaged the car behind the house. She made me have a bath. Then she gave me a slab of Dundee cake and insisted I wash it down with a glass of her finest malt. I did as I was told. All she had to do was tuck me up in bed to finish the job, but whether she did or not, I don’t know. I fell asleep as if I’d been felled.

  I woke flailing from the embrace of seaweed, my arms encrusted and stiff with barnacles. As I gasped to the surface, I found the bedclothes wrapped round me like winding sheets, and even when liberated, my limbs felt like I’d wrestled with the Loch Ness monster itself.

  I eased my way to the bathroom and stood staring at my ruined face. The cut on my forehead from my fight in the pub toilet had opened again. But the worst was the livid horizontal weal that ran from the back of my head round under my ear and across the chin. Part of it was just bruising, but two-thirds was lifted raw skin. It wasn’t bleeding or oozing, though; the salt water had been a good antiseptic. Fergie was going to pay.

  ‘Brodie! There’s breakfast on the table if you can face it!’ she called from the hallway outside my door.

  ‘I can face it. But can it face me?’

  I found a heavy tartan dressing gown hanging behind the door. I slipped it on over my pyjamas. I smelt again the same old man’s smell that came with the tweed trousers: a lifetime of tobacco smoke and humanity. I presented myself at the kitchen door. She couldn’t help put her hand to her mouth. Her eyes were wide. I guessed it wasn’t just her father’s dressing gown.

  ‘You poor wee soul, you.’ She gathered her wits and busied herself. ‘Sit here. Start with the tea, and breakfast will be in front of you in no time.’

  I sat down, picked up my teacup and raised it high. ‘To Lipton’s.’

  That got a laugh from her, and then she was as good as her word. A great plateful of powdered-egg omelette, black pudding and tattie scones was served up with a flourish. She must have used up her ration coupons for a week. She sat there sipping her own tea, elbows on the table watching me proprietorially as I devoured the lot. Toast was grilled and buttered for me. All I had to do was wash it down with the steady flow of life-giving tea.

  Then came the iodine for the wounds. We couldn’t work out any sensible way of bandaging the jawline without my looking like a bad advert for tooth decay. So we let the wound be. It was healing fast after the tender ministrations of the Atlantic.

  I had another bath to ease the aches, and dressed for our Sunday outing. There was a jacket that matched the trousers. A good fit, if a bit dated. And with the plain brown tweed tie I looked as if I’d strolled off the heather after an encounter with a stag, said stag winning the first round.

  ‘You’ll do,’ she said, eyeing me at the door.

  ‘I hope the holy Father doesn’t decide to put up a fight,’ I said, wincing as I tried to free up the strained muscles in my arms and shoulders. ‘You’ll have to wrestle him to the ground. Then these fine brogues of your dad’s will come into their own.’ I pointed down at the slabs of leather that would certainly outlive their present temporary owner, as well as their last.

  ‘There’s one other thing,’ she said, walking over to the sideboard and picking up a cloth-covered lump in two hands. She placed it on the table in front of me. It clunked.

  I walked over and unwrapped it. It was a big brutal Webley Mark VI revolver, standard officer issue in the Great War. Its cylinder took six bone-crushing. 455 shells; its 6-inch barrel gave it an effective range of about 50 yards. Accurate with each shot if you could hold the damn thing down each time. It kicked back in the hand like a mule.

  ‘Your dad’s again?’

  She nodded. ‘He brought it back from France in nineteen eighteen. Kept it for hunting. The coup de grace. Don’t, and I really mean this, Brodie, don’t use it unless you have to. I don’t want you turning Glasgow into the Scottish Wild West.’

  I hefted it, broke it open and examined the barrel. It was a nice, simple weapon. Double action, so no need to cock it each time you fired. Ideal for bringing down a villain and keeping him down. A hit from one of these bullets would leave a huge exit wound and a lot of internal damage, no matter where it struck. I opened the tweed jacket, and found a pocket that seemed to have been strengthened and tailored to take it. It bulged the front of the jacket a little but otherwise sat neatly enough, as though it had found its way home.

  She went back to the sideboard and brought me a pack of shells. They had to be at least ten years old but looked as if they’d do the trick. I broke the revolver again and filled the chambers. I made sure the safety was on and stored it in the sideboard under the cloth, ready for my next confrontation with the Slatterys. I didn’t think I needed a gun for Sunday mass.

  TWENTY-THREE

  We drove round to the square chapel in the Gorbals. Sam explained on the way that she’d nearly sold the magnificent Kestrel after her parents’ death, but simply never got around to it. I was grateful for her tardiness. We pulled up outside. There were some folk milling about. Chapel-goers in their S
unday black.

  ‘Are you sure we shouldn’t call the police?’ she asked for the third time.

  ‘And tell them what? A well-regarded priest of a prominent chapel is in cahoots with a drugs baron and arranged to have me murdered? And the very same pillar of the community was there the night before Hugh Donovan was found drowning in enough evidence to hang him twice over? How do you think they’d take it?’

  She raised her hands, palms up, over the steering wheel. ‘So we just pop in for a wee chat? Maybe beard him in the confessional and hope he’ll do the talking?’

  ‘I want to see his face. When he sees mine. We’ll take it from there. OK?’

  ‘OK.’

  We got out and walked up the short path to where people were standing and talking to each other.

  A wee white-haired woman looked up at me. ‘Yer wasting yer time, so ye are. It’s no’ open.’

  ‘What do you mean it’s not open?’ I asked, knowing as I said it that I’d just given the perfect opening for a Glasgow response.

  ‘Because it’s shut,’ said the wee monster.

  ‘How often does this happen?’

  ‘Never been known, so it hasnae,’ she said triumphantly.

  ‘Is there a back door?’

  She looked at me as though she’d only just realised she was talking to a heretic condemned to eternal damnation.

  ‘That’s the priest’s private door. That’s his robing room. Ye cannae just walk up there and chap on his door.’ Her head was indicating the way, so Sam and I took it, despite the evil eye that followed us round the back of the chapel.

  Here the regular sandstone lines were broken up by a small brick building leaning against the rectangle of the church itself. A door was set into the side. It was locked. I really needed to get a proper set of burgling tools made.

  ‘Do you have any kirby grips or a nail file in that bag of yours?’ I asked Sam.

  ‘You’re not… Surely you’re not going to…’