The Hanging Shed Read online

  ‘Ye wurnae exactly singin’ wi’ the Sally Ally yersel’.’

  A conductor in uniform giving a trainee a clout on the ear: ‘Tak’ a tummle tae yersel’, ya glaikit wee nyaf.’

  Two old women with string bags and bare legs knotted with veins: ‘See you, Ah says. If that was ma wean, Ah’d a gi’en her a gid skelp in the lug.’

  ‘Aye, ye cannae ca’ yir ain mither a wee hairy, neither ye can. Even if she is, Jessie…’

  It took me a minute or two to tune in, like finding the Home Service on a crystal set. But then it was like music. Scarcely Brahms, more Buddy Rich, all hard edges and rhythms. My spirits rose despite my mission. I was back among kin. It brought me unexpected pleasure and sharp regret that I’d put off this return for so long. Tonight I’d catch the local train back down to Kilmarnock and give my mother a surprise. But this morning, I had a date with a murderer.

  I dropped off my case in the left-luggage office and came out through the great blackened Victorian arches of St Enoch’s into the bracing Glasgow air. Ten degrees cooler than the lucky south-east of England, but with the great marching skies that I’d forgotten. The air was tangy with the reek of house and factory fires but the steady breeze up the Clyde was keeping the smog away. There had been days before the war when the only way you could tell if a tram was coming was by its bell sounding through the murk.

  I stopped and looked around. It was as though the war hadn’t happened. No signs of bomb damage, and a bustle and an urgency that London lacked. As well as being a mainline station, St Enoch’s was a tram and trolley terminus, so I shouldn’t have been surprised, but I felt as if I’d walked on to the stage of a mad ballet of machines. The square was heaving with the great cars, their network of overhead wires like a drunken spider-web. There was even the choice of an underground: the Glasgow Subway, but that would have taken me round in a circle south under the Clyde, then west to Govan, back north over the river to Partick, and east again to where I stood. I could have walked from here to the Eastern Division police station in Tobago Street. My first job. But I’d save that pleasure for later.

  I got help from a patient tram inspector who reminded me of the colour coding system. I made him repeat his directions and started what seemed like an epic journey east out of the city along the Edinburgh road and then north-east to a quiet suburb with open fields beyond. I changed trams twice and then took a bus. I got off it at the terminus and walked down Lee Avenue. Already I could see the bulk looming over the few houses. Finally I saw the whole massive set of blocks sitting at the end of this forsaken avenue like a disused factory. Which I suppose it was. His Majesty’s Prison Barlinnie takes men in and processes them. They go in defiant or terrified, and come out angry or broken, but certainly paler and thinner. Some, like Hugh Donovan, never come out, but are interred in unsanctified ground in the yard near the hanging shed.

  The prison cast a long sullen shadow. I began to feel guilty as I walked towards the huge metal door in the centre of the six-storey grey-stone building. I hadn’t done anything, but the sense of oppression made me check off my past sins to see if any were jailable crimes. One or two perhaps, but who would know? I felt watched all the way. When I got to the man-sized door set into the giant-sized gate, a grille opened.

  ‘Visitor?’ asked a head with a cap on.

  ‘I’m here to see a prisoner. I made an appointment.’

  ‘Name?’

  ‘Mine or the prisoner’s?’

  There was a narrowing of eyes. ‘Both.’

  ‘I’m Brodie. Here to see Hugh Donovan.’

  ‘Donovan, is it? Well, you’d better be quick,’ he said with a malevolent grin.

  He slammed the hatch down and then opened the door. He stood back to let me step over the threshold. I walked in and stood in a narrow alleyway with a further metal-grilled gate ahead and an office either side. Two other guards in black uniform stood casually in front of the inner gate.

  ‘This way, sir.’

  The guard who’d let me in walked off in front of me and began a slow ritual with multiple keys through several inner gates and doors. There was a familiar smell: like the cells in Tobago Street nick writ large. Floor polish, fag smoke, male sweat and, from one branching corridor, the pungent smell of cooked greens. We fetched up outside a door marked ‘Mr Colin Hislop, Deputy Governor’. I was shown inside. It was an outer office with a pale secretary manning the defence of the inner sanctum. I was made to wait the obligatory twenty minutes before her desk buzzer went and she showed me into the deputy’s presence.

  He was a care-worn clerk in a bad suit with too much in his in-tray and not enough in his out. He took off his glasses and we shook fingers over his pile of papers.

  ‘I’m sorry to be taking up your time, Mr Hislop.’

  He looked despairingly at his paperwork for a long second. ‘It’s perfectly all right. It was important I saw you. Donovan’s request that you visit him was, shall we say, unusual.’

  His accent was curious; local, certainly, but trying to gild the working-class vowels with the drawl of Kelvinside. Like a mutton pie coated in cream. Then I wondered how mine sounded after all this time mixing with the regimental accents of Sutherland and the Hebrides. Maybe we both sounded like phonies.

  ‘Unusual? Why?’

  He dug in his drawer and pulled out a paper. ‘His application said you’re an old friend and that he wanted to see you. Is that correct?’

  Old friend was pushing it, to put it mildly. Old foe, old adversary, old I wouldn’t piss on you if you were on fire would be more accurate. Which made me wonder again at my being here.

  ‘We grew up together. I only heard about the trial and verdict four days ago. When Hugh phoned me.’

  ‘Yes, quite. Prisoners in his – category – are permitted one such call a week.’

  ‘So, may I see him?’

  He pointed his finger at the papers in front of him. ‘It says you attended Glasgow university then became a policeman, a detective sergeant with the Glasgow constabulary.’ Said with disbelief as though you’d have to be daft to toss away a good education to pound the beat. He had a point. ‘Then you joined up. The Seaforths? A battlefield commission, I gather?’ He sniffed, as though he personally would have turned it down. Not that he’d been within five hundred miles of action. I felt my anger levels pick up.

  ‘I don’t know what you’re reading there, but the commission was confirmed. As was the next. It was Major Brodie, acting Major. I reverted to Captain when I demobbed.’ Why should I care what this little prick thought of me? But it seems I did.

  He went on as though I hadn’t spoken, ‘Now you’re a reporter, I believe?’ Said like wife-beater.

  ‘That’s right. Where did you get all this?’

  ‘We can’t be too careful. In the circumstances. I contacted the Glasgow Chief Constable’s office.’

  Hislop began to look ever more uncomfortable and put his specs back on. To stop me hitting him, maybe. ‘What I’d like to know – we’d like to know – is why you want to see him. What I mean to say is, we don’t want any more headlines. Do you see?’

  I stared at him. So that was it. ‘I’m here in a private capacity, not a reporter. The London papers don’t cover regional stuff.’

  He gripped his typed sheet for comfort. ‘Well, of course, it’s just with your police affiliation, and all the fuss we’ve had…’

  I cut in, exasperated with all this shilly-shallying. ‘I’m just a friend. Wanting to see an old pal. I wish I’d heard sooner, before the trial. Are you refusing to let me see him?’

  Off came the glasses again. ‘No, no, of course not. It’s just… with so little time the appeal etc… we don’t want any problems. Do you see?’

  I didn’t feel like being helpful. ‘I don’t think I do.’

  He pushed back his chair. ‘Perhaps you haven’t been aware of the uproar there has been in Scotland? The public were, shall we say, quite upset by it all. We don’t want to stir things up, do we
?’

  I noticed sweat beading his thin top lip. My, my, Shug, look what you’ve done. ‘Mr Hislop, all I’m asking is to visit a man who has four weeks left to live.’

  ‘Quite, quite.’ Hislop fussed around, moving some papers on his table and generally making me want to grab him by the lapels and give him a good cuff round the ears to spur him into action. Finally he leaned over to his desk buzzer and when his pale assistant responded he told her to arrange for me to see Hugh in the visitors’ wing.

  ‘Half an hour only, Mr Brodie. And of course – ahem – we will require you to be searched beforehand. If you don’t mind. Can’t be too careful, you know…’ He trailed to an end and I left him to gnaw at his desk or whatever he did to control his inner rages. Practise his elocution perhaps.

  FOUR

  A different guard escorted me through the warren. Our feet rang out on the tiled floor as we headed towards the cells. We came to an open space with a line of seats jammed against a counter. Above the counter, and coming down to rest on it, was a six-foot-high metal grille. I could see other chairs facing these on the other side. I was motioned to a seat. There was no other visitor. I sat and lit a cigarette, taking deep drags to calm me down. Beyond, on the other side, a door swung open about twenty yards away. A guard stepped forward, looked around and then motioned to someone behind him. A shackled figure shambled forward, head bent to the floor. He wore grey overalls and chains round his wrists and feet. Another guard followed him out. They pointed to me and waited for the prisoner to lift his head and step forward.

  I didn’t recognise the creature who stood, uncertain, by the door. His head was still bent but there was no shock of black hair. The scalp was bald with livid patches. This wasn’t Hugh Donovan. There’d been a mistake.

  Finally the figure shuffled towards me. He stood for a moment facing me through the grille. I stood up, my legs shaking. He twisted into the seat opposite mine and sat bent over his knees, his forearms resting on his thighs and his hands clasped together. Keeping his head bent, he began rocking backward and forward. He might have been praying. He needed to, if this was Donovan, and he’d done what they said did. But it wasn’t Hugh’s head.

  I gazed at his tortured skull. Red and white, marbled and distorted as though the skin had run. Which of course was what had happened. I had seen it before on some Spitfire pilots, young men, handsome young men, whose faces had melted in the flames of their cockpit. When the plastic cover caught light, there was no putting it out, and little chance of wrestling it open without serious burns if your plane was spiralling towards the ground. I suppose the same applied to a tail gunner if your Lancaster had taken hits from phosphorus shells. I sat down and placed my forearms on the bench that ran under the grille through to his side.

  ‘Hello?’ I tried.

  ‘Hello, Dougie.’ He still didn’t look up, and the voice was slow and dull. But this was Hugh. ‘Thanks for coming.’

  ‘Hugh, look at me.’

  For a moment he did nothing. Then he slowly lifted his head. I’d been steeling myself but it wasn’t enough. I stopped breathing. It was a clown’s face, badly made up. Hairless, seamed and ridged like a child’s bad attempt at a patchwork doll. One ear, the right, was missing completely. The nose was vestigial. Then he smiled. It was the worse thing. A twisted, lopsided desecration of that beautiful grin. At least he had his sight; those bright blue eyes of his seemed to mock me from behind a mask that he would take off any minute now. He’d giggle, and then we’d both laugh at the great wheeze. But this was no faux-face from our boyhood guising at Hallowe’en. I couldn’t help myself. The tears sprung.

  ‘Oh Christ, Shug. You’ve been through it, old pal.’

  I reached out instinctively with both hands and clamped them through the grille. He looked at them, smiled that perverted smile again, and put out his own withered limbs. He touched my fingers and then pulled away. I saw the guard on his side step forward and shake his head at me. I pulled back.

  ‘You wanted to know why I never got in touch…’ He sounded as though he was speaking from beneath the sea.

  ‘Hell, Shug, none of us are as braw as we were.’

  ‘I’ll swap you ony time, Dougie,’ he said softly.

  We held each other’s eyes for a minute longer till we both got embarrassed.

  ‘Tell me, Hugh.’

  He looked up again. His blue eyes beseeched. ‘I never killed those weans, Douglas. And certainly no’ that wee boy, Rory. As God’s my judge, I never killed him. How could I kill Fiona’s boy?’ I saw his eyes mist and wondered if this was another of his big lies. Perhaps the biggest.

  Hugh and I had grown up playing together even though he went to the chapel and I went to the kirk. He lived in the next close. He’d call me a Proddy sod and I’d call him a Papish pig. And we’d punch each other on the shoulder to see who could stand the pain the longest. Our friendship survived Orange marches through Kilmarnock when the drums and flutes and orange sashes would clear the streets of left-footers like Hugh. It survived us going to separate schools where the religious differences were drummed in deep. We got looks down the main street, him in his black blazer and me in maroon.

  It survived some of the battles we had at the local dance hall – the Air Training Corps hut – the Attic – Protestants squaring off against Catholics instead of enjoying the girls and the dancing. Hugh left school at fourteen like most of my pals, and followed in his dad’s footsteps into an apprenticeship in the cooperage at Johnnie Walker’s. I stayed on at the Academy thanks to a Coop bursary aiming for my Highers. It wasn’t my choice. My father, through his coughing, vowed I’d not follow him down the pits.

  Hugh and I stayed in touch. He brought his girlfriend, Maureen, to the Attic one night. They’d been to St Joseph’s School together. And Maureen brought her sister, Fiona. Fiona, with heavy black hair flowing halfway down her back. With the upright head and slim musculature of a dancer. With dark lashes sheltering Celtic-black eyes.

  The way she looked at me that first night was all challenge and light, as though she was waiting for me to say something stupid. I don’t know what I said. It couldn’t have been too daft. We danced like dervishes then and every Saturday after. Her hair swirling and tossing like the mane of a black stallion. It was unusual then and maybe still. Catholics winching Protestants. Something you hoped the war would have blown away for ever. We’d see. The Montagues and Capulets had it easy. We became an item in that reckless summer. We were both fifteen and I was harpooned by the love of my life.

  The four of us remained inseparable through the following year, me at school, the other three out earning their living. My pockets were usually empty except for the coppers earned on my paper round. Fiona was a mill girl like her mother and sister before her. I got catcalls from her pals if I picked her up after work, me in my school blazer and she in her pinny, shaking her hair loose from her headscarf. The gentlest jibe was professor. It didn’t seem to matter. We were in love and even the entreaties of her priest and parents to give up this scandalous affair, went unheeded on into the spring of ’29.

  Until I learned of a different arrangement. I heard it first from Maureen, her face burning with bitterness. Hugh and Fiona had been meeting secretly for months. Suddenly all the little evasions made sense; her too tired to meet after work rebuffs, the going out with her pals excuses, the perpetual washing of her black mane. I caught them together walking hand in hand in the Kay Park, their mouths feasting on each other. I stepped in their path. I wasn’t sure what I was going to do: punch him; slap her; kill them both. In the event they froze and looked at me with such pity that I turned and walked away. Hugh called after me: how sorry he was and how they hadn’t meant it to happen. I should have hit him.

  Seventeen years ago. And you know what? It had hurt for seventeen years. It still hurt. What does a seventeen year old know of love? Everything and nothing. Nothing about the longueurs of married life. Nothing about the dips and doubts, the chains and ties. Everythi
ng about the spark and fire of a kiss. The agonies of does she, doesn’t she? The racing blood, the utter certainty, the high passion. Why should a teenage love count less? It’s unconstrained, insane. It lacks adult defences and cynicism. First love is engraved on a developing heart. Like carving the letters on a tree and years later finding them swollen and proud on a mature trunk. Knowing they would last the lifetime of the tree. Longer than your own.

  There had been girls since. Kind women, bright women, teasing women, women who wanted a life with me. I was too busy, too fussy. Fiona cast a long shadow.

  I looked at the wrecked face in front of me. Beyond punching now. I hadn’t spoken to him or her since that day, just heard of their continued passion through others. Until she married someone else. Why? And why not me? Not even third best? And bore her husband – the jammy sod – a son. Why not mine, Fiona?

  Did that have any bearing on the murder of her wee boy? The Hugh I knew didn’t have it in him, not for Fiona’s child, for pity’s sake. Surely? But I’d seen the hardest of men turn into gibbering wrecks after two days of bombardment in a desert foxhole. Hell, I still jolt awake wrapped in sweat-soaked sheets, with Panzer tanks rolling over me. How would being burnt alive affect you?

  I’d phoned an old contact in the Glasgow police. He told me that five boys had gone missing over the past year, three in the East End, two in the Gorbals. Only the last one had been found. Fiona’s son Rory had been discovered in a coal cellar at the back of some tenements. He was naked and dead. He’d been raped, God help him. The following morning Hugh Donovan had been arrested in his single-end in the Gorbals. There was hard evidence all over the house that Hugh had killed the boy, including the boy’s clothing. And here was Donovan telling me he didn’t do it. Despite what he’d done to me, I wanted to believe him, wanted to believe that no one I knew was capable of such horror. But the facts said otherwise. And there was motivation: sick revenge on a faithless lover and her dead husband.

  ‘Tell me everything, Hugh. How did the boy’s clothes get into your flat?’ I took out my reporter’s notebook and a pencil, to encourage him to talk. It usually works.