The Hanging Shed E-Book

Gordon Ferris

• Herausgeber: Corvus
• Kategorie: Krimi
• Sprache: Englisch

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2011

Beschreibung

LONGLISTED FOR THEAKSTONS OLD PECULIER CRIME NOVEL OF THE YEAR SHORTLISTED FOR CRIME READERS ASSOCIATION DAGGER IN THE LIBRARY AWARD A fast-paced, gritty and atmospheric crime novel set on the tough streets of Glasgow, 1946. Glasgow, 1946. The last time Douglas Brodie came home it was 1942 and he was a dashing young warrior in a kilt. Now, the war is over but victory's wine has soured and Brodie's back in Scotland to try and save childhood friend Hugh Donovan from the gallows. Everyone thought Hugh was dead, shot down in the war. Perhaps it would have been kinder if he had been killed. The man who returns from the war is unrecognizable: mutilated, horribly burned. Hugh keeps his own company, only venturing out for heroin to deaden the pain of his wounds. When a local boy is found raped and murdered, there is only one suspect. Hugh claims he's innocent but a mountain of evidence says otherwise. Despite the hideousness of the crime, ex-policeman Brodie feels compelled to try and help his one-time friend. Working with advocate Samantha Campbell, Brodie trawls the mean streets of the Gorbals and the green hills of western Scotland in their search for the truth. What they find is an unholy alliance of troublesome priests, corrupt coppers and Glasgow's deadliest razor gang, happy to slaughter to protect their dark and dirty secrets. As time runs out for the condemned man, the murder tally of innocents starts to climb. When Sam Campbell disappears, it's the last straw for Brodie, and he reverts to his wartime role as a trained killer. It's them or him... The Hanging Shed is the word-of-mouth hit that is leaving its fellow thrillers in its wake. - Guardian

Leseprobe

THE

HANGING

SHED

Also by Gordon Ferris

DREAMING OF A SONG TRUTH DARE KILL THE UNQUIET HEART

THE HANGING SHED

GORDON FERRIS

First published in Great Britain in 2011 by Corvus, an imprint of Atlantic Books Ltd.

Copyright © Gordon Ferris 2011.

The moral right of Gordon Ferris to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act of 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

This is a work of fiction. All characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

ISBN: 978-1-84887-768-9 (Hardback) 978-1-84887-769-6 (Trade paperback)

eBook ISBN: 978-0-85789-346-8

Printed in Great Britain.

Corvus An imprint of Atlantic Books Ltd Ormond House 26-27 Boswell Street London WC1N 3JZ

www.corvus-books.co.uk

Big thanks to: Tina Betts, my diligent agent; Becci Sharpe at Corvus, the first Brodie fan; Nicolas Cheetham at Corvus for taking the leap; Richenda Todd for incisive editing and knowing too much about boats; Sarah for insights and unstinting support.

Table of Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fifteen

Chapter Sixteen

Chapter Seventeen

Chapter Eighteen

Chapter Nineteen

Chapter Twenty

Chapter Twenty-One

Chapter Twenty-Two

Chapter Twenty-Three

Chapter Twenty-Four

Chapter Twenty-Five

Chapter Twenty-Six

Chapter Twenty-Seven

Chapter Twenty-Eight

Chapter Twenty-Nine

Chapter Thirty

Chapter Thirty-One

Chapter Thirty-Two

Chapter Thirty-Three

Chapter Thirty-Four

Chapter Thirty-Five

Chapter Thirty-Six

Chapter Thirty-Seven

Chapter Thirty-Eight

Chapter Thirty-Nine

Chapter Forty

Chapter Forty-One

Chapter Forty-Two

Chapter Forty-Three

Chapter Forty-Four

Chapter Forty-Five

Chapter Forty-Six

Chapter Forty-Seven

Chapter Forty-Eight

I’ll take the big sordid dirty crowded city.

Raymond Chandler, The Long Goodbye

For Jenny and Sarah

ONE

There are no windows in a hanging shed. Only a sadistic architect would provide a last glimpse of the fair green hills. The same goes for paintings or potted plants. You’re unlikely to divert the condemned man from the business in hand with a nice framed ‘Monarch of the Glen’ or a genteel aspidistra. Besides, he’ll only visit once. Wearing a hood.

Before the war I was taken to the hanging shed of His Majesty’s Prison Barlinnie. Years after, I can close my eyes and recite every dismal detail and dimension as though they were tattooed on my eyelids.

Think of a clutch of grey monoliths scarring the countryside on the outskirts of Glasgow. Each solid rectangle studded with tiny barred windows, the roofs festooned with Victorian chimneys. Like houses drawn by an obsessive child. The whole ugly mass surrounded by a tall grey wall. Focus in on the central courtyard and the building known as D Hall. Inside is a standard prison set-up: a high vaulted chamber with galleries facing each other across a gulf. Cells stud the walls on each level. Metal decks bridge the galleries. Metal staircases connect the levels.

There is one special cell on the third floor. Its occupant has nowhere to go except across the short bridge and through the plain wooden door on the other side. Take the walk. Go through the door. Eyes open.

Inside, the air is inert and the white walls press inwards. In the centre, set in the floor, is a trapdoor. Alongside, and surely connected, stands a lever. There are three square holes in the ceiling directly above the trapdoor. You can see the long retaining beam in the room above. A noosed rope dangles from the beam through the central hole. The two other holes gape invitingly, ready for rush hour in the hanging shed, three at once. Jostling for position on the trapdoor.

Today a lone figure stands on a chalked T in the centre of the trap. A broad leather strap binds the upper body. A hood covers the head. The noose is draped over the hood and round the neck. Soft leather coats the noose. No abrasions here for a tender neck. The noose is held in place by a brass slip to make sure it tightens quickly and efficiently. To snap rather than throttle. The mark of a civilised society.

A man in a blue uniform walks across the echoing floor-boards. He grips the lever and grins. There is a shocking clang and thud and the trapdoor falls open. The joist in the room above gives out a tortured creak as it takes the weight. The figure plunges into the void of the floor below where a slab waits. The rope hardens and trembles like a plucked guitar string. The guard sneers at the white faces of the four new constables being shown round for their edification. He signals to the guard below to take down the dummy.

I can conjure it now, lying on my back, rocking in the top bunk of the overnight train to Glasgow. But this time the dummy has a face. Beneath me and all around me I feel the Royal Scot hurtling through the night, steel wheels clacking remorselessly on the rails. Occasionally the great beast splits the tomb-black landscape with a midnight shriek and I listen for an answering call that never comes. I’m going home for the first time in two and half years, and the thought of what I have to face there fills me with a hot mix of anger and dread. I take another pull at my cigarette and watch the tip glow and die, and the smoke drift and swirl away.

Four carefree days ago I was sitting in my wee attic room in South London. I was having a good spell. Almost a week of sleeping better and drinking less. Maybe the two were connected. My newly polished shoes – army indoctrination – were sitting by the door ready for their sprint to Fleet Street. The spring sun was already banking through the skylight window. I was hunched over the table nursing a second mug of tea while reading yesterday’s Times and my own paper the London Bugle. Know your enemy, my old drill sergeant used to say. Besides, I enjoy the adverts on the front of the Times. In their way they give as clear a picture of Britain as the inside news pages. Stories of a hard-up country where gentlemen were selling their fine leather gloves, or where an ex-officer, RAF, DFC would make excellent private secretary. Where trained mechanics were searching for work as drivers, and war heroes were on the lookout for gardening jobs or other manual exercise. The fruits of victory were bitter enough for some.

I supped my tea and counted my blessings. In the last month I’d started to get a steady trickle of freelance assignments from the Bugle and there was a chance of a full-time job. I was making enough money to afford food, fags and Scotch, not necessarily in that order. But at least I would no longer simply be drinking away the last of my demob money. Two weeks ago I’d dragged my flabby body round to Les’s Boxing Academy on the Old Kent Road and – aching limbs apart – I was already getting back a sense of physical well-being. Something I hadn’t felt since the build-up and hard training for D Day. After a few days of the glums last week I was daring to hope that I was nearing the end of the tunnel. Sunshine on my face would be good. Such was my upbeat mood that I’d been crooning along with Lena Horne and whistling a tuneless descant to Artie Shaw on the Light Programme. Even my first fag tasted sweet instead of just satisfying a craving.

Then the phone rang down in the shared entry.

I glanced at my watch. It was just after seven-fifteen. Someone was starting early. I knew Mrs Jackson wouldn’t answer it unless she’d cranked up her hearing aid; I wondered why her daughters had bothered getting the phone installed. Her voice was so loud it made the device redundant. The other three households in our entry rarely got calls, but we were all happy to chip in to pay for the rental. I sprang to my door, still in my slippers and collarless. I could have done with another fifteen minutes of paper-reading and crossword-filling, but maybe the Bugle was calling. I dived down the three flights of stairs and grabbed the shiny black set.

‘Yes, hello? Brodie here,’ I gasped.

‘Is that Mr Douglas Brodie?’ A posh voice. A professional voice. An operator’s voice.

I got my breath back. ‘Yes, that’s me. Doug Brodie.’

‘Please hold the line, I have a call for you. Go ahead, caller, please put your money in now.’

I heard the clank and rattle of coins going in. Several. At least a bob’s worth, which meant long distance. My mother using her neighbour’s phone? An accident? Bad news comes early. A man’s voice started up. Scottish accent, West of Scotland. Like mine. Like mine used to be.

‘Is that you, Dougie boy?’

A bucket of ice splashed down my neck. No one called me Dougie now. It had been Brodie for a decade. The voice scratched at my memory, but I couldn’t put a face to it. Wouldn’t. My mind simply rejected the likelihood. For it was an impossible voice from the days of bows and arrows, spots and whispering girls. Of fist fights that ended in bloody lips and trembling anger. Of a great betrayal that gnawed at me still.

‘Who’s this? What’s happened?’ I pressed my palm against the wall for support, feeling the cool plaster suck at the heat of my hand.

‘That’s a big question,’ said the voice.

My mind was fumbling with memories. The timbre and cadence were heavier and slower but, oh, so disturbingly familiar. I knew who this was, but didn’t, couldn’t believe it. How could it be him?

‘Let’s keep it simple, then. Who … are … you?’

With new strength: ‘Don’t tell me you don’t know me, ya Proddy sod?’

That did it. The mocking West of Scotland greeting. I saw his face, a wee boy’s face. Pawky, we called it, cheeky, with his big silly grin and his fringe of black hair. We played soldiers back then, erupting from our trenches against the machine guns of the Boches. Seeing who could die on the barbed wire with the greatest panache. Shug Donovan – or Hugh, when we started going out with girls – beat us all. He’d fall in a cartwheel of melodrama, great anguished cries and flailing arms. He grew tall and handsome, black hair and blue eyes, like an advert for a Celtic bard. The girls loved him and his easy smile. I hated him for the same reasons, especially for the one girl that fell for him.

I hadn’t seen him since I left Kilmarnock for Glasgow University back in ’29. I heard odd snatches about him from my mother down the years, though she knew I hated every mention. He was a journeyman cooper at Johnnie Walker’s at the same time I was making my way in the Glasgow police force. In ’39 I went into the army, the Seaforth Highlanders, my dad’s old regiment, though I was a lowlander. Donovan ended up in the RAF, Bomber Command. A tail gunner. A guaranteed way of getting yourself killed for real. Which was exactly what happened.

In a letter from my mother in 1943 I was told that Hugh Donovan had died in his bomber in the flames of Dresden. My first ungracious thought was: Serves you right, you sod. Then remorse made my cheeks burn. It prompted me to write to his mother saying how sorry I was to hear the news. But the guilt of that instant wasn’t so easily erased.

‘Shug? Is it you?’

‘Aye, Dougie, it is.’

‘But how, what the hell? I thought you were dead!’ My voice cracked and echoed round the empty entry.

‘So did I, old pal. So did I.’

‘But this is great! Just fantastic!’ I could stop feeling bad about him, about how we’d left things. Time to move on.

He cut in. ‘Dougie. It’s no’ … It’s no’ great at all …’

TWO

The train roared through a station, lights flickering briefly before we plunged back into the dark. The sour scent of cheap Scotch tinged the air. The bloke in the bunk below had sucked patiently on a half-bottle to get to sleep. Mother’s milk where he came from; we came from, I reminded myself. I’d resolutely declined when he’d passed the bottle up to me. To prove I could. Now I wish I’d taken a slug or two. My brain was fidgeting. I lay in the dark and lit another fag and thought about going home, and what I meant by that.

There was Kilmarnock, the place where I was born and grew up. And there was Glasgow, where I’d gone to university, studied languages and, in a fit of rebellion, joined the police. A town and a city a mere twenty miles apart, but they might as well have been on different continents. It wasn’t just that I left my boyhood behind on the short train journey from Kilmarnock. It was as though someone had carelessly spliced two strips of films together from entirely different movies. The lead character had changed, as had the supporting cast and the entire plot and arc of the film. The one connecting thread between the two places was the language of the script and the sharp-edged humour and brashness of the West Central Lowlands. Where no German spy could mimic the tortured accents. His request for a pie and a pint in any of the hard pubs that littered the slummy landscape would have earned him a good kicking before being handed over to the comparative safety of the polis.

I’d last been in Kilmarnock in late ’43, on leave from my regiment, proud to bursting of the 2nd lieutenant’s pips on my epaulettes and the North Africa ribbon on my chest. The dull khaki of my battledress tunic was outshone by the strong blues and greens of the MacKenzie tartan in my Seaforth kilt. I rolled off the train with my kitbag over my shoulder and my tam-o’-shanter pitched at a suitably jaunty angle on my head. I was the picture of health. My leg had healed. Army training and the residue of the desert sun had honed me into a lean brown warrior. I bounded down the steps of the station and out into Kilmarnock’s high street. The heavy swing of the kilt made me lift up my head and push out my chest as if I was on parade. I marched down King Street with its stout Victorian façade, and strolled nonchalantly one full time round the cross – the town centre, with its statue of James Shaw in the middle of it.

I caught the smiles on girls’ faces: See you at the Palais on Saturday, then? And the nods of welcome from the old men: You’ve done your time now, laddie, just like us in the last one. When I thought I’d earned enough silent plaudits, I sauntered back up the Foregate and up the Gas Brae. I was held up briefly at Barclay’s yard as they trundled a new locomotive across the main street and on into the run of rail tracks that would channel it into service. The driver nodded and winked at me and I was eight again and enthralled by the giant metal wheels and the massive boiler.

I was marching into my own past, shedding the years with every step, casting off the veneer of learning, city airs and cynicism, and three years of hard fighting. On up to Bonnyton. On the left, climbing up the hill, smart rows of smoke-black sandstone terraces. Opposite, on the right, a clutch of older, sorrier tenements where the mining community clustered and from where, each day, the buses picked up the lines of men and ferried them off to dig the black seams below the fertile Ayrshire hills. I turned right and marched through the rows of grey tenements and across the drying greens. Washing flapped on the lines strung between the communal poles. The smell of washed linen anywhere in the world would take me back to that spot in a heartbeat.

She was there behind the net curtains, looking for me. I saw the twitch. Sure enough, she was out in a moment, her tiny frame all mobile and flapping, and her white hair shining and lifting in the warm breeze. A lifetime ago it had been red as rowan berries. For a while it seemed I’d inherited her wild colour. But as I grew my father’s black bristles counterattacked and turned mine to a compromise shade of dried blood. Only my morning stubble held the memory of her oriflamme. And his dark eyes, his height and miner’s shoulders won out against her grey eyes and elfin figure.

‘Hello, Mum,’ I called, and waved. I dropped my bag and held out my arms.

She scooted towards me, not sure where to put her hands, on her face, outstretched in front of her, or clasped in some inner prayer. The hero’s return.

‘Oh, Douglas, Douglas. Look at you! Ma wee boy!’

The tears were already coursing on her cheeks. And my eyes were wet by the time she clasped me to her. She felt like a bird, so light and bony. She smelt as she always did, a mix of coal-tar soap that she scrubbed her face with, and lavender from the sachets she hung on her handful of clothes. The very essence of home. I breathed it in, and was a child again. Some of the neighbour women poked their heads out, just by accident of course. But they were all beaming, glad to see one of their sons returned in one piece. Though most of their menfolk had been in reserved service down the pits, there were enough that hadn’t come back or had come back maimed.

The one black mark on the day, on all my days now, was the absence of the big man with the coal dust stamped in his hands and on his forehead in a line below his helmet. My father. Three years after his death her red had turned to snow as though she had no further need of it. My mother and I would visit his grave in the afternoon with flowers. Me in my uniform still, to show him what I’d become. What he’d made me. But unable now to delight in the banter over our shared uniform. No chance now of him saluting me with an insolent grin to show that a sergeant could honour a son even though he was now a bloody officer.

This homecoming would be different. I’d lost that bounce and sense of invulnerability that had swept me home two and a half long years ago. My skin had a London pallor and my shock of mud-red hair bore stubs of grey on my sideburns. Only thirty-four, one year short of the biblical halfway mark, and already on the downward slope.

This summons was too soon. It felt like I was rushing pellmell towards a nexus in my life of dark threads spewing from my past. I wouldn’t have been surprised if the conductor had appeared with red-hot coals for eyes and an announcement that the next stop was purgatory.

Hugh Donovan had survived the war and was calling from a pay phone in the visitor section of Barlinnie Prison, Glasgow. The Bar–L, the Big Mansion House, as we used to call it. Thanks to my own problems I’d missed all the furore north of the border. Certainly missed the trial and the verdict. Hugh wanted to see me, to convince me of his innocence. But why me? Why call the man he shafted, the man who still nursed rancour for what he’d taken from me? Why the hell would he think I’d care whether he was guilty or not? Just when I was getting my life back in some sort of order, he kicks up the pieces and I lose the pattern again. And by the sound of it, and from the enquiries I made later that day, he was guilty as sin. It had taken just four months from his arrest in November 1945 to conviction and sentencing.

The judge at Glasgow’s High Court had donned the black cap. In just over four short weeks, on the spring morning of 30 April, they would hang Hugh Donovan by the neck until he was dead.

Good riddance.

THREE

I must have dozed. The rhythm of the train had finally pushed me into a deep sleep studded with crazed dreams of riding in a landing craft, slap, slap, slapping through the waves towards the roar of a mighty waterfall. Now the change in rhythm brought me back to the surface; the train slowed, the wheels clacking at walking pace. I peeled back the curtain in the carriage and saw a grey dawn over a brown cityscape. A sluggard river stretched away through the girders of a bridge. I knew exactly where we were. Soon enough the pillars of the station were flicking past the window. As I struggled from my cot and dropped to the floor, the brakes were applied and we ground and huffed to a stop in St Enoch’s station, Glasgow.

I quickly soaped my face and skimmed my razor over my chin. I dressed, put on my hat, grabbed my little case and left my travelling companion to groan his way out of his stupor. I wasn’t smug. It could have been me last week. I walked past the towering wheels of the Royal Scot and resisted giving her steaming flanks a pat for getting us safely here on time. All around the familiar accents of home burst on my ears like rain after a long drought.

Two young men slouching by: ‘Ma heid’s gowpin’, so it is.’

‘Nae wunner. Ye were stocious last nicht.’

‘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 careworn 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, et cetera … 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 Perspex 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 sprang.

‘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 Co-op 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. Everything 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’d known hadn’t had 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.