Gordon Ferris - The Hanging Shed

‘You thought he was innocent?’

He nodded. ‘I’ve known Hugh for about a year now. He’s known great pain and temptation. I don’t think I would have had his strength. Now he needs all his courage to get him through the next few weeks. And to face whatever God has in mind for him. It’s good that he has a friend he can talk to at this time. Other than me, of course. I visit him as often as I can.’

‘Next time, can you have a word with them about more pain relief? Unless you think it’s God’s punishment?’

Father Cassidy looked at me quizzically. ‘The good Lord leaves mortal judgements to us. His judgement will come in the fullness of time.’

I felt foolish trying to provoke him. There’s something about all men of the cloth, their quiet assurance and certainty, that makes me want to shake them. Just jealous, I guess. I finally lost all patience with superstition during my stints as a policeman and a soldier. Were the rampaging Derry Boys really a product of an all-seeing God? Were the concentration camps? If so, it was a queer way of showing love for the creatures built in your own image. Confronted by this grown man blithely uttering platitudes as though he believed every word, knowing he’d have an excuse for every Godly thunderbolt, labelled him – in my jaundiced view – an idiot or a charlatan. But I recognised that the same hard logic had made me substitute belief in a god – any god – for a belief in myself. That worked for a while. I blamed nobody but me for my failures and took quiet credit for my personal triumphs. But for the last six months, I seemed to have handed in my self-belief with my uniform.

‘So what is your mortal judgement, Patrick?’

‘If you believe all the evidence, then it’s hard to go on thinking him innocent. But that doesn’t mean I can’t forgive him and offer him succour in his darkest hour.’

I wondered if Hugh had already known that hour. The first time he’d looked in a mirror after the bandages had come off.

‘He still has an appeal,’ I pointed out.

‘Indeed. But Miss Campbell tells me she’s got little new to work with.’

‘I think that’s why I was summoned.’

‘ Do you have something new, Brodie?’ His shrewd eyes searched my face.

I shook my head. ‘There are things that don’t add up.’ I explained the gap between the time of going missing and the time of death. ‘But I don’t have any leads. That’s why I’m trying to talk to all the folk that knew Hugh. See if there was anything they can recall about his whereabouts that week.’

‘It’s a while ago now.’

‘I know, but I’m desperate.’

He rubbed his chin. ‘It was a difficult week. Fiona was distraught. I spent most of my time with her or out looking for the boy. Like everybody else.’

‘You knew Fiona too?’

He smiled. ‘There are not so many chapels round here. Yes, I’ve known her – and Rory of course – for years. She lost her husband and now this.’

‘God’s will, eh, Patrick?’

The smile hardened. ‘God gave us the freedom to choose our own path. It means we take responsibility for our actions and answer to Him later.’

‘How does that help the innocent, like Fiona MacAuslan? Sorry, Fiona Hutchinson. It wasn’t her fault her husband died in the war. Not her fault that her son was murdered.’

He pulled himself upright and clasped his left hand round his cross. ‘We cannot know the mind of God. Sometimes from great grief a stronger faith grows.’

‘That will be a great comfort to Hugh Donovan when they hang him!’

I hadn’t realised how angry I was over this whole damn business. I was angry at being dragged up here away from the new life I was trying to construct in London. I was angry at having to rake over the past. I was angry at the mirror being held up to me here in my old stamping ground. Angry at reaching thirty four with a great education and nothing to show for it. No wife, no children, no career, no peace. Angry at being so pathetic. We sat in awkward silence for a few seconds.

‘I will help you in any way I can, Brodie. But I’m not sure how…’

‘This drug dealer. The one that hooked Hugh. Do you have any idea where I might run into him?’

‘I don’t have a name. But I suppose you could try Hugh’s haunts. The pubs he frequented. Doyle’s at Gorbals Cross. Or the Mally Arms.’

‘What about the neighbours? The ones who mysteriously vanished after the murder. Do you know where they went?’

He shook his head. ‘They weren’t of my faith. I never knew them. But I’m afraid it’s typical of life here. I hear they fell behind with rent.’

Ripples. Drop a pebble in a pond and watch the effect. It doesn’t take much to snap the thin anchor chain of some people’s lives, capsizing them, sending them tumbling and twisting off into the murk. I glanced at my watch. There was nothing else for me here except more platitudes. Whereas the bars were open in half an hour, and I had a legitimate reason for a pub crawl.

In one sense I was looking forward to a drink. The day’s revelations had taken their toll on my equilibrium. In another sense I was wary of entering one of Hugh’s watering holes. Before the war when I did my five-year stint at Tobago Street nick, drink was the blight of every evening shift. It wasn’t so much in the pubs we had trouble but in the parks and walkways by the Clyde. Gangs of broken men getting tanked up on their own special brew: a mix of meths and cheap red wine that they called ‘Jake’ or ‘Johnnie Jump Up’. It was hard to say which of the two ingredients was the real poison. I reckoned it was a recipe handed down from the Viking invasions. It would certainly account for the berserkers roaming the streets on a Saturday night.

Those that could afford to drink the real stuff – a half-gill of Bell’s chased down by a half-pint of Tennent’s – blew their pay packets at the weekend in pubs that were little more than tiled caves for garrulous drunks. Glasgow’s East End and the Gorbals itself were littered with dingy wee hostelries that refused to serve women, as much from embarrassment as from sensitivity to the gentler sex. Not that any self-respecting woman would have demeaned herself by standing ankle deep in soggy sawdust amidst a jabbering crowd of flush-faced men in flat caps. A woman’s role in the Friday-night revels was to stand at the shipyard gate, ready when the whistle went, to tackle her man and extract enough cash from his pay packet to feed her and her ragged weans for another week. I’ve seen six-footers reduced to shame-faced mumbling at the factory gate by a tiny wee fury wanting to know where he’d hidden the ten-shilling overtime she knew he’d worked that week.

So it was with some trepidation that I approached the bunker-like Mally Arms off Gorbals Cross. It was just past opening time but already there were a few old soaks at the bar. There was fresh sawdust on the floor and fresh tobacco smoke wreathing the air. There was nothing else fresh. Dark rings surrounded the corroded spittoons while a fireplace gasped out a thin trail of smoke from glowing dross. The chairs and tables had only recently been recovered from the wreck of the Titanic.

The bar itself was horseshoe shaped with a partition dividing the public from the saloon bar. The lounge had chairs with arms and lacked spittoons. The public had a dartboard and a snooker table whose green baize looked as if it had hosted the final Somme offensive.

I chose to pay a penny extra for a pint in the comparative luxury of the saloon and pushed through the dividing door. It was empty. I ordered a stout and picked up the Racing Mirror to see what I might have lost at Ayr. Not that I ever put a bet on a nag or a dog. Not since I’d heard from my dad about the tricks of the trade such as making a whippet swallow a packet of ten Woodbine before a race. I can’t recall whether it slowed the poor beast down or fired him up. But it did seem to make a nonsense of the form guides. The paper was only of use as camouflage. I glanced at it long enough for appearances then called the barman over. I was taken aback to hear my accent dropping back into the nasal grooves of my boyhood. Self-preservation behind enemy lines.