Gordon Ferris: The Hanging Shed

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.

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 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.