Gordon Ferris - The Hanging Shed

It was as though Slattery himself had squeezed my heart.

‘Room 301, you said? Have you got a spare key?’ I asked the receptionist.

‘Yes sir.’

‘Get the manager.’

The duty manager, a slick Englishman doing penance in the North, and I arrived on the third floor and strode to 301. The door had a ‘Do not disturb’ sign up.

‘Open it,’ I demanded of the manager.

‘We can’t simply barge into a private room with that sign up, sir. A senior judge and all that.’

Through clenched teeth I said, ‘A woman has been abducted from your hotel. Her life is in danger. Open the door before I break it down.’

The manager fumbled through his keys, knocked a couple of times on the door and then, seeing me on the point of combustion and portal destruction, unlocked the door. I dashed inside and found myself in the lounge. It looked unused.

But there was a strange smell back in the hall. I looked around and noticed a white hankie lying by the door. I picked it up. The stink assailed my nostrils and made my head buzz. Dental chairs and hospitals. Chloroform. On the floor partially tucked under a sideboard was a folder. Sam’s folder. I reached down and grabbed it.

I heard a gasp from the doorway to the bedroom beyond. The manager was standing looking in. I pushed him to one side.

A man lay flat on his back, face bulging and blackening, with a cord round his neck. At least he was fully clothed. If this was Lord Chief Justice Craig Allardyce he’d found out the hard way how it felt to have one of his ultimate sentences carried out.

I dropped the chloroform wad back on the floor but took her folder. The manager had gone into full ‘how do we protect our reputation’ mode while at the same time summoning the police. It was time I got out of there before I got snared. It was nine o’clock at night and the trail was already cold.

I had the spare keys for the car on my key ring. I drove back to the house oblivious to the rest of the traffic. I left it sitting outside instead of garaging it. I ran up the stairs and barged inside calling her name like an idiot. My voice echoed and rolled round the big old house. No one replied. I hadn’t really expected them to.

As darkness settled, I sat quietly in the kitchen doodling on my pad. I seemed unable to break out of my circular thoughts. What I kept writing on the pad was Why?

Did they take her to shut her up? Was she a hostage to shut me up? Would they make demands? Or would they kill her as casually as they slaughtered the others, including a Lord Chief Justice of Scotland? Would they even now be pushing her broken body off the Stranraer ferry to Belfast, her torso weighed down with stones? I clung to the thought that they’d wanted her alive at least for the moment. They could simply have left her strangled body alongside Allardyce. And how had a Lord Chief Justice got mixed up in this escalating slaughter anyway? What unholy alliance existed between a bunch of Glasgow gangsters with IRA affiliations and one of the top men in the Scottish legal system?

I had one large Scotch, drunk too fast and with too little water. I wanted the fire and pain to break me loose from my meanderings. I coughed and wiped my eyes and then I stoppered the bottle. I needed a clear head for the long drive and what I had to do in the morning. I was amazed that the street outside wasn’t yet filled with clanging squad cars. Wouldn’t this house be their first stop? Maybe it had all been too much for the police top brass. Maybe they were all sitting paralysed with empty bottles at their feet, wondering what new catastrophe would be in the papers in the morning. Maybe they were all in jail.

I began with her room, feeling like a burglar. It was neat and clean and surprisingly frilly. Her scent was everywhere. I leaned forward and sniffed her pillow, then I pressed my face into it. My senses thrilled to the memory of the other night when she’d joined me. But this wasn’t what I’d come for. Feeling mildly ashamed of myself I checked her drawers and found what I was looking for. I took the big bunch of keys and left her room. I’d never been to the top floor of the house. The layout was like the second floor where our bedrooms were. A toilet, a bathroom and two larger rooms.

I tried one and found it laid out as a bedroom. It had similar colours and tastes to Sam’s and I assumed it had been her mother’s. Opposite was the room I was looking for. It was dark until I got a fresh bulb for the overhead light. Very much a man’s room. Solid woods and plain curtains. Hairbrushes sitting neat on a dresser. A wardrobe full of men’s suits and perfectly polished shoes. The room felt like a shrine. There was another cupboard on the far wall, locked and padlocked. This looked like it. If Sam’s hunting father had a hand gun it was likely he had other weapons.

I tried several keys before giving up and breaking into it. Inside on hooks was a pair of magnificent 12-bores. The metal gleamed dully and seemed to flow into the hardwood stock as though wood and metal had chemically fused. I lifted one of them out, savouring the weight and balance. Then as my hand smoothed its way down the barrel from the trigger guard I noticed the unique round action and knew instantly I held a Dickson, a product of Scotland’s finest gunsmiths.

My father had never owned a shotgun but we fished, and we’d spent hours in the fishing and shooting shop in Kilmarnock buying fly-making materials and surreptitiously admiring the arrays of guns. Like any young boy I was entranced by these weapons and the shopkeeper was happy to indulge my endless questions. He even let me hold some. Maybe it was why I joined up.

It must have been well over twenty years ago that he called me over to the gun counter and put a long polished wood box in front of me. It was a special order for one of the factory owners at the big metal works. Inside was a pair of Dicksons with their trademark round action so visibly different from the square action of the English Purdeys or Holland amp; Hollands.

He told me that it was more than just cosmetic, delightful though it was to the look and touch. The opening action was smooth as silk and the spent cartridges were automatically ejected when the gun was broken, saving time on reloading.

I hefted this Dickson, feeling it settle snugly into the shoulder and the barrel come up and hold steady as a rock. I checked the levers and the barrel. Still well oiled and smooth action. I broke it open and closed it again, feeling the springs tug and give properly. I pulled the triggers, one after the other. They clicked neatly and loudly.

The shelves were full of boxes; cartridges for the Dicksons and shells for the Webley I’d already tested on one of the Slattery gang. I took down a leather pouch and filled it full of ammunition. I checked the remaining drawer and discovered a fine-edged gutting knife in its leather sheath. I slipped it into my pouch. There was an old army water bottle in webbing. I slung it round my shoulder. I relocked the remaining gun in its cupboard and left the room. I packed a couple of overnight items, locked the house and loaded the car. It was midnight. I could chance getting some sleep here and being wakened by heavy knocks on the door, or I could start out after Sam.

By twelve thirty I was steering the big car back down the coast road through the douce towns of Troon and Ayr. My headlights swept the quiet roads ahead and only once clashed with the beams from another car. Well into the middle of the night the sign to Culzean Castle flashed up in my lamps. This was where General Eisenhower was about to take residence. A grateful British nation had offered Ike a suite in the castle in perpetuity in thanks for his leadership during the war. Or at least from the time the Yanks finally showed up.