Gordon Ferris: The Hanging Shed

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 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.

He was shaking his head, holding his face in his hands. ‘It’s going to sound stupid.’ His eyes looked hunted. He flung up his hands. ‘I don’t know, Dougie! I just don’t know! I don’t know how they got there, and that’s the truth!’

‘What do you remember? I mean what was the last thing you recall before…’

‘Before they found me there? And took me away? Took me here?’

I nodded.

‘Look, I’d better tell you a wee bit about the last few months. How I ran into Fiona again.’

This is what he told me. These are the notes I took, good ex-copper and budding crime reporter that I was.

Hugh Donovan kept his hat on and his collar up in all weathers. Even in pubs; no, especially in pubs. He didn’t want to put off his fellow drinkers. It was a habit he’d started the day he left the hospital at East Grinstead and took the train north. Donovan was terrified. He’d spent nearly two years cloistered in Professor Archie McIndoe’s revolutionary burns unit. Nineteen operations on his hands and face and he still looked like something stitched together by a one-handed seamstress. This wasn’t to malign McIndoe’s now legendary skills. It was a recognition of the starting point.

Hugh should have got off at Kilmarnock but he took one look at the familiar smoke-black sandstone of the station and kept going, kept right on the extra twenty minutes to Glasgow. No one was expecting him in Kilmarnock. His father was dead and his mother had stopped visiting East Grinstead months ago, too stressing, all those poor boys wi’ ruined faces. She’d gone a bit doolally lately, Hugh had thought. He had five older siblings but they’d scattered to the winds in search of work or husbands.

He’d turned south as he came out of the St Enoch’s and walked over Jamaica Bridge spanning the Clyde. Hugh knew little of Glasgow, but enough to know that the Gorbals was an area where a man could lose himself and not stand out too much among the other ill-favoured folk crowded into the four-storey tenement blocks. It had always been Hugh’s experience that the people at the bottom of the heap were the most forgiving and accepting.

He found digs in Florence Street; a one-room single-end next to the room and kitchen of a family of five, four kids and a widow whose wage-earner had died in a shipyard accident. The ‘houses’ shared a toilet on the outside landing on the second floor of the sandstone tenement.

Hugh checked into the local post office and began collecting his army pension. He found Doyle’s pub on his second day and it became, through convenience and its anonymous cubbyholes, his evening haunt. Sometimes his lunchtime haunt too. He had no further thought to his future than to lie low, not bother anyone, see how it went, maybe get a wee job. The wee job that turned up became the heart of all Hugh’s future problems.

Hugh could ignore the looks. He could hide in quiet corners. He might have been happy enough to drift through his days like a wraith. But the physical pain was often beyond bearing. As the flesh had healed – haphazardly and multi-hued – the nerve ends too came back to life, back to haunt him. Instead of being cauterised by the ravening flames, his nervous system kept telling his brain to move away from the terrible heat. Kept sending waves of invisible fire over his face and limbs.