Gordon Ferris: The Hanging Shed

It had been expected and McIndoe had lined him up with a letter to take to the Glasgow Royal Infirmary to ensure that Donovan would have a steady supply of painkillers. But bureaucracy had stood in the way. The National Health Service existed only in newspaper reports forecasting the effect of the Beveridge proposals. If they were to be believed, in another couple of years Hugh would receive all the pain relief he needed from a free, national medical system. It seemed unlikely. And as of today he lacked a local sponsor to have him taken on the books of the dispensary. But an ex-army doctor took pity on him and agreed to give him morphine injections once a week on a Monday. Tuesdays were bliss for Hugh. Wednesdays were bearable. All the other days were nightmares waiting for Monday to come round.

He added Scotch. It brought temporary oblivion, but soon the sawing at his frayed and burnt nerve ends cut through and jolted him awake to a pain-filled hangover. Sometimes his moans woke the folk in the next flat and they banged on his wall till he quietened.

So the man he met in Doyle’s one night was as much a saviour as Christ himself. He sold dirty brown lumps of chemicals that you heated till liquid and then injected into a vein. The relief was instant. Like a balm administered by God himself. Stronger than the hospital version, it helped Hugh bridge the gap from Wednesday to the following Monday. Indeed, for an hour or two Hugh Donovan was transported, beyond pain, into a land of utter bliss. It was unsurprising that he began taking it daily. Unsurprising that his entire paltry war pension went on the heroin salve. Inevitable that the daily fix wasn’t enough. His body demanded more than he could afford. His saviour helpfully explained a solution. Hugh began to sell the stuff and take his commission in kind.

‘You became a junkie? And you sold the stuff! For Christ’s sake, Shug!’

He gazed at me with his tortured eyes. ‘I saw your limp. Wounded?’

I nodded. ‘Sicily. It’s fine mostly. Just when I get tired.’

‘Did they give you morphine?’

I remembered with all the warmth of a love affair, the blissful floating feeling of the first shot from the medic as they hauled me into the ambulance. I scarcely felt the bumping and crashing as we swayed down the pitted roads. There were many more injections, each taking me off into a wonderland of sweet comfort and happiness. It took a while to do without it.

‘Sorry, Hugh. It’s just… Selling the stuff?’

He shrugged. ‘I thought I’d go mad with the pain.’

‘What about the boy then? What about Fiona?’

It was pure chance. He glimpsed her coming out of the Co-op in Cumberland Street. It was her familiar walk that caught his eye. But she had a child by her side, a lad of maybe six or seven. Celtic-dark like his mother. A sweet wee face too. He pulled back into a shop doorway as she went past. He heard her tell the boy to pick up his feet, and he knew her voice. As unobtrusively as he could, he followed her along the cobbled streets to a close in Kidston Street which ran at 90 degrees to his own Florence Street. He watched her vanish inside and wondered what her husband was like. He wondered if I had kept in touch.

He took to hovering between Cumberland Street and Kidston Street. Over the coming weeks he must have seen her four or five times, usually with the boy, never with a man. Once he followed them to the benches under the trees in Hutcheson Square. He sat on the other side and pretended to read a newspaper. But his talent as a scout was soon laid bare. He’d waited till she walked round a corner before crossing over and peeking round it. She was waiting for him, two yards away.

‘Mister, Ah don’t know who you are but if you don’t stop following me ah’m getting the polis.’

Hugh slumped against the wall. ‘Sorry, missus. Sorry. I thought you were someone I knew.’

‘Oh aye, and who would that be?’ She folded her arms.

Hugh turned and made to walk away. But she took two steps and grabbed his arm. He turned and faced her and said, ‘Fiona MacAuslan.’

Her hand flew to her mouth. ‘That was my maiden name. How did you ken? Who are you, mister?’ He lifted his head a little. She could see his eyes under the hat. ‘Oh dear God, is that you, Hugh Donovan? Is that you?’

‘Aye, Fiona. Sorry to have frightened you. Ah’ll no bother you again. Sorry.’

‘You’ll do nae such thing, Hugh Donovan.’ She reached out and held his elbow again, stopped his retreat. Tears were already running down her face. ‘You’ll take some tea.’

They met once or twice a week after that. Fiona’s husband had died in the push through the Ardennes. She got a small war widow’s pension. She lived near her mother and had a parttime job at Miss Cranston’s tearoom in Buchanan Street. Her mother picked up the boy, Rory, after school. At first Hugh’s face made the boy hide behind his mother’s skirts, but soon, with the capacity all children have for absorbing change, Rory accepted him and ignored his blistered skin. Hugh taught the boy card games and made him giggle. Hugh clung to these moments like a rope in a gale. It helped him reduce the intake of heroin, even lessened the amount he would push. Until the world crashed around him.

She was in the street calling Rory’s name when he turned the corner. She was wild with fear, storming this way and that. There was already talk of this being the third or fourth child that had gone missing. The neighbours were out and soon there were little groups of women combing the closes and the washing-filled greens round the back. Rory had been out playing. His pals said a man with a hat and a coat had called him over. Rory had taken his hand and walked off. They hadn’t seen his face. Could have been anyone. Could have been him, they said, pointing at Hugh in his buttoned-up coat and hat. Fiona looked at him in a funny way for a second and then went back to her raging worry.

The police came and took notes and tried to calm the now hysterical Fiona. Her panic was infecting the whole neighbourhood. The press was ramping it up too. Headlines about the ‘Gorbals Ghoul’ were selling newspapers like the announcement of D-Day. A day passed, then another, then nearly a week had gone by and there was no sign of the boy or of the two others. The police interviewed everyone, including Hugh, in the first couple of days. They spent longer with him than anyone. He didn’t have much of an alibi for his time. How could he? They searched his room; it didn’t take them long. They found nothing.

Until the morning they burst down his door and found Hugh Donovan unconscious from a drug overdose. He was still dressed but his clothes were caked with coal dust. Under the sink was a bucket full of evidence. They dragged him from his bed and gave him a good kicking to wake him up. They called him an animal, a child molester, a murdering bastard who would rot in hell. They handcuffed him and dragged him out of the flat on to the landing. As an afterthought they read him his rights and arrested him for the kidnap and murder of Rory Hutchinson, and the kidnap and disappearance of four other missing boys.

I looked at Hugh with a mix of despair and disgust. I couldn’t comment on the four missing boys. But all the evidence in the world pointed to him having abused and killed Rory in a drug frenzy. What other conclusion could a jury come to?

The rational part of me wanted to ask where had he kept the lad while the coppers were searching his tiny room the first time? Didn’t the neighbours hear something? But surely to God Hugh had never been a homo? Far less fancied wee boys? Was it some stupid revenge on Fiona for having married someone else and had a child by him? But rationality was crowded from my mind with the image of that poor raped child. He must have read my face.